– An Easy Spread –

I have never voluntarily eaten ketchup. The very thought of it turns my stomach. I get a little angry when confronted by it and I get a little worried when someone has ordered french fries, or, god forbid, hash browns. That is because I know what’s coming.

First off, the bottle always makes a rude sound. Well it does. Think about it the next time you are in a restaurant and you turn over that half-empty bottle and get ready to smack its ass. You don’t like my using the word ass? Well, I’m sorry, but the sound your bottle makes when you hit it makes me think of one. Imagine an air-blowing-through-moist-lips sound, then plop, plop. And those plastic squeeze things that some places put on the table? Well a squirting sound is even worse than the plopping sound, if you know what I mean.

But the sound the bottle makes isn’t even the worst part about it, really. If a bottle of steak sauce were to make the same noise I doubt I’d notice. Or even glare at the person about to eat it. The worst part about it is how it looks.

When I was little, I thought it looked like blood. When you are a child one of the earliest and inevitable confrontations with food is the condiments on a hot dog. The hot dog was something that I (in my racially-homogenous five-year-old life) thought of as having “skin color.” And I wasn’t too little to realize that a hot dog looks like a certain body part that you don’t call a wiener for nothing. So the bright red of ketchup on a hot dog disgusted me and I simply would not eat it. I still won’t eat it. And the thought of someone sitting across from me dipping fries into the same stuff that goes on a wiener is a horrific thought.

And hey, how the hell are you supposed to spell it anyway? I mean there isn’t really a for-sure way to spell it right? K-E-T-C-H-U-P or C-A-T-S-U-P? The latter spelling seems grosser to me. First there is the word “cat” in there. I like them. I think they are furry and cute. But I don’t want to eat anything that comes out of them. And then there is “sup.” Well the sound of that is just bad and spelled backwards we get “pus.” Nasty.

So the sound the bottle makes is bad. The look of it is bad. But the taste of it is even worse. It’s enough to put me off of eating for a while.

At Burger King a few years ago—where you are supposed to get “Your Whopper Your Way,” they forgot to leave the damn stuff off and I didn’t notice until after I had taken a big bite. I can assure you, I haven’t been back since.

Unfortunately, this fervent hatred is nonsensical. I love tomatoes. I love spaghetti sauce. I even tend to eat a spoonful of tomato paste when I open up a can for cooking. I am also especially fond of vinegar–the other key ingredient in the offending condiment. I should like the stuff. I mean, give me a little tomato paste and a nice red wine vinegar and I bet I could mix it up and dip fries in it with joy. But I cannot, will not, won’t, no god damn way eat anything labeled as ketchup (notice my preferred spelling).

And please, don’t eat any of it in front of me. Please, someone tell my sister, whose married name is Heintz, to stop wearing that red Heinz ketchup t-shirt. I mean c’mon, the spellings don’t even match.

Ick.

Guest blogger Jennifer Brown is studying fiction in the MFA program at George Mason. She is crazy about all condiments, except for ketchup. She has even been caught eating ranch dressing from the bottle.