Dear World: I Am Really Not Sure About This Salad

America, why are we doing this? Who's in charge? What is this pomegranate trash?

I’m Ash, and I’m a writer, traveler, nonconformist & nomad, and every week I’m sharing funny field notes from around the world. Currently, I’m in America writing about what it’s been like to return home to my small town, twenty years after living abroad.

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Salads hate me.

And what is this pomegranate trash? Don’t put fruits I can’t spell into my salad.

I also have a vendetta against beets. Why are we eating these. Beets are about as delicious as a cigarette butt.

Other salad ingredients that can shove off: strawberries, mandarin oranges, fruits that rhyme with “tango,” radishes, walnuts, raisins (why) shredded cabbage, onions, and salmon. There is no more vile thing on earth than salmon. Especially with the skin on.

The Cobb Salad is also disturbing. Like, thanks for not assembling my salad. This is the do-it-yourself salad! You pay us, and we’ll give you the ingredients, and you do all the work. If I wanted to do that, I’d eat at home.

Caesar salads, on the other hand, are iconic. I used to devour these things. Then I found out there were anchovies in the dressing. Now I still devour them, but have to give myself a little pep talk first.

I’m sure I sound like a picky eater, but that’s only true partially true: I’m fine whenever there’s cheese and pepperoni involved. Things start going downhill once mushrooms enter the chat, but that’s mostly a textural thing. Then again, truffle oil is equally repugnant. Who did this? Was it you, Slovenia? Did you and your fairytale forests run a massive marketing campaign to convince the world that mushrooms should be put on everyone’s french fries?

Everything is truffled these days, especially at American gastropubs. Truffle burgers, truffle risotto, truffle cream sauce, truffle flatbreads. Parmesan is a frequent co-conspirator. And, the people go nuts for this fugly overpriced fungus. I rather think it tastes like feet. However, anytime I see it on the menu I secretly think that maybe this will be the time I like it. Nope, it’s never the time. I never like truffles. I NOW KNOW THIS ABOUT MYSELF. Don’t @ me with your truffle propaganda, Gen Z.

Of course, here in rural America, where I’ve recently bought the farmhouse, no one even knows what truffles are. That’s not an insult, it’s a fact. I’ve asked around. They don’t appear on any menu. However, you know what you can get around here? Dr. Pepper flavored wings. I’m not sure that’s an improvement, but I applaud the creativity.

One flavor I will not be trying, however, is peanut butter and jelly wings. Jelly is satan. I have a friend who eats jelly every time we go to breakfast, and every time we go to breakfast I think about trying to save her. What are you doing to your taste buds? What kind of sick torture are you inflicting upon your stomach?

As it seems, I’m not a fan of sweet. That must be why I don’t want any fruit in my salad, or jelly on my toast, or caramel on my popcorn, or unicorns on my notebook. Don’t even get me started on cotton candy. I’ll eat one bite of one cookie and my throat immediately shuts down. That’s not to say my throat is defective, which is a sentence that could go many places, but rather to say: isn’t it interesting how many of our preferences are actually our parents’ preferences? My mom didn’t like sweets either. I didn’t grow up baking cakes or muffins or even French toast. AND NOW I AM RUINED. I can’t even drink a glass of moscato. However will I go on?

Sometimes I see people who are carrying around the same extra thirty pounds as I am, but they don’t drink. And I always wonder, where’s that coming from? If I didn’t drink wine, I’d be a beanpole. That’s an exaggeration because I will never be a beanpole, I just like to tell myself that. Anyway, you know where it comes from? Sweets! Other people like sweets, especially in rural America—as I’m discovering. This is most definitely a thing. It’s a bake sale, church sale, big-family, down-home kind of thing. These people grew up with mothers who baked them things. So now they bake things. And they know how to bake things. And those baked things taste very good to people with a sweet tooth.

But is a sweet tooth even real?!

Maybe we only like the things that give us nostalgia for our youth, in which case this explains my fascination with the glory that is cheese and pepperoni and bread and all things excellent for my arteries: my mom and I used to get a pizza and movie every Friday night. Thus, cheese and pepperoni isn’t just cheese and pepperoni: it’s love. And isn’t that just terrible? Perhaps if we had gotten salads every Friday night, I’d like beets, and radishes, and onions, and walnuts. Maybe I’d like raisins, and cabbage, and strawberries, and salmon. And maybe I wouldn’t be on the internet 20 years later, talking shit about pomegranate seeds.

It makes me wonder: what other things do we do to remain comfortable, and safe, and loved, and secure?

The job?
The house?
The partner?
The routine?

We are the ultimate creatures of habit. And, that’s fine when you’re talking about your preferences for hot wings. But, what happens when you’re talking about your preferences for life?

One of the reasons I like to travel so much is not because a place is different, but because it forces me to be.

Because even though I don’t want truffle oil on my fries?

I damn well want to be the one deciding.