Only in California

Princess has a little performance thing at school where the kindergartners get to sing a song on stage. It's a turkey song.

I'll spare you the three verses of nonsense, but basically it's about a turkey who is a child's pet and doesn't want to get eaten, so they have egg foo yung on Thanksgiving rather than eating the poor bird. Poor, poor bird.

I said in front of my kids that it's a good thing that turkeys are so dang ugly. I mean, DANG UGLY. I don't feel bad about eating them at all. That would be the barbarian in me coming out.

I adore that for a while my grandparents had seafood linguine for T-day dinner. It was different, delicious, and kept turkey dinners fresh and delightful. No one got sick of turkey leftovers for 2-3 months afterward. And little seafood creatures are also very ugly. I don't mind eating them either.

Cows are getting into the cute range, but they smell so terrible that once again, I don't mind eating them.

On the other hand, there are things that are too ugly to eat. Fried bugs of any kind (except for sea bugs like shrimp, of course) are totally off my list. So are snails. And what the heck do you do with a geoduck? Oh, and crawfish. Ew.

Are there vegetables that are too ugly to eat? Or fruits? There's actually a fruit called ugli fruit which I've found to be tasty. And the deceptively tomato-looking persimmon which I tasted for the first time at the farmer's market and loved. The Chinese plum doesn't look too bad. It's very small, a little smaller than a roma tomato. I didn't try those. :( I wonder if things start to look more attractive once you know how they taste, kind of like how some people become more attractive the more you get to know them.

Speaking of odd creatures, let's take a quick look at weird mascots. The above mentioned geoduck is actually the mascot for the Evergreen State College in Washington. Their motto is Omnia Extares (or, "let it all hang out"). Hah. UCSC sports the banana slug as its mascot. Then there's the Delta State Fighting Okra (how'd you like to be a cheerleader for them?), University of Arkansas at Monticello has the boll weevil, and North Carolina School of the Arts has the fighting pickles.

Yeah. Weird.