A Defense of Questionable Food Choices

Some people love runny eggs, while others will only eat "fully cooked" eggs with yolks as dry as chalk. My wife says runny eggs feel like eating snot – and yes, we've all been there as kids. I'm firmly in the runny egg camp, which puts me in the minority of people willing to defend questionable food choices in polite company.

I had many opportunities to indulge in this gooey goodness during our recent Penang summer vacation, where I discovered that my food prejudices were both deeply held and completely arbitrary.

The last meal I ate in Penang, before flying home, was an excellent kaya toast, runny eggs, and kopi set at OO White Coffee, very close to the airport. We found this place by accident a year earlier when we had to stop for our car-sick daughter to throw up in a pleasant environment.

This time, I also visited one of Penang's most well-known toast and kopi institutions, Toh Soon Cafe (yes, "that's what she said"). I felt deliciously "in the know" queuing up with fellow Asian foodies, the only Western face in a sea of locals who clearly knew something I was still learning. The kopi – coffee with condensed milk, brewed through a sock-like cloth filter – was rich and foamy. I'm always suspicious it's not a "sock-like filter" but an actual sock these vendors use. I just hope it was clean. This from someone who normally drinks coffee black and skips breakfast entirely for weight management. Apparently, vacation makes hypocrites of us all.

Here's what I learned about my own food snobbery: I'd been hunting for "proper" Chinese food in Penang and was consistently disappointed. Turns out you can find better Chinese food in any random mall in any random Tier 2 city in China. The revelation was to stop having culinary expectations and embrace how cuisines adapt and mix in a new and interesting way – the beautiful mess where Chinese and Malay Muslim cultures create something entirely new. Curry mee soup, for instance, is wildly addictive and now ranks among my favorite noodle soups globally.

But my real conversion story involves durian – the fruit that smells like used socks, but tastes like heaven had a baby with custard. Unlike the runny egg divide, I actually managed to convert my wife to Team Durian. Now we both indulge in this pungent, aromatic fruit with zero moderation, sometimes driving directly to farms like fruit addicts seeking a fix. When I discovered the variety of durian species cultivated in Penang, my mind was blown. It's joined coffee and kombucha in my holy trinity of things I can bore people to death discussing – origins, taxonomies, and details only fellow obsessives care about.

Yet even I have limits. I always make sure to skip the cockles in my Penang laksa or char kway teow. These tiny clams taste too much like the bottom of the sea, and I'd happily trade all of them for more runny eggs.

The irony isn't lost on me: I'll evangelize for a fruit that most Westerners find revolting, defend eggs that make my wife gag, but draw the line at perfectly normal shellfish. Food prejudices, it turns out, are as personal and illogical as any other kind of prejudice – we just get to eat the evidence.

#runnyeggs #smellysocks #durian4life