Free the Eggplant
Eggplant is at its best and most abundant in late summer. I rarely cook it, but I’ve learned its schedule over the past few years because of a recurring social-media gag. When sturdy purple aubergines begin to fill farmers’ markets in the United States, people will post pictures of eggplants along with captions that vaguely imply the scene is, in the abbreviated language of the internet, NSFW. Something like, “Dudes, make sure your girlfriends don’t see this.”
It’s not a great joke. There’s no punch line, just an assumption that the viewer understands the reference: When depicted online, “eggplant” is code for “dick.” That’s thanks to the shared cultural lexicon of emoji, the of internet-dwelling contrarians, a vagina. A grouping of three water droplets is what happens when you rub an eggplant and a peach together.
