- In the nineteen-seventies, carob infiltrated food co-ops and baking books as if it had been sent on a cointelpro mission to alienate the left’s next generation.
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.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.
Lol. I don't care for 90% of hippie food shit but I kinda like carob in some things sometimes. I loathe alt milks, and chai tea and prefer spinach to kale. What's wrong with spinach? Why does kale have to replace it in every fucking dish now a days? We like to play a game when we go to potlucks now. How many kale dishes will be served? It's a function of the number of guests and how granola the crowd will be.
I eat the Fred Meyer Energee Nuggets or whatever and they're mostly carob. But you'd confuse them for used coffee grounds before you'd confuse them for chocolate. Something you should know about kale: every meal-in-a-box company shoves it down your throat two, three meals a week. You learn to cook kale or you starve. Also it's crazy cheap. Yeah, it's an execution-dependent green. And yeah, one form of kale can easily be too much for any given buffet. But I think anyone who has figured out how to turn landscaping into food? Goddamn right they're inflicting that recipe on the world whether you like it or not.
Are we talking about the same food item here? I tried it. It's no chocolate, but it was good enough an alternative. My mother likes it, too. "Bring me some!" Yeah, yeah... This shit ain't cheap.It's 'cuz carob is fucking vile.
Different food item, then. Same name, same healthy food status... somehow, different. Here, a square of the quadratisch, praktisch, gut Ritter Sport? 50 RUB. A square of carob? 150 RUB.
Maaan if carob wasn't domestic I doubt Americans would have ever bothered with it. Ritter Sports are... okay chocolate. The West Coast of the US has pretty much all of the USA's boutique chocolate makers - See's, Ghirardelli, Dilettante, a dozen sub-brands. We've kind of gone a different way from Swiss/Belgian/German chocolate. Here Hershey's is like 89 cents a bar while half again as much Theo is $2.99. Carob raisins? about 70% as much as chocolate raisins (when you can find them) and who the fuck would eat them anyway.
I still don't get your dismissive attitude towards carob, but then, I haven't lived through being ostensibly forced to eat it instead of chocolate. Maybe it was as bad as you claim it was. If I'm ever in the US, I'm trying your local carob bars.
Healthy Foods or Whole Foods section, right? Do you guys have those in them big malls? We have sections shared between special foods (for diabetics, for lactose-intolerant etc.) and those marketed as healthy and wholesome.