I would rather do anything—sit through three cavity fillings, go for a run on a 110-degree day, endure two nights without sleeping—than eat an entire bowl of celery. I promise you, I am not exaggerating. There’s something about its stringy texture and weird, watery consistency that sends me sprinting in the opposite direction.
There are people who add cilantro to their every meal because they can’t get enough of its herby bite. Others would compare it to chewing on a bar of soap. Me and celery? It sends my mouth into a confused foam that I would at best describe as soapy and at worst liken to chomping on hundreds of pieces of thread dipped in dirty rain water that mysteriously maintain their crunch.
Don’t get me wrong, I respect celery's much-admired role as a classic snack food. It’s crunchy, you basically burn the calories it contains by chewing it, and you can top it with peanut butter (in its defense, major points to anything that goes with a spoonful of Skippy). But one bite of celery—be it as a stick, in a soup (or worse, in a soup made almost entirely of celery!), or in a stir-fry—and my face falls into a cringe to kill all other cringes.
My hatred is no secret among family and friends. I’ve been served a plate of ribs with one lone celery stick, smothered in BBQ sauce, hiding underneath the bones, just to see if my distaste for the vegetable stood the test of sneaky inclusion. (It did.) And it goes beyond the taste. Try watching a TV show with your roommate chomping on celery across the room. (PSA: I shouldn’t be able to hear what’s going on in your mouth from clear across the room, even when you are politely chewing with your mouth closed.)
The roots of my celery aversion run deep: I remember the first time I ever tasted that vile veggie, and maybe it says something more about my personality than my taste buds. My brother and I attended a summer day care program way back when. Much to my soon-to-be-discovered dismay, there was a strict rule at the lunch table of this day care program: you had to clean your plate, or you couldn't participate in afternoon crafts. Even as an adult I can tell you that my hatred for celery is matched by my love of crafting. As you can probably guess, celery—being a low-cost and low-fuss food—was one of the main side dishes of many meals. Just the scent of it threw my stomach into a tizzy. And you’d better believe I sat there straight through craft time refusing to eat it.
I begged the day care monitor to let me off the hook, warned her of the potential of it coming right back up after it went down (most likely in less eloquent words), but she wouldn’t hear me out. Eventually, out of fear that I would actually get in trouble for not eating something I hated, I forced it down. So is it celery's confusing, stringy crunch or the sting of childhood defeat that turned me off of this ubiquitous veggie for life? I'll never know, but needless to say, keep your ants on a log far, far away from my snack table.
Editor's Note: Don't even think about serving this dish to Erika:
Or this one:
And especially not this one:
