By Sally Beerworth
Popcorn is one of the few foods that you tend to eat in the dark; it is treated like a bad date, that you would prefer to entertain with the lights off. This week however, I discovered some popcorn that I wanted to eat with the lights on… over and over, and over.
I picked up some packets of Love Da Pop at Reynolds Café on Charlotte Street. Reynolds are the people who believe in grazing, and therefore that we should all be walking around perpetually with something in our mouths… other than our feet.
I liked these people, well as much as I can like anyone who sells lentils. The café’s redeeming feature is that they are selling the kind of popcorn that highlights just how ghastly some of the stuff we have been shovelling in the dark really is.
The Love Da Pop popcorn is made by hand, using organic corn kernels. Personally I have never felt compelled to eat anything purely because it was ‘organic’, I am not even really sure what it means. I had always assumed that it meant a large vacuum had been used to suck the fun out of the food product in question. Yet in this case, it just seemed to make it taste fresher than other popcorn… my cheeks were left very confused as to why they weren’t flushed from a food additive overdose, especially after eating something that had my taste buds doing cartwheels. The only part of my body capable these days of doing gymnastics are my taste buds.
The cartwheels may just have something to do with the flavours that were added to corn kernels. In my day, your only choice of flavouring was salt, or more salt… and as a result I still can’t resist opening my mouth when I go for a swim at the beach.
As I have never learnt the art of culinary sacrifice, I couldn’t resist picking up bags of their Sea Salt & Pepper, Caramel Kiss and White Chocolate flavours. Despite the overpromise of getting a bit of action from the caramel, I Hoovered up every piece. I also rather worryingly found myself with an overwhelming to desire, to mug the Mad Men wannabe who walked past me with a bag of the stuff.
Funnily enough, it wasn’t the popcorn that I enjoyed so much, as the packaging (no I didn’t eat it, I did consider it obviously.) There is something wholesome about food that comes in red & white striped wrapping; it reminds me of something that I might have been handed by the owner of the corner shop when I was a kid… without the trauma of his vegetable handling fingernails.
Love Da Pop’s striped packaging is sealed with an old-fashioned wooden laundry peg, I assume because they know I will end up with it all over me, and quickly need to make a mad dash for the washing machine. If I eat a few more packets I will have enough laundry equipment to finally qualify as a woman. I assumed this was possible, as it seemed that even their pop corn machines had qualified as women; I learnt that Megan and Foxy were the names given to the popping machines, used to lovingly assist in make my grazing fodder.
I now find myself craving more, but I am torn between going back, just in case my beloved popcorn is stacked a little too close to the seaweed peanuts at Reynolds…it is almost worth the risk.
Funny, as always!