As adults, we make hundreds of carob-like dietary substitutions in the name of good health. We shave summer squash into long spirals and deceive ourselves that it’s anything like pasta. We tip coconut creamer into our coffee, ignoring the way it threatens to curdle, and project onto it the memory of café au lait. Grownups have mastered this acquired taste for the ersatz, but children have no ability to strike the same bargain. They taste not the similarities between the foods they are eating and the foods they really want to eat, only the thwarted desire for what is forbidden. No matter how much time passes, those objects of childhood dread are difficult to see anew. Poor carob. I may never know how good you taste.

Dude don't lay that shit on kids carob is fucking disgusting. Who ate it before the hippies tried to turn it into chocolate? no one. Who eats it now that the hippies are eating chocolate again? no one.

My mother taught biology at alternative medicine schools in Santa Fucking Fe New Mexico from 1977 to like 1986. I went to a lesbian wedding in muthafuckin' 1985. I done did that. But wait. There's more. My wife is a naturopathic doctor and a midwife. She went to school in Seattle, then serviced the.most.hard.core hippies and granola fucks the West Side of Los Angeles could produce. Kombucha mothers? I've harbored them. Placenta prints? I've seen them made. Every fuckin' hippie dippie notion you've ever heard of? I've lived through it. And let me tell you: if these mutherfuckers will eat black bean brownies? If these sonsabitches will make "mousse" out of chia seed? If these crazy moonbats will eat kale chips but leave a goddamn locally-grown, locally-harvested legume on the goddamn sidewalk rather than eat it?

That's not the kids' fault. It's 'cuz carob is fucking vile.