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Appealing Grapes

© Chris Rothe

Smooth and sweet, satisfying to taste after pushing your hard white teeth through the skin so thin. Let the juice roll around on your tongue. Not only the grape, but all of it - all the fruit, the vegetables, meat, and bread. It's all good.

Have you ever seen The Iron Chef? It's like a cooking game show from Japan that is truly entertaining. Judging by whatever you thought of my last artice you can decide what exactly is meant by entertaining, but it's fun to watch at any rate. It's beautiful to see these chefs at work, running back and forth, doing what they do best - appeasing the taste buds of others. It's great to watch right up until the end when the people actually get to taste, and judge, but more importantly taste, the food. I burn with a huge desire to get in there and taste the food myself, taking great pleasure in the finest of culinary masterpiece...free of charge.

Taste is something that I do not normally enjoy. I usually gorge when I eat, and there is a difficulty in trying to taste something that's already in your stomach. Lately, I've been trying to eat slower, not only so that I'm done when everyone else I'm eating with is, but also so that I can squeeze a little more enjoyment out of life. There is art in food, I think, and it's all in how it tastes. I'm still not too keen on it and I still don't really care what my food tastes like most of the time, but the fact remains that I'd like to wake up one day and discover what all the fuss is about. I want to know why this is a delicacy or that is a masterwork worth $70-a-serving. Experience dictates what I eat in this stage of life, and McDonalds is pretty darn cheap.

I worked a Starbucks for a while a few months back. During that time I experienced a huge underground subculture of Starbucks connoisseurs who know the proper way to get the full enjoyment out of a cup of coffee. First, you cover the cup of your specialty coffee with your hand and wait for a buildup of steam. You lift your hand and inhale the aroma of the coffee, which gets your tastebuds a goin' - then you taste. You taste by rolling the coffee around on your tongue to get the body and flavor of the drink. Down the hatch she goes.

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