Food is an emotional subject, as anyone who has wept over having to eat a nearly-raw boiled egg for breakfast - like me - will tell you. The thing about slithery, clear eggwhite, only just warmed is it's slimy and it looks like snot.
As children at boarding school we tearfully held out over what we called gooey eggs till the bell rang for classes and matron lost jurisdiction. We got the eggs that went last into the boiling pot, you see, and so they came out as good as raw, because we were served first. It's a vivid Dickensian memory, so don't come the sous-vide egg with me.
Why force kids to eat disgusting things? They only hate them more, things like the special dishes that will be served up this August at Wellington On a Plate. Oh how restaurateurs thrill to see me coming. Oh how I read the planned menus for the annual food festival and marvel that people will eat anything so long as they're paying for it and someone else cooked it.
My father said, "I will not eat things' works", and neither do I. I am not delighted by lungs, livers, kidneys, intestines, stomachs, cheeks, ears and noses, all of which have become witty things to eat, conceits to titillate our sybaritic palates. We are so sophisticated that we crave the bits that get thrown away.
In fairness, I've tried some of them: steak-and-kidney stews with hard, dry lumps of urine-sifter that make me gag, and liver in slabs, with a host of tiny veins, as if it's been beset by tunnelling creatures. Nothing could make me eat chicken livers, however poshly presented. What a disgusting texture. The chicken needed them. I don't.