Eat Drink Man Children

The other day I was having coffee with my dad friend TMR and he ordered a mugaccino. Yes, a mugaccino. For those of you whose lives  have thus far been untouched by the mugaccino, let me explain it this way: it’s a cappuccino. In a mug.

I snorted slightly as it was delivered.

“Oh, [TMR],” I said, shaking my head. “A mugaccino is sooooo 1995.”

Even the cafe owner laughed as he placed it on the table. But then, I have the cafe owner well trained. He basically knows to start laughing the moment I walk through the cafe door but I’m not sure he’s always laughing in a kind way.

A few minutes later, however, it was TMR’s turn to raise an eyebrow when the cafe owner placed a Chai Latte in front of me.

“Yeah, okay, alright,” I said, feeling a bit exposed. “At least my drink wasn’t in fashion with Jennifer Aniston’s ‘Rachel’ ‘do.”

Still, there we both were, with our notsohotrightnow drinks. We chatted for a while about ways we could get them to join forces, wonder twins style, to become a ‘chai-accino’ or a ‘mugachai’. But that last one just sounded like a character from hit 1984 movie ‘Gremlins’. And no, I don’t know why I thought that, either.

Anyway, it turns out TMR is simply waiting for the mugaccino to become the ‘it’ drink again. Just in the same way, I’m waiting for Cornflakes to become the ‘it’ cereal in my household so that the 5KG Family Pack taking up precious pantry real estate might actually get eaten.

You see, I live with a bunch of food faddists. Mostly this faddism is concentrated in the area of breakfast cereal where a particular cereal will be eaten voraciously right up until the point I invest large sums of money in the type of bulk-buy pack that requires its own shopping trolley. It’s at that moment that my children will suddenly regard eating the cereal in question as the equivalent of stuffing one’s mouth with shredded cardboard and cat’s piss.

Fruit, too, is also a key focus area for food faddism. For example, Mr Justice last year proclaimed the humble ‘Golden Delicious’ as his ‘apple of choice’, shortly before it went out of season. I waited half a year for them to appear back on the supermarket shelves only to have him take one bite and spit it out, declaring it to be ‘the devil’s own food’. Yes, that apple tree in the garden of Eden was apparently a Golden Delicious tree. Who knew.

To be honest, I think they basically inherit this trait from their father – my so-called husband – who will announce that from this moment on he will only eat chicken and vegetable pies and then, mere minutes later, will have taken to his bed complaining of ‘pie poisoning’.

The most annoying thing of all of this is trying to cater for such movable palates. If you were to draw a Venn diagram of foods each of my children deemed ‘acceptable for consumption’ at any given moment in time, the circles representing each child will cross at one point and one point only: hot chips.

Personally, I hope for two things: that there is a scientist out there somewhere on the verge of declaring hot chips as the new Super Food (bye bye, banana) and that hot chips never, ever, EVER go out of fashion. Not like the mugaccino, eh, TMR?