#3 Down the Hatch

I'm genuinely concerned about the sanity of the first person to ever pick up an oyster, look at it, and think to themselves, "this gelatinous goop looks delicious". Let's be real, this person was not quite right. Yet thousands of years later, the humble oyster has become a delicacy. I'm not being dramatic when I say I'd rather walk on a bed of hot coals than eat another one of these things. Ok, maybe I'm being a little dramatic, but surely by now you've caught on to me.

As a child I always refused to eat any kind of fish or seafood and would blame it on the fact that I was a real life mermaid. I mean, come on, my name is MARINA. I knew I had to secretly be a real mermaid. Never mind the fact that I had the swimming skills of a cat. I was from the ocean and I couldn't eat my friends. Between this and my younger sister torturing me by chasing me with claws every time she ate crab, I never had a taste for anything fishy.

You're probably assuming I chose to try my first oyster somewhere on an ocean coast, where the oyster had been out of the sea for less than an hour before it found its unfortunate fate on my plate. Nope. I chose my midwestern hometown for this culinary adventure. The good news is that I did not fall victim to a bout of food poisoning. I survived eating what looked like it had already been digested.

It was the night of my daughter's homecoming dance. Since the parents had to play chauffer to a group of mildly rowdy teenagers, we decided to treat ourselves to dinner at a restaurant next to the one our kids were at not eating the dinners they ordered. Side note, I would like to remind my daughter that we gave her and her friends their space and didn't hide at a nearby table peaking from behind menus to watch them. I definitely never suggested that to the other parents.

Okay, back to the sea creature. I picked up the menu and saw raw oysters. I had found my adversary and ordered them after making sure someone else would eat the other five of them since I found it highly unlikely I would willingly choose to consume more than one. After a few minutes, a platter of sparkling ice was brought out. On top of the ice were the ugliest little morsels I've ever seen in my life. As I regretted the life choices that lead me to that moment, I picked one up. After a squeeze of lemon I emptied the shell's contents into my mouth and gulped it down as quickly as I could and then just as quickly as I'd downed it passed the platter to the other end of the table.

Now while I don't plan on ingesting one ever again, the next time I find myself at the seaside, I just might be brave enough to go for a second round. While the restaurant I tried my midwestern oyster at definitely orders from high quality sources, I'm assuming they taste a bit different than the oyster who woke up in his seaweed bed in the morning and then went to sleep that night in a human's belly. I may just become a seafood fan yet. Probably not, but we'll see.