These are Eggs

Our longtime friends were visiting a nearby town, and one night, after work, we made the 1.5 hour trek to see them.

The town was one of those places which is fun to visit, annoying to live in. You want to make a left hand turn off of Main Street? Why don't you just go F yourself? Back in the day they built the town so its Main Street was the highway, never engineered a bypass, and it is now a somewhat functional disaster. Not a green arrow to be found, the intersections are crammed with tourists full of vacation brains, and semis are using their Jake Brakes right next to people pushing strollers.

But the town is cool, and the surrounding area is a national treasure. We were very excited to see them and spend an evening playing tourist.

When we got there, it was clear, the four year-old we had come to visit needed food, and there were two types of food which were acceptable: edamame or cheese pizza.

We set off to go to the restaurant we'd eaten in the last time they visited, and like all great, a-little-off-the-beaten-path, restaurants in tourist towns, it had closed. This was problematic as one of their menu items was a huge bowl of edamame.

So, we needed to find the only other acceptable food: cheese pizza. And on one of the bumping corners, there was a two-story, super-touristy, restaurant full of fake rocks and neon lights that served pizza.

During our twenty-minute wait, we looked at the menu. Us adults decided we wanted an appetizer, and the hummus plate looked good. I had recently been on a hummus kick, and was actually really excited about it.

We got seated, ordered the cheese pizza, hummus plate, and other adult foods. The hummus plate came out pretty quickly. It had pita, carrots, and celery arranged around a big bowl of apparent hummus. Chunks of what looked like square white cheese, and various spices, to include paprika, coated the top of the hummus. I mean, the spice blanket was so thick, I figured it might be too spicy, even if we mixed it into all the hummus.

The four-year-old looked at the hummus and simply gave an ardent NO when asked to try it. The adults though, blood sugars low, all grabbed a piece of pita and dug in. We chewed quietly for a little bit, and I realized, the hummus didn't taste bad, but weirdly, it had no taste.

But that made no sense. The paprika carpet on top of it was like a centimeter thick. It had to at least taste like paprika. I scooped a big heap of spices with my next bite.

Nope, still nothing. I couldn't taste the hummus or spices. I tried one of the little cubes I figured was cheese. It was just a cube. My mouth indicated to me it was a soft solid, nothing else.

But I was so hungry, I continued to sample it. When I ate a carrot without dipping it into the hummus, I could taste it. Same with the celery, which had it’s hallmark... sensation?... of crunchy water. But everything in the hummus bowl didn’t have a taste.

"This hummus is... weird..." someone finally said.

Oh thank God. I wasn't in the beginning stages of some horrible medical issue which started with an erasure of taste.

"It has no taste," someone else added.

But it wasn't that just the hummus had no taste. Nothing in it did. Like a black hole consuming light, this hummus was doing the same thing just with taste. I could not taste the paprika. THE PAPRIKA.

"You know," my husband said, snatching up another pita and swirling it in the back hole before us, "if I was on a colony ship, and I had just woken up, and someone served this to me and said it was eggs, I would believe it. This could be literally anything if you just believed it was."

"So it's just space protein powder?" I asked.

"Tell me it isn't," he said.

But I couldn't. It was, the weirdest thing I'd ever eaten. Sort of watery, and a consumer of all flavors, it didn't taste bad, it just had the texture of paste, and the more I ate, the less hungry I felt, so I felt strongly that it was probably food.

The rest of the dinner was subpar, although the cheese pizza seemed to get rave reviews. We headed home long after the sun set. Both my husband and I had to work the next day.

Of course, on our way home, the road flashed, and a river flooded over the blacktop. We spent over an hour sitting on a pitch black highway waiting for the river to disappear, but in that time, we could not get over the protein paste we'd been served.

The longer I sat in the car, watching the brown water surge by us, lit by the cars behind us headlights, the more I wondered. There was no way, some space-fairing-hopeful corporation or government entity was testing space-ready protein paste on the unsuspecting public in tourist trap restaurants.

Right?

Right?