Choke.(artichokes)(Essay)

The place was France, the time was the mid-nineteen-seventies, the evening was warm, and the thing on my plate was trying to kill me. That, at least, was the only sane conclusion at which I could possibly arrive. The thing resembled a dark-green hand grenade, and under the lamp that hung above the dinner table it gleamed and steamed, to my appalled eyes, with the promise of pure malice. I was handed a dish of melted butter, as if to initiate some sacramental rite. "Merci beaucoup," I said, although, to be frank, the last thing I needed was a dairy product. I needed the bomb squad.

The Oxford English Dictionary has this to say of the artichoke, or Cynara scolymus:

Its eatable parts are the fleshy bases of the involucral leaves or scales of the gigantic thistle-like flower, and its receptacle or "bottom," when freed from the bristles and seed-down or "choke."

Can you imagine a sentence more likely to dam the salivary glands? For that matter, can you propose a more cogent rebuke to the theory of intelligent design? Surely no wise, all-seeing God would go to the trouble of creating human beings and then encourage them to munch on bristles, bottom, and choke; unless, of course, He was also French, in which case the artichoke would be just the kind of capricious, amusing challenge that He would throw down to mankind--a test of our culinary skills, our table manners, and our powers of mastication.

My meeting with this remarkable vegetable, hitherto glimpsed only on market stalls, came in the midst of an exchange program. Every year, I would pay a visit to my French friend, either at his family's Paris apartment or at their cottage in Normandy, and he in turn would spend a few weeks at my home. Until now, I had been convinced that I had the better deal; at this moment, deep in the Norman pastures, the balance was being hastily redressed. I was already a scrofulous English-speaking teen-ager, barely fit for European society; now, thanks to Cynara scolymus, I would also be revealed as an irredeemable hick. Everything--my reputation, my country, my dim hopes for a civilized future--hung on whether I could disarm the hand grenade.

I did the only thing I could. Under the cover of politeness, I waited until Madame began to unpack her own artichoke, and then copied her every tug. No knife, no fork: she merely reached for ...