My Favorite Vegetable and The Brief History of the Cigarette Filter

Do you remember how easy it was to strike up conversation and meet new friends when you were little? Glowing Wonder Bread years when, "what's your favorite color?" could create new best friends, perhaps even lead to a quiet game of "I'll show you mine if you show me yours". If only life could be that easy now. So, in my daily existential comparing of what I was, what I've become, and still, what I am becoming, I've been asking myself some very childish questions, in hopes that perhaps the tiny fingers of these questions can help to unravel such a great knot of neural clusterfucks. So, I asked myself, 'what's your favorite vegetable?'

Surprisingly, it was not zucchini, or potato--both of which I am fond of...it was tobacco. Simultaniously amused and distraught by this admissive discovery, I found myself googling "tobacco is my favorite vegetable", and was astonished to find that it is a Frank Zappa quote. Apparently, a month or so before he died of smoking-related cancer, he was asked during his final interview why he continued to smoke, if he knew that it had caused his prostate cancer, to which he replied, "tobacco is my favorite vegetable." I guess I'm not alone. This leads to my next questions: what makes a good cigarette? and does the color of the filter really make a difference in the taste? Color psychology? Let's see...

The first question is easy: what makes a good cigarette? A little brand called 555, that's who. Filter color and its effect on the flavor and richness of a dart, however, is steeped a little deeper in our psyches, and requires a more thorough investigation.

In my brain, this is how colors work: red is steaks, brown is chocolate, orange is cheese. All these things are rich in flavor and texture. Therefore, as I need a stronger, richer smoke, I gravitate towards darker packaging, and will always grab a brown filtered smoke from a table if given the choice. White, on the other hand, is like fish, or chardonnay, or water, something pale and thin that will leave me craving a cheeseburger and a coke. But after doing research, I was kinda bummed.  It actually has nothing to do with color psychology, and if it does, then its origins are in the history of the cigarette filter.

First of all, we must understand why some cigarettes have brown filters, and why some have white ones. Historically, the first cigarette filters were made of crepe paper, which naturally had a yellowish-brownish tint to it. Later, came an actual cork filter, which is probably the reason why most brown filtered cigarettes nowadays still have little off-white flecks on them, artificially imitating the cork filters of old. Many years later, came the white filter cigarette, which was at first geared towards a female market, but then began to represent most light cigarettes, but not always. There are some tough smokes in Asia that don the white filter. Perhaps, and this would be psychological, that the brown filter too much resembles nicotine stained fingers, as if that dark filter could actually rub off onto the digits and be partly to blame for this unclean topical effect of smoking. Maybe the Asian market is less macho when it comes to smoking, as there are no cowboys wrangling on the Brokeback with a Marly Red dangling from their yaps to be seen in their smoking ads.

Anyway, I don't know where I'm going with this anymore, so I'll just stop here. Tobacco is my favorite vegetable, 555s are my favorite brand, and I sign off here to go at once to enjoy one on my balcony.