Beijing's Sproutcore craze is fine if you want a…

Beijing's Sproutcore craze is fine if you want a vegetable patch on your head

A fanciful new fashion trend has popped up on the streets of Beijing. Or, more specifically, on the heads of pedestrians on the streets of Beijing: bean-sprout barrettes. People have taken to wearing hair clips with little plastic bean sprouts fixed to the top.

This is sort of an inverse of those baby-shaped pears we learned about last year, the opposite of the nightmare hellscapes envisioned by photographer Anne Geddes. While baby pears and Geddes’s pictures depict human infants emerging from bean stalks, flower or seed pods, “sproutcore”, as the Chinese fashion has been named, makes it look like a human is growing a plant out of his or her head. Like Dr Seuss’s Daisy-Head Mayzie.

It’s cute, if not exactly appetizing. Sprouts taste like dirt. They have a nice crunch, I guess, if you’re into that sort of thing. But generally I want sprouts to get lost – as far away from my salads and sandwiches as possible.

Regardless, it’s understandable that, as our world becomes more and more dominated by chrome, glass, computer screens and synthetic fibers, people are compelled to commune with nature. Who wouldn’t want to be a little bit more like Groot?

“You can buy your own #sproutcore accessories on eBay for less than a dollar,” says First We Feast’s Zachary Harris, “a wool version from Etsy for $9, or you could make your own snack-ready version from a real bean sprout. We suggest the latter.”

Whoa … whoa. Slow down, Zach. Slow waaaaay down. This is a very bad suggestion.

The best and worst Halloween costume I ever saw was when my friends Will and Chris decided to be Chia Pets. We were in college, and another friend, Carter, worked at the dining hall and so could procure a large amount of alfalfa sprouts from the stock for the salad bar. Will and Chris bought long underwear and plastic shower caps, rolled themselves in spray adhesive and stuck fresh sprouts all over themselves.

It worked better than I ever thought it would. Human shapes covered in little green seedlings. There was no question: they were Chia Pets.

At the start of the evening, they were huge hits. We’d walk into a party and everyone would laugh and cheer and ask them to pose for pictures and girls came up to dance with them first.

As the evening wore on, though, beneath the hot, neon-tube lighting in various crowded, drunken college dorm living rooms, the bean sprouts turned. They started to smell like rotting vegetables. And then like rotting vegetables that have been sitting inside a closed garbage can for a long time.

By the end of the night, we’d walk into a party and watch people cringe and scatter, moving as far away as they could from Will and Chris, who were now shedding wan grey limp sprouts wherever they went. Alfalfa sprouts are high in phosphorus, which is used to make industrial fertilizer. When rotting, they smell like it.

So that’s just to say: do not wear real alfalfa sprouts in your hair. In fact, based on this one experience, I think I would advise against the wearing of any food as clothing or accessory, ever (apologies to Lady Gaga).

Except maybe edible underwear? Which I have never tried. Wearing or eating. I guess I should probably do my due diligence for this column and go get a pair and test it out. They’re basically made of Fruit Roll-Ups, right? That’s about as unnatural and synthetic-seeming as food products get, isn’t it?

If memory serves, I liked the strawberry ones best, and apricot was gross. And the stuff tended to stick beneath your fingernails when you ate it. I wonder if that happens with edible underwear?

Oh, computer research reveals that they are now making Spongebob Squarepants Fruit Roll-Ups. That’s basically the same as edible underwear.

I’ll go get a pack, have a snack, and report back later.