Mushrooms.

Are somehow delicious.

I can't stop eating them.

I bought a bag of fresh picked white button mushrooms yesterday ... and by bag, I mean 2.5 pounds of succulent, pale, large capped, expectant fungi - and have devoured easily half the bag already. They're like potato chips ... except not made with oil, not fried or baked, not potato, not salty, not crunchy, not grown below the soil, not mass produced in little snack bags, and definitely not good with salsa ... so perhaps not at all like potato chips. But I eat them in prodigious handfuls nonetheless!

As I bite in, the flavors of the rich earth and supple hints of mold rise up to my waiting palate - a thin layer of mushroom pulp envelopes my tongue with a cool, refreshing, bitterness that strikes an oaky chord - as I finish the bite, and reach for another, there is a clean, yet soft aftertaste, like the tiny droplets of water on fresh green grass in a spring field overlooked by apple trees and willows over a garrulous stream after a mild rain.

yes.

mushrooms.

I have a 6 pound bag full of every kind of chocolate snack that Hershey, Nestle, and M&M make sitting next to me (Costco business expense thanks to Kaplan ... 'student incentives') and I am instead munching contentedly on the spore bearing fruiting body of a fungus.

it has indeed come to this.