Author: Kim du Toit

Not Wanting

Food & Drink

In a recent poll taken among two thousand Gen Z Brits, the following are ones that these kids refuse to eat, ranking by the negative percentages, so to speak.

Liver (35% refuse to eat)
Blue cheese (32%)
Anchovies (30%)
Black pudding (29%)
Prawns (26%)
Duck (25%)
Tofu (23%)
Mushrooms (23%)
Olives (23%)
Plant-based cheese (21%)

My take, as a Boomer:

Liver — as a rule, I prefer liver in pâté form, but I love me some deep-fried chicken livers, with a passion.
Blue cheese — by itself, a tad strong;  crumbled over a burger:  yummy.
Anchovies — whether on toast or on pizza, I’ll eat them any day of the week
Black pudding — ugh.  The best thing you can say about black (i.e. “blood”) pudding is that it’s tasteless.
Prawns — or as we Murkins call them, shrimp:  love ’em.
Duck — little oily, but tastier than chicken.  (Duck fat, by the way, is the ultimate cooking ingredient.)
Tofu — nope.  Not ever.
Mushrooms — are you kidding me?  I must eat mushrooms of one sort or another at least three times a week.  My favorite:  a substitute for a bun in a hamburger (giant Portobella fried in butter, oh my).
Olives — nope.  Not ever.
Plant-based cheese — LOL, forget that shit.

The Daily Mail  article which fostered this post had the usual scare headline — “These Foods Are Going To Disappear!!!!!”

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…but I don’t think we need to panic.  If it were only true of olives (never gonna happen), tofu (ugh) and that strange plant cheese (we can but hope, plus all “plant-based” meats), I’m fine with the prognosis.

Editorial Speedbump

Grammar Nazism

I know I said I wasn’t going to do the Speedbump thing anymore, but that’s only because I was sick of correcting stupid spelling- and grammar mistakes.

But this is different.  (My game, my rules.)

Specifically, I want to address an editorial quirk that has me reaching for the 1911:  this nonsense of using the plural “they/their” instead of “he/his” or “she/her”.

Now there are times when this device is appropriate, e.g. when using generalities such as “Anyone should be able to call their congressman an asshole”, where usage of “his” instead of “their” might be taken to mean that only men may call their congressman an asshole, which is clearly not the case.  (We used to be able to use “his” in these cases, where the word was understood to mean either sex, but it seems that in our ultra-sensitive times, even innocent words like “mankind” can be adjudged as sexisss by the Ultra-Sensitive Set.)

Anyway, here’s a perfect example where this androgynous practice becomes ridiculous and in fact can cause confusion:


(I’m not at all interested in the content of the article, of course.)

Note that the use of “they” and “their” could easily be interpreted that both Ore and his sister committed suicide, which isn’t the case — unless they dressed him in tiny Pride pants and read out a statement of his sexuality after he popped the magic pills, that is.

But that didn’t happen.  Only the sister whacked herself, so the headline should have been written as follows:

Simple, with perfect clarity.  But this woke nonsense of using the impersonal plural terms has the effect of confusing the issue — not that the cloth-eared editors and writers could care, because who needs clarity when feeeeelings are at stake?

Tossers.  And a pox on them for making me irritated enough to have to write about this bullshit.