skinny girls & mayonnaise

One of my favorite grocery store tabloid headlines ever, many years ago on the cover of the late, great Florida rag Weekly World News, said: “Lovestruck Farmer Weds Head of Lettuce.” Featured beneath the headline was a photo of the amorous agriculturalist with the object of his affection.

I must say I was a bit head-over-heels myself a couple days ago when I cut into a mini-watermelon to find an ancient Celtic symbol — the spiral, representing  life, death and rebirth.

People always seem to be finding images of significant things in their food. The most popular subjects are usually religious — Jesus for example, or the Virgin Mary.

Tortillas are popular vehicles for miraculous appearances of the Virgin in Mexico (and Texas, which is like Mexico), especially the favored Guadalupe version. Witness this miraculous vision scorched into unleavened flour in Starr County, Texas, in 2011 (with Byzantine Virgin and Child for comparison):

Just a couple weeks ago, Lupe Rodriguez of Wilson County, Texas, was making dinner when the Virgin appeared on her tortilla, too.

“I said, ‘Oh, my God. I can’t believe it,'” Ms. Rodriguez told local Channel 4 news.

Ms. Rodriguez’s divine tortilla

In 2004, an online casino paid $28,000 for a 10-year-old grilled cheese sandwich bearing the image of the Virgin:

However, if you look at the sandwich in detail, it appears less like the Virgin Mary than a scary poltergeist (or perhaps, even scarier, one of the Kardashian sisters):

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Jesus makes regular unannounced appearances in food as well. Less partial to tortillas, He is more likely to be found in a plate of spaghetti or a sandwich bun. The most famous Jesus-spaghetti sighting was on a Pizza Hut billboard on a remote stretch of highway in Georgia in 1991.

Here’s the billboard, if you blur your eyes in just the right way, you can kind of see the Savior with his crown of thorns in the sauce at the center of the fork:

My favorite Jesus apparition has to be a Cheeto discovered by a youth minister at a church in, yes, Texas.

“When I first saw it. Oh, it kind of looks like a dog or something with the two legs. Then I turned it on its side. I was fixing to eat it,” said the youth minister. “And that is the image I saw. I don’t think the heavenly choir actually started singing, but in my mind they did.”

Around the church, they called it Cheesus.

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Besides seeing Richard Nixon’s face in a russet potato (and who hasn’t seen that!?), I’ve never had much luck with important images appearing in my food. So I felt special when I opened my watermelon to find the ancient Celtic symbol. After all, I have Celtic blood and I’m a cook.

I sliced some pieces of this very special watermelon for my daughter, Willa.

“How did you like the watermelon!?” I asked with eager anticipation after she’d finished her first slice.

She frowned and pushed the plate away. “I didn’t. It was mushy!”

I wonder how the Cheeto was?