Food from My Geographical Area That I Don't Like

The Long & Short Reviews challenge for this week is another easy one: "local" food that I don't like.

That would be the things people started eating, and made "traditional," due to hunger, or to disguise the nastiness of spoiled food...

1. Wine

When fruit juice starts to go bad, the fructose and water in it ferment into alcohol, and it becomes wine. To some people wine smells and tastes good. Better them than me. Most people in my part of the world don't drink wine, but some people, who raise wine grapes, want to expand the market for wine.

2. Vinegar

When fruit juice goes completely bad, the alcohol decays into acid, and it becomes vinegar.  To some people vinegar is at least useful as a preservative. To me food that's been preserved in vinegar smells  and tastes as if it's not been preserved at all. It's nasty. Bury it. But many people of German or French descent seem to feel that they need some vinegar mixed into something with every meal.

3. Cheese

Long ago people discovered that milk in the stomach of a young animal absorbs rennet and curdles into cheese. Some people believe that cheese, being partly digested milk in which the lactose has already started to break down, is easier to digest than milk. My body disagrees with this theory. I can digest a little milk or cream from time to time, but no cheese.

4. Mayonnaise

If you beat enough air into clear oil and vinegar, they form a white substance that looks like cream and tastes like vinegar. Some people want a little of this stuff on every salad and sandwich they eat; some can make a sandwich of bread and mayonnaise alone. They may have every single bit of mine.

5. Salad Dressing

In addition to mayonnaise there are at least a hundred other concoctions made of oil and vinegar that some people like to use to "dress" a salad. I prefer my salad naked. Vegetables are better with neither oil nor vinegar. If you want to add calories from healthy fat, mix nuts or meat into the salad. If you want to coat things with liquid, use juicier vegetables.

6. Potato Salad

People of German descent traditionally cooked potatoes, let them get cold, coated them with oil and vinegar, and mixed them with other vegetables and/or meat to form what they call a potato salad. To me, there are potatoes, which taste best when they're piping hot, and there are salads, which taste best when they're room temperature or chilled, and these two separate things belong in separate dishes.

7. Sauerkraut

People of German descent traditionally preserved cabbage by letting it ferment. When I was a child some people paid debts to my parents, partly, in jars of sauerkraut. The'rents accepted those jars with gratitude, buried the contents, then cleaned and reused the jars. For all of us, cabbage is good when it's fresh and raw, and then you wait till next year to enjoy cabbage again.

8. Pork

Many people in my part of the world would raise a pig, or pigs, until they were about a year old and big enough to be dangerous. Then they'd kill the pig and cook the meat in various ways, supposed to kill all the germs and worms that a pig naturally contains, and eat the preserved pig's body as their primary form of meat all through the next year. It was economical all right, and some parts of a preserved pig don't even taste bad, but I've always thought Moses must have had some very good reason to tell people not to do this. Pigs can share a lot of diseases with people.

9. Buttermilk Biscuits

When fresh milk stands for a few hours, before it starts to go bad, it separates into cream that can be churned into butter, and a defatted, sour-tasting, lumpy milk residue known as buttermilk. (This is real buttermilk. Supermarket buttermilk is fermented with chemicals so that it looks and tastes similar, and you can sour milk with a bit of lemon juice so that it works similarly in baking, but those are not the real thing.) A few people like to drink buttermilk. Most people use it in cooking, to react with baking soda and leaven breads. The simplest form of bread made with baking soda and buttermilk, mixed in with flour, salt, and butter or lard, is known as buttermilk biscuits. It does not look or taste like the biscotti or other sweet cakes European and British people call biscuits. Buttermilk biscuits are like real Southern cornbread, only made with white wheat flour instead of cornmeal. I actually like the taste of buttermilk biscuits but I don't digest them, because wheat, and I was always taught that they're pure junk calories--the nutrition in wheat is in the bran that's been sifted out of that white flour.

10, Blackberries

Blackberries don't taste bad and there's no special reason to avoid them. I don't like to bother with them because, in the orchard, they come in between raspberries, wineberries, cherries, and blueberries, not to mention ground-cherries, and interfere with picking, eating, and preserving these fruits that I like much better. If blackberries only ripened in midwinter, I'd like them. (In late autumn, nut season, I have similar feelings about black walnuts. They're not bad at all, except that, coming at the same time when so  many other nuts are so much better, they're sort of boring.) Generally anything edible that grows fresh out of the ground is acceptable, but some things that grow fresh out of the ground are more delicious than others.