Disgusting nature
of mayo has no limitsAS founder and president of the Worldwide I Hate Mayonnaise Club (Est. 1988) I am often presented with rude and disgusting ways in which the white slime has come to be used in our society. In short, mayo-lovers enjoy grossing me out with mayonnaise horror stories. To be honest, it's not just the mayo-lovers who feel compelled to tell me stories. Club members from all over the globe have sent me sad tales of their encounters with mayo, often asking for advice.
Here's a recent e-mail: "A friend of mine has a submarine sandwich shop and heats up sandwiches with mayo in the microwave oven. Of course, this turns the mayo into a disgusting grease substance. I told her that cooked mayonnaise can cause food poisoning and make people very ill. Am I correct that nuking mayonnaise can make people sick?"
I told the poor soul that, yes, nuking mayo would make anyone with good taste ill. In fact, just READING about nuking mayo made me sick.
A man from Oregon wrote:
"When I was in first grade, my sister made my lunch. Wouldn't you know it? Egg salad just smothered in mushy, gunky mayonnaise. Well, I wasn't going to eat it. So I picked the sandwich apart into small pieces and started tossing them into the air. Mrs. Walters (we called her Mrs. Walrus) came by and asked who was throwing things. My punishment was to sit by myself along the wall of the cafeteria. I have permanent emotional scars from the incident. Yours in mayo-loathing, Darren.''
All I could tell Darren is he got off easy compared to the lady who wrote in telling me about the time when she was a kid and a 5 gallon jar of mayo broke in the back of the family car and her mother forced her to scoop out the gunk with bare hands. Now THAT'S child abuse.
Mayonnaise is responsible for a lot of hurt in the world today. I'm convinced it is also chiefly responsible for global warming, but I'm still working on that. I know that it is spreading like a virus and must be stopped. I recently saw a television show from Japan about a Chinese college student who took a huge tube of mayo (that's how they sell it in Japan) and a dried squid the size of a tennis racket home to China. (Apparently, there's no mayo in China, which was almost enough to convert me to Communism.) Then they showed the girl's family dipping pieces of this dried squid into a huge bowl of mayo, as if they were eating something normal, like salsa and chips. AND THEY WERE LOVING IT! I don't care about any economic embargo against China, but the United Nations must do everything possible to keep China from becoming a mayo-eating country.
The Worldwide I Hate Mayonnaise Club continues to do what it can to fight mayo-usage. In 1997, we received a lot of coverage from the mainstream media about our web site (www.nomayo.com.), including mention in the New Orleans Times Picayune, the New York Post and others. We also were the subject of a feature in Kurier, the second largest daily newspaper in Austria, where, I'm told by Kurier's Birgit Braunrath "Mozart grew up and probably had his first contact with mayo-spoilt sandwiches."
Unfortunately, it is a lonely battle we wage. All we want is simply to be able to go into a restaurant and get food that is not automatically slathered with mayo. On Monday, I will tell you of how some scientists now claim that mayonnaise may be an important link to the origin of life. It is all just too horrifying to contemplate.
