A few times each year, Laura and I will eat at a sushi restaurant. When we do, we usually get edamame. It’s cheap, healthy and a nice finger-food.
There’s something about a heaping plate of warm, salty soybean pods that brings a smile to our faces. As we chat we’ll pluck a pod from the plate, squeeze the beans from the hull into our mouths and then put the empty hulls on a second plate.
It’s a this point in the consuming process that it’s worth bestowing a bit of advice…
Somewhere around the midway point the uneaten and the eaten plates start to look a lot alike. They both glisten, but one glistens with salt and a little butter, while the other glistens with spit. This is the edamame danger zone for the inattentive eater as they run the risk of putting a spent hull into their mouth.
This very thing happened to Laura’s coworker, John. They were 20 minutes into a half-dozen person happy hour when John exclaimed, “these beans are defective! The last five I’ve eaten have been empty!”
“Uh, John,” Laura responded, “that’s because you’re eating from the eaten pile.”