Once, as a child, I had the bright idea to taste something that I had seen eaten many times before, but never by humans.
I grew up in the Northeastern United States, where both oak trees and squirrels are utterly pervasive. Each fall, the ground would be littered with these little nuggets of nature, and an army of gray gatherers would frenetically ferret them away for the coming winter.
I was always a curious child, and from a very early age I felt a certain kinship with the animal world around me. In a city like New York, where fauna seemed almost out of place, those symbols of nature (basically all animals besides pigeons, rats, and roaches) seemed to show me a part of myself, reflected through the evolutionary mirror of a hundred million years. I too felt like a lost vestige of a previous time, trying to find my way through the concrete canyons of a world that moved too fast to understand.
One afternoon, a curiosity took me. What would it be like to be a squirrel? For one, it would mean eating a lot of acorns. I figured I』d give it a try. After all, I had never heard anything about them being dangerous, and I wasn’t allergic to any foods. At the same time, though, I』d never actually seen anyone eat an acorn. Oh well, what’s the worst that could happen?
What I expected was that it would be thoroughly bland. I had actually nibbled on and swallowed a piece of tree bark before and, while it didn’t taste good, it wasn’t exactly awful either. I expected acorns to have a rough woody grittiness but to be thoroughly devoid of taste.
One day in the park, I picked up an acorn, peered at it, popped in in my mouth, and bit down hard.
It was not what I expected.
Acorns, as it happens, taste awful. Acrid and bitter and furiously strong. It took me hours to get the taste out of my mouth.
The taste of that acorn haunts me to this day. Fond as I still am of them, it made me glad that I wasn’t a squirrel.
If you』ve never tried an acorn, dear reader, I suggest you remain in that state of blissful ignorance.
As it happens, there’s a reason no one eats them.