Love. Hate.

I love fruit salad. I hate fruit salad.
What brings me to discuss this unexpected topic? The fact that I just ate fruit salad. Yesterday the Company bought lunch for the twenty-odd people involved in the newest edition of one of our best-selling textbooks. This was not the usual vat o' pad thai lunch we're usually treated to, but a nice lunch of individually prepared salmon, a roll, fruit salad, and a box of cookies. Pretty swank. I even got to have a diet Snapple iced tea to drink instead of soda. Nice.
We sat around and talked about what a gigantic pain in the ass the book was while we worked on it, but how good it looks now and how exacting the late author was. Since I'm relatively new here, none of it made much sense to me. But I ate my salmon and rice with a smile on my face, reaping my reward for a job well done. Salmon doesn't keep to well as leftovers, so I decided to eat all of that, and save the fruit salad, cookies and roll for today.
This morning, I poured myself a bowl of Kashi and sat myself in front of my computer. I ate that up, and then switched over to the fruit salad. Which was comprised of several grapes, several chunks of pineapple, a bunch of watermelon, a bunch of orange melon, a bunch of green melon, and a half-slice of orange.
I ate the orange, the grapes and the pineapple chunks happily. I suffered through the watermelon, which usually isn't that bad, but it had soaked up the flavors of the other melons and tasted like ass. I tried to keep in mind all the fibery, sweet goodness of fruit, but hocked the rest of the bowl, which was about three-quarters of the fruit salad. I even asked Kristen if she wanted some, but she said "I hate melon."
For the love of Christ and reindeer, why the hell do people put melon in fruit salad? Melon is gross. It tastes like an absence of flavor. It has a bizarre consistency. Nobody likes melon. People eat out the good stuff and chuck the melons. The melons give their life in vain. I mean, I know the practical reason why restaurants put melon in the fruit salad-- it's cheap and takes up a lot of space. But it's gross. I'd much rather have a small bowl of delicious fruits mixed together than a huge vat of ass-tasting melon with some good stuff tossed in for color.
For my Mom's birthday in May, my grandmother made fruit salad. And that could have been the end of the meal for me. Halved red grapes, halved green grapes, small bits of pineapple, delightfully firm bits of peaches, sweet, small blueberries, diced strawberries, and even a few pears for a change of consistency that wasn't nasty tasting. I ate two small bowls before the baked fish even came out of the oven. That was a fruit salad. A smorgasboard of fiber, antioxidants, and some scurvy-fighting vitamin C.
I will not rest until restaurants and office function caterers are aware that they aren't fooling anyone. Nobody wants melons in the fruit salad. Charge a little more for some interesting combinations. Raspberries and blueberries are good together, as are those fruits and strawberries. Pears and raspberries work well and have a nice change in texture between them. Grapes are always welcome. But keep that bastard melon out of my salad.