IT is a well-known fact that Hawaii is the center of the mayonnaise-eating world. I don't know why this is. But it is. If the state Legislature was to designate an official state food it would be mayo. Two words:
primordial crudThis is the second of my two-part year-end look at mayonnaise and what my organization, the Worldwide I Hate Mayonnaise Club (www.nomayo.com) is doing to fight the spread of the evil slime. (The first part ran in Honolulu Lite on Dec. 26).
You say someone is addicted to a substance, like heroin, when they simply can't live without it. But one thing I like about heroin is that no one has ever tried to put it on my cheeseburger. I can't say the same about mayo. People in Hawaii are addicted to mayonnaise and something should be done about it. The proof is that the mayo-afflicted here now put mayonnaise on everything from pizza to chili.
My buddy Sam Choy, who occupies the Big and Tall section of the professional cooking world, simply cannot stop cooking with mayonnaise. He apologizes for it. He jokes about. But he doesn't stop it. He can't. He's a mayo junkie. Sam needs help. But he's not alone. Thousands of people in Hawaii suffer from this curse. We need organizations like MAMA (Mothers Against Mayo Addiction), and clinics like Planned Sandwichhood to take in and counsel the mayo-afflicted. We need Mayo Anonymous, with a program that would take you from mayo to mustard in twelve steps. We need Mayo-Free Zones in restaurants.
But it's not happening. Instead, Hawaii is becoming a huge dumping ground for mayo, with stores like Costco selling vast tubs of the stuff. And worse, as I detailed in the last column, mayo is spreading into countries like China, where mayo-producers see billions of potential condiment abusers.
Perhaps, like the tobacco industry, mayo producers know they have to start concentrating on other countries. Maybe they sense a crackdown against mayo here, similar to the one against cigarettes. Oh, if that were only true. If there only were a giant anti-mayo conspiracy, I'd join the Trilateral Commission and become a member of the New World Order.
The truth is that scientists are trying to prop up mayo's reputation. The proof? Star-Bulletin columnist Dave Donnelly, usually a person of good taste, recently took glee in presenting me with a book entitled ''Mayonnaise and the Origin of Life,'' by Harold Morowitz.
Morowitz, a professor of biochemistry, contends that the very existence of mayo holds clues to how life started on this planet.
His point is that mayonnaise is made up mainly of substances that should repel each other. (I know they repel the hell out of me.) Mayonnaise is mainly oil and vinegar. Normally, these two substances wouldn't even talk to each other. But sometime around 1800, some French guy figured out that if you add egg yoke to the mixture, it turns oil and vinegar into that yukky white gunk now called mayonnaise.
It's all because egg yokes contain molecules called amphiphiles. Amphiphile molecules have two active ends, one that loves water and the other that loves oil. Most molecules are just one type. The switch-hitting amphiphiles allow the oil and vinegar hang on to each other. (It all sounds terribly sexual, in a deviant way.)
Scientists think that it was similar amphiphiles that led to biogenesis, the first step toward cellular life. In other words, pond scum not only was the beginning of life but it was nature's first mayonnaise.
While scientists like Morowitz may think this elevates mayonnaise to some respectable evolutionary status, I think it clearly shows mayo's disgusting family pedigree. Mayo rose from the primordial ooze and evolved into modern ooze. Ooze is ooze, in my book; the forces of goodness will never stop trying to send it back to the muck from which it came.