The place beyond the pineapple

There’s a friend of mine who can’t stand the taste of carrots. I’ve got a suspicion he may be clinically insane.

 

I mean, they’re just so good. Not Krispy Kreme or birthday cake good, but good nonetheless. And even if carrots aren’t really your thing, the idea of finding them actively disgusting is wholly foreign to me. Sure, I can understand that some people may find them bland or unexciting, but to actively hate them? To catch the flavor on one’s tongue and spit them out like so much spoiled meat? Blasphemy. The carrot gods are frowning in disapproval – inasmuch as they’re capable of frowning, being that they probably look like giant carrots.

 

But hey, I can’t be one to judge. Everyone’s got different tastes, different foods that are on their do-not-consume list.

 

For me, it’s pineapple. Acidic, tangy, chop-my-tongue-off-with-a-carving-knife pineapple. The flavor is pure, distilled evil. If crying children had a taste, they would taste like pineapple – the grossest and most offensive of all fruits, somewhere on the Ick-O-Meter between two-headed snakes and a basket full of scorpion droppings. If I’m ever captured by armed militants, the best way for the terrorists to inflict torture would be to feed me spoonfuls of this gag-inducing food; I’d reveal state secrets in about two seconds flat if it meant wrapping my lips around a palate-cleansing steak.

 

“Fine, you’ve got me! The missiles are in a bunker under Pauly Shore’s house! For the love of Pete, get me a damn doughnut!”

 

This is why I never joined the military.

 

Back in college, I had a buddy who delivered pizza for a major chain. Occasionally, at the end of his shift, they’d have a “junk pie” lying around – a pizza with no home. (Is there a sadder image?) Perhaps they tried to deliver it and no one answered the door. Or maybe they made a mistake while prepping it – slipped while cutting it, for instance, resulting in a pie chopped into the shape of Ronald McDonald giving the middle finger. These were pizzas that would be thrown away if not consumed, and this was considered an egregious waste of ingredients. So some nights, on his way home, our pizza buddy would drop by with a free pie, and our hungry little group of cereal-eating college kids would nosh on a mouth-watering treat. This was many moons and about 50 pounds ago. If pizza were still free, I’d have to be airlifted out of my office chair by the National Guard.

 

Delivery Guy dropped by one night with a pineapple pizza, not knowing I had a visceral aversion to this Satanic edible. And in sneaky fashion, the pineapple was cooked underneath a camouflage of cheese and onions. Because cheese and onions are glorious foods, worthy of a seat next to the Norse gods of Valhalla, I recklessly chomped a bite off the biggest slice in the box.

 

Ptoooey! Out shot the nasty pineapple-infected bite. Because my reaction to the enemy fruit was so immediate and powerful, the flying, chewed-up wad of nastiness achieved a remarkable velocity, ramming into a refrigerator magnet with an audible thwap – the sound of a spitball striking a blackboard. The magnet was a picture of me backstage with the frontman for Megadeth. A little to the left, and the pineapple-and-cheese mush would have struck Dave Mustaine right in the kisser.

 

A lesson was learned that day: Never hand me a piece of pineapple anything. It will end up on a musician’s face.

 

Yet there are those who would scarf this stuff by the ton. Curious how one man’s trash is another’s treasure. There’s an age-old question in science – and in drunken conversations with philosophy majors – which asks, “How do you know everyone sees the color red the same way? Maybe my red is your blue.” It’s a tantalizing hypothetical, and perhaps an unanswerable one. It can easily be adapted to address how we perceive flavor. How do we know pineapple tastes the same for everybody? If I were to switch palates with someone, would pineapple then taste like a smoked ham? Or a mound of blueberries lathered in whipped cream? Maybe some people bite into a pineapple and taste something even worse, like the sweaty armpit of a hygienically-challenged professional wrestler. Something tells me that flavor has never been incorporated into a pizza.

 

If there are two things I’m good at, they’re geeking out over scientific advancements and daydreaming about ridiculously farfetched scenarios. (If there’s a third thing I’m good at, it’s playing the theme song from “Shaft” on a kazoo.) It’s in this spirit that I pine for a technology which would allow us to alter our perceptions of the flavor of various foods – thus making it easier to eat more healthfully. For example, we push a button, and voila! Tomatoes taste like Double-Stuffed Oreos. Push another button, and poof! Lettuce tastes like vanilla ice cream. In this fantasy situation, I could gobble down all the nutrient-rich pineapple I could handle, with nary an offense to my sensitive taste buds. Of course, this technology could easily be abused; vampires could use it to make human blood taste like Dr. Pepper. But hey, every technology comes with risks. Paintball, anyone? I rest my case.

 

Honestly, though, what I’d really like to do with this whimsical invention is install it into the brain of my carrot-hating friend. Dislike for carrots is an unspeakable atrocity, and this could easily be remedied by programming it to taste like one of his favorite foods. I’d just sit down with him and ask him what he likes.

 

But if he says pineapple, I’m slugging him.