A Little Taste of Heaven...or is it? (Yes, it is)

When I was growing up I always assumed that the way my family did things must be the way every family did things. I figured every Mom made cookies or cinnamon rolls for their kids to eat when they got home from school. Every family must have had an ancient TV that required getting off the sofa to change the channel. Certainly, everybody put ketchup on their Mexican food.

Well, I don't know about most of those, but I now know that the Mexican food/ketchup thing was not universal as I once would have believed. Turns out that very few people do it, as far as I can tell. Having grown up with it, it is perfectly normal to me, but it seems to attract nothing but scorn from non-ketchuped-Mexican-food-eaters.

Carlene and I are admittedly picky eaters. When we got married, there were certain things that I simply could not get Carlene to eat, onions and peas being two of them, and the rest I have forgotten. Since then, she has slowly come to accept onions and peas (the peas are eaten on a very limited basis) as part of her diet, along with some of the other formerly verboten foods. The one thing I have yet to convince her even to try is ketchup on her Mexican food. I've even nicknamed it "American Salsa" in an effort to get her to try it, but to no avail.

To my disciplined taste buds, Mexican food without Ketchup is bland and uninteresting, like Cher without Sunny. If you like sour cream, you would be in for a very special treat; ketchup and sour cream together on Mexican food is a taste sensation not to be missed. Oh, sure, I've heard the arguments: It doesn't taste good; It's not authentic; I'm a fossilized troglodyte stuck in a culinary rut so deep I can't see the blue sky above me; I'm part of the Women's Anti-Ketchup-and-Other-Tomato-Based-Products League.

To all those, I can only say, "Okay, but have you tried it?" If it doesn't taste good, then fine, don't eat it. But don't tell me it's not good without eating it first. And who cares about it being "authentic"? How much of the Mexican food we eat here in America is authentic anyway? Do they make numbers that low? And the other excuses? Well, there is probably no hope for you.

The point is that trying new foods can be fun, and you never know if it is something you will like. Thus it is with ketchup. Yes, it sounds strange, I'll admit, but unless you've actually tried it, you will never know what you are missing. I've been eating it all my life, and I've turned out perfectly . . . duh . . . normal.

So take my poll and tell me what you think about this subject. Yes, I know that there are plenty of important, pressing matters in the world today. I just thought I would pick the most urgent one and start with that. I'm only one man, after all. Now, pass the American Salsa, please.