This open letter was originally featured in PASTEL Magazine Issue #3. You can buy a copy of the latest issue (as well as the previous two issues) here, and you can stalk their Instagram here.
Literally the grossest thing in existence. Not safe for children under the age of 99.
Dear Rocket,
There are few things in this world that prove the devil is real and wants to punish us.
UTIs, the garbage island in the Pacific Ocean, and sitting near small children on long-haul flights are all testaments to the fact we live in a deeply flawed world. But there exists an evil far more sinister and malevolent than the child in Row 17. I refer, of course, to the most insidious evil of them all: you.
Rocket (aka arugula/colewort/Lucifer’s anal hairs), a leaf by any other name would still make me gag. Rather than confine yourself from humanity, you typically infest salads or assert yourself as a garnish on far superior foods. For too long, I have struggled to articulate the sheer brutality of your tangy flavour. The phrases ‘desiccated testicle’ and ‘if gastroenteritis was a vegetable’ came to mind, but these insufficiently captured just how awful you truly are (as well as taint the good name of testicles everywhere).
I have spent countless hours extracting your leaves from otherwise delicious dishes, to the point where many innocent sandwiches have come to resemble homicide scenes or works by Jackson Pollock. These mutilations are an unfortunate side effect of living in a world where chefs insist on tainting dinner parties and brunch dates with your vulgar shade of gangrene.
There is a special place in Hell for people who genuinely enjoy eating you: it’s next to the people who grow you. I wish that NASA could take every one of your species, put you all on a spaceship (the only kind of rocket that serves a purpose) and launch it directly into the sun.
If nothing else, our relationship has taught me that you can judge someone’s character based on what they pick out of their salad. I dream of a future where my children and my grandchildren will look at you as I would regard polio and the Black Death: bygone scourges of history. May you be banished from every restaurant, cafe, food truck and supermarket. Take thy leaves from out my salad and remove thy form off my goddamn planet.
Sincerely,
Vivienne Coburn
Pear and Ivy 