People are fickle. They’ll eat or drink something created from bacteria culture without a thought, and they’ll eat a fungus without hesitation. The same people will turn their nose up at something like dried fish or balut.
I don’t like most yogurt products and I don’t like probiotics like Yakult. Yakult is a popular drink with the children in my little corner of the Philippines. Even my younger son, Jon, likes it. I’ve tasted it and I can only describe it as non-palatable, to use a mild term for it.
Yakult isn’t yogurt but it’s made in much the same way. Yogurt is the bacterial fermentation of milk. Yakult is a probiotic dairy product made by fermenting a mixture of skimmed milk with a special strain of bacteria. Yogurt is semi-solid while Yakult is liquid.
Plain yogurt doesn’t have much of a taste to it. That’s why people add other things, like fruit. My older grandson, Joshua, used to love the Yoplait brand of yogurt when he was young. I don’t know if he still does. The only yogurt I could ever stomach was the frozen yogurt of TCBY sold like ice cream. It’s probably been 15 years or more since I had a waffle cone filled with their chocolate-flavored yogurt.
Fungi, fungus, whatever, but they’re not bacteria or a bacteria culture. They’re parasites. A mushroom and a toadstool are the same thing. If they’re edible, people call them mushrooms. If they’re not, they call them toadstools. Some are poisonous and if you want to be safe, you can grow your own mushrooms.
I like mushrooms when they’re used as an ingredient. By themselves, they don’t have much of a taste to them. I like mushroom soup, mushroom gravy and mushrooms on burgers (bacon, mushroom and cheese). I’ve never tried to eat magic mushrooms (or shrooms). It doesn’t matter if they’re legal or not. I don’t want a psychedelic or mystical experience. If I ever do partake, it will be purely accidental and someone else’s fault.
By the way, I’ve never tried to eat or smoke peyote either. It’s another psychoactive plant I want no part of. Luckily, it isn’t native to any place I’ve ever lived.
Photo Attribution: Bernadette Wurzinger from Pixabay
Edited and updated. Originally published at one of my other websites in April 2017.