Does capsicum make anybody else suspicious? It just doesn’t seem right that the same vegetable can come in so many different colours. Oh, I know, there are yellow tomatoes and different coloured chillies, but they’re not exactly high frequency veggies, more the fare of “gourmet” types. But capsicum regularly turns up in salads or stir fries, and between the red, yellow and green slivers essentially transfers a green salad into something resembling a shattered traffic light.

Truth be know, I’ve always had a fair degree of suspicion of veggies in general. The majority of them have the decency to be what they appear (if a carrot isn’t orange, pointy at one end, and fat at the other, it’s probably a sweet potato), however there are enough who do things on the sly to taint the upright and honest decency of the rest. This is sad, but true. How, for example, can zucchini get away with looking so much like a cucumber? A weird, mushy, bland vegetable masquerading as a cool, sweet, refreshing salad addition. As a kid I was always reluctant to take cucumber on a salad, just in case some “gourmet” adult had decided it would be nice to use zucchini instead. I knew I’d have to eat what was on my plate and although I enjoyed cucumber it just wasn’t worth the risk.

Zucchini is one of those particularly funny vegetables that are often used because they take on the flavour of the other ingredients in the recipe. If this is the reason for using it, why not just use more of the other ingredients? Why humour this uninventive, flavourless impersonator who not only looks like something else but doesn’t even have its own taste? I often eat zucchini in dishes, I’m not a bigot or anything, but I must say I don’t think I’ll ever fully understand it. Suspicious flavour behaviour is another reason not to trust your average vegetable too far. Raw onion has a smell that can peel paint, and a flavour that will clear your sinuses for a week. Cook it though, and it becomes sweet and syrupy. Roast onion is one of my favourite tastes, as is the delicious flavour of onions of a BBQ. Why can’t it just taste that good to start with and save us all that mucking around?

Of course, the ultimate vegetable funny business is not actually performed by a vegetable at all, but a fruit: the lime! Most fruit has the decency to start life green, then gradually change colour to let you know it is ripe. Not the lime, it spends its whole life looking unripe. So suspicious am I of the lime that I am considering researching a theory that lime is not a distinct fruit at all, but simply a lemon whose development has been stalled through clever genetic engineering. I’m convinced that if one were to try eating a lemon that was not yet ripe, it would taste suspiciously lime like. Of course, if I’m wrong, it would probably taste even more disgusting that a mouthful of fully ripened lemon, which is why I’m a bit hesitant to test my theory. Meanwhile, the conspiracy lives on…