No place for fruit cakes

It is appropriate that in the enlightened home of bagged milk and two-fours, we should reserve the masticating and subsequent digestion of fruitcake to a time of year when we are surrounded by loved ones, enveloped by the seasonal glow of festive lights and holiday hoopla. This is the only period on our calendars in which the deplorable dessert’s hideous piquancy might be disguised enough by our communal sense of goodwill as to render it edible in the least.

In fact, it is to our nation’s benefit that we seldom consider the loaf of confectioned fruit outside of the holiday season. And it is therefore to our common detriment that we were reminded of its cursed existence this week, when National Geographic reported a team of conservationists had discovered a 106-year-old fruitcake in one of Antarctica’s oldest buildings. That it was found in “excellent condition,” with a look and smell that was described by the conservationists as “edible” should surprise no one. The fruitcake, after all, is the cockroach of culinary creation. Actually, to compare the nauseating block of dough and fruit to a cockroach would be a disservice to the exoskeleton-boasting insects. At least a cockroach offers some benefit to our world through its willingness to eat what other organisms reject, breaking matter down and increasing the amount of nitrogen in our soil. Given such a mandate by nature, cockroaches are perhaps the only animal for which the fruitcake might make a suitable snack.

There are no redeeming qualities inherent to the fruitcake. A dense mass of flour, sugar and water baked around hardened bits of fruit that are coloured in a fashion more reminiscent of radiation than deliciousness, the seasonal baked good (more like seasonal baked bad) is served not in pieces but slabs. For that is the only acceptable term one could possibly conjure to describe the scale-tipping compound.

While fruitcakes are mostly – and sensibly – relegated to a time of year in which they are least likely to offend, one of the great mysteries of our species remains the continuance of the fruitcake’s existence at all. Together, humans have worked tirelessly to mostly eradicate smallpox, Guinea worm, rubella and polio. Yet, the fruitcake endures. There are no equal sides to this debate. Fruitcakes are wrong. And all of us – from presidents to paupers – need to proclaim as much.