Trouble over Bridgwater

[venta]

Imagine, if you will, that you are eating a half-coated chocolate biscuit. Maybe it's a digestive, maybe it's a hobnob. Maybe it's a vegan, gluten-free biccie with carob coating if that sounds more like your thing. Anyway, imagine you are eating a biscuit with some form of chocolate-esque coating on exactly one side.

You're thinking of it?

OK.

[Poll #1966494]

Thank you. This poll brought to you following a traumatic outbreak of biscuit-eating-related horror in my household.

Comments

[huskyteer.livejournal.com]

That's a Half Man Half Biscuit album, isn't it? Never listened to it or AFAIK even seen it, but obviously love the title.

[venta.livejournal.com]

One kudo to you. You should absolutely listen to some HMHB, they're very entertaining.

[ringbark.livejournal.com]

Proud to be a Wirral person.

[huskyteer.livejournal.com]

I probably should at that - I laughed a lot just reading the lyrics to 'Trumpton Riots'.

[the-alchemist.livejournal.com]

I see 'top' as the canonical way, and bottom as the superior way, given the higher concentration of tastebuds on the tongue.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Interesting. My boyfriend's defence of his upside-down biscuit eating was that by eating chocolate-side-down you drop fewer crumbs.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

That boy has his priorities all wrong! :-P

[taimatsu]

My view is that the non-chocolate side is the one which often (e.g. with digestives) has writing on it, and it is therefore the top, and it should continue to be at the top when you eat it. I didn't realise other people did it THE WRONG WAY.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

Ah, but Choco Leibniz, which are my personal favourite chocolate biscuits, have writing on both sides.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Actually, now you mention it, I am ambivalent to the way up of Choco Leibniz. Which, you're right, are awesome.

[the-alchemist.livejournal.com]

Just realised (though I've never articulated this to myself before) that additional reason is that I slightly dislike getting chocolate on my teeth, and if I eat biscuits chocolate-side-down, only the non-chocolately bit has to touch my teeth, as my tongue can provide the pressure needed from the bottom side to break the biscuit.

[venta.livejournal.com]

I am torn. On the one hand, this is clearly an utterly unimportant issue, it's your biscuit and you can eat it however you want. Plus you have perfectly sound arguments for the chocolate-down approach.

On the other hand you're eating it upside down!

(I should comment that should I witness you eating a chocolate-down biscuit I wouldn't dream of mentioning it. I only took it up with the boyfriend in revenge for his equally ridiculous complaints when I drank Coca Cola out of a mug ;)

[lnr]

Mike votes chocolate on top too, he cites pizzas as another example of a food only usually eaten with the topping on the top.

I note however that I eat burgers upside down! The motion of lifting it from plate to mouth inverts it, and putting it back down reverts it, so it's right way up on the plate but wrong way up at point of eating.

[ringbark.livejournal.com]

What? How the hell do you pick up your burger? And don't your sesame seeds detach and fall on the floor?

[lnr]

Hold hands with palms up, insert fingers under bun and place thumbs on top, pick up and rotate at wrists so the bit of bun at the back lifts first, continue to rotate until burger is horizontal upside down. The buns in question either don't have seeds or have them better attached IME.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

I would be more worried about the loose innards falling out during the rotation process?

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

I do this too, but usually only if the bottom bun layer is of insufficient structural integrity. If it's very bad I'll even leave it upside down on the plate.

[venta.livejournal.com]

I don't have a policy of eating burgers upside down, but it does sometimes happen that way.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

I'm left feeling like a faithless, flibtertigibbet flip-flopping fence-sitter now. I go both ways. Sometimes in the course of the same biscuit. If the chocolate starts melting on to my fingers, I'll put the chocolate on top; if it starts sprinkling lots of crumbs I'll put the chocolate on the bottom. But otherwise I flip them around with abandon. I'll even alternate from one bite to the next. This must horrify partisans of either approach. I shall try to be more considerate in future.

At the risk of starting another holy war: What about bananas?

Most people open them at the sticky-out bit end (where they originally attached to the tree), but I open them at the flatter black-bit/starfish end (where the flower was), which I call "the monkey end", having been convinced by a YouTube video of monkeys opening bananas from that end and my own personal experimentation. On closer watching, though (they are very fast at it), the non-human primate approach seems much more to split the skin than to peel it, and you can find evidence of monkeys sometimes starting from nearer the stalk end too.

After witnessing distressing parental disagreements on this topic, my kids, in a spirit of compromise and/or cussedness, invented a third approach: cut them in half with a knife, and peel them from the middle. This, I was forced to concede, was an unequivocally human way of opening a banana.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Ah, I remember your blogging about eating bananas from the middle. I too am the child of mixed-endian parents. I resolved this conflict by failing to notice until a few years ago that my dad was monkey-endian. I'm usually a stalk opener, but try the other end if the stalk resists.

[lnr]

I,ve occasionally tried the monkey-end approach, having been told it is better, but nearly always end up with squished bits of banana, whereas a thumbnail in the stalk end nearly always opens it with no issues for me. I like the middle-endian approach though.

[shermarama]

...This entire conversation is like a whole new world for me. I eat them chocolate side up, and I'd never thought of or noticed anyone else doing it any other way, let alone having reasons for it beyond maybe not really caring, and above everything else, having reasons that sound perfectly sensible to me now they've been pointed out. Chocolate next to your tongue! Writing on the top! Crumb retention! Of course!

(Actually thinking about it there is one type of biscuit I have eaten chocolate side down but it's barely a biscuit; it's a Mrs. Crimble's Chocolate Macaroon, and the heavily-domed top is so clearly the top that the chocolate has to go on the bottom.)

[secondhand-rick.livejournal.com]

Your callous prejudice, against those of us who don't care for chocolate, is deeply unpleasant.