Vinegar cures depression
A running joke at work attributed to me is the idea that "vinegar cures depression". If you were to look online, you'd see some studies on it, though the point of me writing this isn't to argue whether it does or not, or to what extent. Often, I would have some vinegar-rich foods for lunch, ranging from my homemade pickles to fishball noodles (one of my favourite staple Singaporean fare). Eating lunch in general makes me happy, but if it happens to contain vinegar, the remark that it "cures my depression" gets thrown around.
There is this humorous sentence you may see online, yeah I'll go ahead and integrate that into my belief system
,
which I think perfectly captures these inconsequential concepts. I don't actually believe it's the next big breakthrough in
psychiatry, but I was going to eat vinegar-rich foods anyway (YEAH CHINESE FOOD!), so it'd be nicely convenient if it had that
effect on my mental health in actuality.
A side effect of this joke may be me actually noticing when vinegar is a key ingredient in the food I eat, or maybe even actively seeking to incorporate it into my diet. I share a few condiments with my colleague, since most days we bring our own meal-prepped lunch which require a little more oomph in flavour. They are, so far, primarily relish and hot sauces, which are indeed vinegar-based! I now appreciate vinegar much more, for its flavour, depth, and lack of calories(!).
I wrote this at work, and at lunch I sat with my colleagues, the "awesome sauces" (as we called them) laid out in front of us.
One of them bought mixed rice and remarked that the eggplant dish had already run out by lunchtime.
Me and eggplants are like you and vinegar
(or something to that effect),
he said to me, to which I replied My eggplant is your eggplant
(I like eggplants too!).