“Stop embarrassing yourself.”

We have made it through an entire tomato season having only woken up a handful of times to a mauled tomato on the living room floor. This is progress. I think the progress is mostly due to the habit we’ve developed of hiding our tomatoes like Easter eggs rather than any real rehabilitation on the part of Oscar (a.k.a. The Tomato Slayer). But progress nonetheless.

The other day, while Oscar was busy seducing the top of a soy sauce bottle, I hatched a new theory about his unnatural tomato love. Maybe he is so nuts about them because of umami, that mysterious fifth taste that English has hard time capturing in words. Most people say it corresponds to savory, the taste of meat and MSG and ketchup (and…tomatoes?!) A quick Google search had me feeling smug; there were multiple reports of carnivorous housecats attacking non-meat items that are rich in that umami taste, particularly mushrooms. Oscar has never shown a particular taste for mushrooms, even the ones that I grew on my windowsill, but he does have a discriminating palate, so I decided to rehydrate one of our fancy Chinese black mushrooms and run a little experiment. Perhaps I had finally plumbed the secrets of the Tomato Slayer’s inner workings.

But the response was…non-existent. He looked away from the mushroom like he was vaguely embarrassed for me. (I also offered it to our other two cats. The eyed me sleepily and silently made plans to rub their butts on my pillow in retribution for interrupting their naps.)

And then came the morning when Jason plucked one of his snazzy organic apples off the counter. “What happened to this?” he asked. “Does it have some kind of disease?!” It did not have a disease. Those brown spots were definitely fang marks.

Apples? What the hell, Oscar?! There is no umami taste to an apple. Carnivores are not supposed to be able to taste sweet. It cannot even be easy to bite into an apple if you are a cat. Plus, there are all sorts of alarmists on the internet saying that apple skins and seeds will give cats, like, instant renal failure. Well, those and tomato skins, that is. Presented with this evidence, the Tomato Slayer gave me a thousand-yard stare. Apple season is only just beginning.