I'll Have a Dash of...Cuckoo Spit?

I remember reading, with a jolt, this headline in the New York Times:

“American Cuisine Is Back.”

I was eating a chicken potpie. “Where are you back from?” I asked it. No response. A chicken potpie is not a fun food. And I mean that as a compliment.

You know that expression on a dog’s face as he watches you plop food into his bowl? Everything that’s happened in my life so far has led up to this moment. That is how I feel, at bottom, about something to eat.

It’s hard to turn me away from food. “Trust me,” confided a waitperson once, “don’t eat the garnish.” And yet I had a hard time laying off that carrot curl. I don’t eat a lot of carrots, but an occasional carrot shaving… Maybe management made her say that so they wouldn’t have to keep buying new carrots. Now on the Internet you can find Rachel Maddow, the MSNBC news host, saying, “Don’t eat the garnish” with regard to cocktail olives and maraschino cherries. Honeybees, she says, have been turning a fluorescent red from sipping out of maraschino cherry vats. I’ll cut out the cherries when I start getting rosy cheeks. Cocktail olives, she says, have “conceivably been lying out festering in their own juices in a warm room all night, with fingers on them.” But isn’t gin a disinfectant?

Silliness, alone, needn’t put me off food. Someone told me she had recently enjoyed celery sorbet. Celery Sorbet sounds like the name of an exotic dancer. If served it, however, I would try it. If it tasted okay, I would say so.