I may be the only person in North America –– maybe even the world –– who can make this statement: I have no desire to drink coffee in the morning. I don’t need it to wake me up, and I don’t crave it. In fact, I have another distinction, though not as rare. On workdays I don’t eat breakfast. I’m just not hungry early in the day and I don’t run out of gas before lunch.

Don’t get me wrong. I do enjoy a good cup of coffee with dessert at dinner sometimes. My wife likes it more than I, though, but if she even has a cup of decaf after 10 a.m., she maintains that she won’t sleep that night.

So the bottom line is that you probably won’t be seeing the Bernstein family featured on a coffee commercial on TV.

A friend of mine is, to my thinking, a sommelier of black licorice. I’ve lost track of the number of brands he has given me to try. The smoother the better, he says. I have, as you probably know, fairly strong opinions about food and drink. But I must say that when it comes to black licorice (there are favors like strawberry, but my friend does not acknowledge them), I have trouble differentiating among the good and the bad.

Their most noteworthy characteristic is this: They all get stuck in your teeth. With all of the advances in food science, you’d have thought they’d have fixed that problem. They seemed to have done a pretty darn good job smoothing out peanut butter, so why not licorice?

The licorice problem, then, makes an item in this week’s ACS Weekly PressPac very intriguing to me. It seems that scientists have discovered medicinal properties of licorice root.

While at summer camp in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts, our group took a trip to nearby Tanglewood, the home of a popular annual summer music ...

My friend Roy is not going to be happy about this. In fact, I, myself, am not very happy about what I’m going to write in the next sentence. My favorite Major League ballpark hot dog is the (drumroll!) Fenway Frank, produced courtesy of the Boston Red Sox. And if that weren’t bad enough, here’s more: I have eaten the fabled Dodger Dog and the Fenway Frank is in another league.

 

The problem is that I am a lifelong Dodger fan and, even worse, Roy is such a fan that he has an L.A. Dodgers’ website. Boo to me. But I can’t help it. During one of our ACS national meetings in Boston last year a group of us went to a game at Fenway and one bite out that Fenway Frank and I was a goner. What a wonderful smokey flavor! I know virtually all Major League teams have good franks (there’s the Braves’ Georgia Dog, the Rangers’ Big Dog, the Yankee’s yummy Nathan’s Frank and so on). But I have never, ever eaten more than one dog at a game, until Fenway. So Roy, please forgive me.

There’s no accounting for people’s taste when it comes to food. Some like thin, greasy burgers fried on a restaurant grill. Others of us like thick, juicy burgers broiled to perfection over a fire, gas or otherwise.

 

Some of us love a wide variety of spices from rosemary, sage and thyme to Jamaican curry and even turmeric. On the other hand, someone I know, who will remain nameless, is repelled by virtually all but the most basic spices. Salt and pepper generally will do for this person.

 

I’ve just read that individual taste not only depends on what kind of taste buds you have in your tongue, but what your emotional state might be. And now, after digesting this week’s ACS PressPac, I’ve learned even more about taste: There’s something new and exciting going on with the tongue and it’s not the one inside your mouth.

Some people go with the flow when it comes to food. If their mashed potatoes are not piping hot they won’t ever complain to their server. If their coffee could be a little warmer, they drink it anyway. If their entrée doesn’t really look like it was described on the menu, they let it go.

 

And then there’s yours truly: The wait person’s nightmare. If my food is only warm, look out! If the fish sauce doesn’t taste quite right, I’m on it.

 

And added to this philosophy about food, I have very special likes and dislikes. Let me give you just one example: I like ice tea, provided it isn’t diluted with 150 ice cubes. But I don’t like hot tea, unless it’s chai. And I like my chai with milk, the English way.

Sometimes I like to live on the edge. Don’t get me wrong: I’m probably not likely to climb the Washington Monument (when they fix the earthquake cracks) without a net. But when I’m feeling good and the stars are in alignment I might just surprise some people.

 

Let me give you an example. Even when I’m wearing a nice new white dress shirt and my favorite tie I have been known to visit an Italian restaurant and, rather than go for the safety of the penne or the corkscrew pasta, I order the spaghetti. And I do this this after my history of twirling the long strands around my fork and splashing myself with the rich red sauce more times than I can remember. Once, I cleverly kept my shirt and tie spotless with a linen napkin tied around my neck. I was very proud of myself.

Get ready for a sad tale about mushrooms. Well, actually, a sad tale about me and mushrooms.

 

I was ogling the seafood at Seattle’s famous Pike Place Market one bright, sunny day (yes, it was sunny) some years ago when I came upon a table laden with beautiful chanterelle mushrooms. It just so happened that the night before I had eaten a side order of these most delicious veggies for the first time at a local restaurant. I had never had such mushrooms before. So flavorful.

 

So I bought a large box of them, stored them in my hotel room fridge and packed them in my suitcase the next morning and flew home. I rushed them to the fridge when I walked through the door and looked forward to a nice plate of them, sautéed in olive oil or, maybe, even butter. I eat very carefully, but one dollop of butter surely couldn’t hurt this one time!

When it comes to eating heart-healthy foods and avoiding high-fat delicacies, there is no halfway for me. It’s a cool day in August in Washington, D.C. when I will tackle a plateful of red meat twice in the same month. I had my last donut in 1986. The last time I had fried chicken was sometime in that decade. That’s right. You heard me.

 

I also take several fish oil vitamins, rich in omega-3 oils, as the ads say, every day and have kept my weight to within a few pounds of where it was when I came back from basic training, eons ago. And, yes, I use our treadmill regularly and do a lot of walking.