The Food Police: Quinoa

There’s a distinct snob value in knowing how to pronounce quinoa (keen WAH). You do not want to be caught musing aloud in the health food store or at the burgeoning tabouli-bulgar-cous cous-wild rice section at Fairway that for some time now you’ve been itching to try kee-NOA (or much, much worse, kwee-NOA). It immediately will brand you as some kind of retro, twentieth century food ignoramus who still eats fruit loops.

In truth, it’s all about the name here and it can be quite intimidating. The food police like to remind us that there are basically two types of people in the world: those who know how to say the word and those who do not; this division of food class creates chasms of socio-political-economic differences that speak volumes about your dress style, choice of music, voting habits, number of plastic bags used in a lifetime, breed of dogs cleaved to, type of movies watched, whether you have an iphone or an android or neither, if you practice yoga or pilates, cross training or walking, which browser you prefer, the vagaries of your moral compass and life expectancy to the minute.

It’s all so smarmy, and for what? The particular grain, whose name I refuse to type again lest I give “them” the satisfaction of knowing that I too have succumbed to pressure and learned how to bandy it around without a shred of linguistic awkwardness, is completely tasteless and tends to make people stutter when trying to say it. It’s a loser big time against such formidable competitors as kasha, which can also be used to help comprise a knish, and wheatberry, another fiber blockbuster with a much more charming name evocative not only of all things wholesome and clean  but also of fairy tale meadows. Are they kidding or what? The stuff has a weird, trick spelling and is boring beyond belief. And most sadly, there really is no way to jazz up that ubiquitous, obstinate mulch of tiny kernels completely devoid of any flavor- the dish is simply the queen (pronounced KWEEN, not KEEN) of bland.

Bland, bland, bland!

And I will not take back those words, even at the threat of being excommunicated from the kitchy kwizeene klub.