Mustard

Certain cultural traditions have been passed on from generation to generation, with a progressively weaker grasp of why we adopted them in the first place. some were borne out of necessity, and said necessity ceased to be a long time ago, but we fetishized it long before we could come to our senses and we think they're somehow good and desirable in their own right. This phenomenon, known in the social sciences as 'peer pressure from people who are dead', is especially bothersome when it comes to food.

Wacky culinary traditions are more conspicuous when they come from far away, but my beef is with something more close to home, which always causes me to wince within smelling distance, or worse upon unforeseen gustatory encounter.

I'm talking, of course, about mustard.

I don't know what the purpose of mustard was in the beginning. All i know is that it's a seed, not a fruit. Fruits are delicious, and it's nature's devious scheme to get us to spread genes as far and wide as possible. Seeds do not take part in that plan. What I learned from biology class in high school is that seeds are supposed to be left the fuck alone.
So maybe it was some kind of promethean victory on our part. A massive middle finger to God. He had created the earth with a set of rules that we had twisted and shaped to our liking. We would look to the skies with a teaspoon in our hand and a badly concealed grimace, and scream at the top of our lungs: 'humanity has won, once again!' and proceed to consume the gross product of our defiance, like an invading soldier rapes an unattractive indigenous woman -purely out of principle.

I can totally get behind that. but what is the point today? We have proved time and time again that we can make nature our bitch if we want to. We can genetically engineer our food, and what mustard is is just a sloppy prototype of our later accomplishments.

But that middle-aged woman who works at the hotdog stand, with a constant shit-eating grin on her face, assumes by default that I want to take part in this insanity, in this archaic and blasphemous custom.

Well I don't.