While quarantined from an extremely mild, nearly nominal case of COVID-19 in the middle of January, the Observer, who is approaching 30 years of age, ordered a mess of chicken fingers and fries to be contactlessly delivered to the front door of his apartment building in downtown Little Rock. Hear me out: At my most unmediated, I have the palate of a child, and I’ve accepted this. In keeping with my juvenile preferences, I also adore ketchup, and have loved it for as long as I can remember, so much so that I’m the kind of ketchup consumer who doesn’t mess with packets. There’s never enough and I’ve no interest in rationing. Instead, I keep a big bottle of Heinz original on hand at all times.
As I opened and broke down the lukewarm cardboard meal box to make a place for a heaping blob of the silly sauce, I noticed that the fries looked a little more wilted than usual, but what can you expect? Fast food is best experienced in the literal seconds after it emerges from the fryer. At the end of the day, it’s all going to mostly taste like ketchup anyway, at least if you dip like I do. As some pragmatic thinker once said, food is just a vessel for sauce, especially when the food is of questionable quality.
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I’ve been told that I eat too quickly and, though there were no witnesses, I can only assume that this day was no exception. In fact, a blend of fries, tenders, ketchup and the restaurant’s namesake dipping sauce entered my mouth at such a ferocious clip that when an unexpectedly rancid flavor started kicking at my tongue, I couldn’t immediately identify the origin. With perishability in mind, I suspected the chicken.
Through rigorous triangulation, however, I deduced the real culprit: The ketchup. When savored in isolation, my favorite condiment had an awful, mouth-twisting aftertaste like rubbing alcohol. I sampled it over and over again, expecting the intruder to go away, but it didn’t. What was up? The bottle was far from expiration, had only been opened a couple months ago and had never left the chilly sanctum of my fridge for longer than a few minutes at a time. I wondered if even Heinz makes mistakes sometimes. As a lifelong patron of the brand, I could handle one preservative error. Sad but resigned, I ate the rest of my meal sans tomato aid.
While holding the three-fourths-full bottle over the trash can, ready to release my grip, I was struck with a harrowing and epiphanic thought: What if this is because of the COVID? It was, after all, my first time afflicted with the virus. People talk about changes or losses in taste and smell, but surely this couldn’t be what they mean? Wouldn’t everyone be taking the pandemic more seriously if so? After a quick phone call to my recently retired doctor mother, I learned that I was not the only person suffering from this exact phenomenon after contracting COVID-19.
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Still, I was skeptical. Could my taste buds really be this sensitive to the whims of a mere disease? Was my biology really that malleable? Isn’t ketchup one of the most powerful forces in the world? Are such levels of karmic cruelty and betrayal even possible? It all just seemed so farfetched to me. And so I let the trouble slip my mind for a few days, hoping to forget it like a bad dream.
Until it was time for the weekly burger, another staple of my ludicrously simple and indulgent diet. Sure enough, upon my first dunk in ketchup from an entirely different source than the last time, the taste was back, spiteful and vinegary. It wasn’t a fluke. Who knows how long this devastating reality will last.
So what should I do? Should I keep eating it until I’m used to the taste? Or is this an excuse to get off the sauce? Maybe I could take this as a sign from the universe that it’s time to finally reexamine my eating habits in the hopes of shifting toward more sophisticated forms of sustenance that are less dependent on the red stuff. I don’t know. If it’s any indication, I’ve already discovered that, for some reason, when ingested in smaller amounts, the mystery acidity of the ketchup is significantly less intense. It’s even tolerable. If I’m being honest, I bet I’ll keep eating the same shit.
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