Out to dinner the other night, I ordered an appetizer which came with a small bowl of olives. All the olives were green, but some were pitted while others were not. I like both sorts.
Popping a bigger olive into my mouth, I began to chew off some of the meat around the pit. (I think meat is what you call the part of the olive that you eat; versus the pit, which you spit out.) As I chomped off a big piece of the olive meat, I suddenly questioned whether I should:
(a) Stop trying to de-pit the olive and chewingly enjoy that chunk of olive which I had just detached from the pit; or
(b) Continue to de-pit the olive, spit out the pit and then chew all the meat of the olive at once.
Yes, I know that I just made up the word chewingly, but I thought it suited the quandary in which I found myself.
In the end, I went with Plan (b). Yet as I chewed all those delicious pieces of olive at once, I wondered how other olive eaters would have approached the same problem.
