According to my boyfriend, I appear to have very strong opinions on things I dislike and he thought it would be funny if I wrote a book on my pet-hates. Now,whilst I don't intend to publish anything, I did quite like the idea of having a wee diatribe on one of my dislikes.
Namely- Mushrooms!
There is nothing, I repeat, NOTHING good about these evil blighters.
First things first- there is the colour. Vegetables (yes I know it's a fungus, but your average Joe Bloggs classes it as such) should be bbbbbbbbbrrrright, beaming, glorious, healthy colours. Perky peas show their joyous goodness through a costume of brilliant green. Tomatoes, a glorious scarlet, shiny, tasty, juicy. Mushrooms? Sludge grey- the hue of miserable rainy, windy, bitterly cold days. A colour not even in the spectrum. Dead or ill people take on a grey palour. They always talk about a rainbow of vegetables. Where pray, does grey fit into all that?
Next, they are neither fruit, vegetable, nor meat, fish nor grain. They are an oddity, a pariah, a nutritional rebel! Why do they have the privelege of being a class of their own. They deserve no such censure nor such praise!
Thirdly, texture. Not only in colour, cooked appearance they are in essence SLUGS. They crawl down ones throat and gullet like some haughty gastropod elevated way above its designated social station. In my resistant throat, they feel like slugs have felt under foot or when picked up (with a spade I might hasten to add). I physically cannot swallow them! Nobody likes slugs- they keep on turning up uninvited in many venues. Urgh! And the complete contrast in textures in the mushroom. The tops, so slimy and unpalatable, concealing an undercarriage of furry strands, plus a harder pillar at the base.
Moreover, take the name- mushrooms. Mush is seldom regarded highly- it is usually designated to some bland, tasteless, horrid substance. So to have a mush ROOM, thus implying a chamber FULL of some bland, tasteless substance, is immediately off-putting.
Also, they are fungus, they grow like mould. They carry their spores through the air like some truly egregious virus attempting to bring doom to the masses. Spores are bad things! They pick on poor moudly, damp surfaces, environments already wretched by their conditions and like some vicious Star-Trek-esque parasites, they cover it with their evil offspring!
Furthermore, many varieties are deadly! And yet, these are brushed under the carpet and the few safe varieties are coveted the world over. There must be some form of mass-hypnotism going on.
In conclusion, though I might write more and indeed may in the future, I must thus conclude that mushrooms are the epitomy of all that is wrong with the world.
