Hear me out.
I’m an open-minded individual, but there are certain things I will not stand for.
I will eat my burger off a slate and drink my juice from a jam jar; I will pay close to twice the minimum hourly wage for eggs on toast at brunch; I will even grin and bear it when a wobbly table leg makes cutting through a particularly tough piece of beef a waking nightmare.
But I will no longer put up with one sneaky salad ingredient that’s being forced on the general food-eating public.
Rocket, the jig is up.
I have eaten from questionable food vans at many a festival; I’ve eaten a kebab that has been dropped on the street at 2am and hastily picked up, but I just can’t eat this.
How can such a benign-seeming leaf be so over-powering? Whether it’s a salad or a sandwich I’m eating, it may as well just be a big bowl of rocket, given how overwhelming the taste is. It’s the gingernut biscuit of the lunch world – selfishly contaminating everything it touches with its own flavour – and just like the gingernut, it needs to be rooted out.
Google informs me that the leaf is known as arugula to our friends in the US and that, in Ancient Roman times, it was used as an aphrodisiac, a concept that baffles me.
Nothing could be bigger turn-off. I didn’t go through college, get a job and work hard to go to nice restaurants and pay for something that looks like it was pulled from a riverbank.
As for it being healthy? That argument is void. So is drinking your own urine, going to bed early and not creeping your ex on Instagram. Just because something is good for you doesn’t mean you do it, and never has that been truer than when it comes to rocket.
It’s hard to take when you didn’t know it was coming in your healthy lunch, but my disdain for rocket hits a new level when it’s put in junk food.
Like, pizza – really? The purest food there is, steeped in Mediterranean history and assembled with care, only to be irreparably ruined by glorified seaweed? Not on my watch.
Its only saving grace is that its long and stringy form (I’m gagging as I type) makes it relatively easy to pull out of sandwiches.
We’ve been sold a donkey as a racehorse. Rocket photographs beautifully (I’ll give it that), giving the illusion that it’ll be a delight going down. Sadly, nothing could be further from the truth.
So who’s with me? I’m calling for an all-out ban on this awful, awful food.
I don’t care if it drives leaf trading underground – keep it off my plate and it’s not my problem. Let the fit-fammers meet in car parks late at night to trade bags of green; once I don’t come across it in another sandwich, wrap or salad, I’ll be happy.
