Popcorn Darwinism

Last night, I had planned to get a delivery of some sort for dinner– pizza, curry, chinese, or greek. Since I had indulged in a 5pm snack (okay, mini meal) of brie, crackers and chorizo slices, I wasn’t all that hungry. I got online for a bit and before I knew it, it was 9pm. Too late to order food or I wouldn’t even eat until 10. I wanted to go to bed at 11 so thought I’d better eat earlier than that. Plus, I figured I shouldn’t spend the money on a takeaway when I’d dropped £40 at Borders the day before buying books (all non-fiction) and another £50 having my highlights done. It’s a pricy business, being an intelligent woman with good hair, I’m tellin’ ya.

So, as I rummaged through cupboards looking for a meal I could put together quickly and easily, I came across the popcorn popper that I received for Christmas from Paul’s aunt and uncle. I’d been meaning to try it out for weeks but there was always something preventing me from doing so — no popcorn kernels, didn’t have real butter in the fridge, didn’t want to wake the baby with all the noise, or just plain didn’t fancy it.

But, I’m a Hoosier. Being from Indiana, the home of popcorn, it is my birthright –no, my DUTY– to prepare and eat popcorn, as well as propogate its spread over the industrialized world. I didn’t move to the UK for love or for a new experience in a different culture. No. It was to salvage the UK’s paltry popcorn record and teach them the ways of fresh, buttered, salted popcorn instead of the processed, bagged crap with toffee on it that they eat here. I travel the depth and breadth of this island, standing in cinema lobbies, quietly handing out literature near the ‘help yourself’ buckets of stale, cold popcorn in its sterile containers, encouraging a revolution in cinema snacking, demanding change and enlisting others in my cause.

And so, since I was feeling particularly popcorn deprived that night and, it being a tradition amongst women in my family to have it for dinner when husbands are away, I plugged that baby in and let ‘er rip. I was like a kid in candy store, nose pressed up against the glass, watching and waiting with semi-glazed eyes and with the slightest hint of drool forming at the corners of my lips. I watched the little golden nuggets of corny goodness spin and spin in the chamber, furiously working themselves into a frenzy of heat and motion. The whirring air rose up through the vents. lightly feathering my hair and filling my nose with the unmistakable smell of melting butter and the burning of the seeds, about to burst. Ahhhhhh. Then the popcorn began swelling and spilling out of the chamber and into the bowl I had placed below it; filling, overflowing and then tumbling from the edge. I cupped my hands under the ’spout’ and caught a few freshly-popped kernels in my hand. So warm, so lovely. I smiled and closed my eyes, savoring real popcorn as it should be, in its natural habitat.

And then, as I marvelled at its tastiness, an unpopped kernel exploded forth, escaping the ‘kernel catcher’ above the spinning chamber, and shot out of the machine, directly towards my head. I squeezed my eyes closed in the nick of time and felt a little ping and a burning sensation on the bridge of my nose, just a few millimeters from my eye. I looked down and there, burning a hole into the tub of butter on the counter, was the renegade kernel. It had tried to blind me, resentful, I suppose, of its maker, the machine’s, inability to turn it into a proper piece of popcorn, relegated to the wimpy guys at the bottom that never muster the strength or stamina to make it to the top of the chamber and propel themselves forward, multiplying and fulfilling their duty as good kernels.

It’s survival of the fittest out there and, like in life, it isn’t very often that the little guys at the bottom manage to make it out alive. But when they do? Man, are they feisty!