When I eat at home, I eat well. Healthy meals that are naturally full of all the right vitamins and minerals. My mom taught me right when it comes to food.

But at work, I don't have the advantage of my healthful larder. I have my lunch (if I remember it) and a cooler full of cokes at my disposal. The closest places to eat are Chick-Fil-A (not always utterly unhealthy), Subway (reasonably healthy if I get the veggie and don't load up on salty pickled extras) and scattered hot dog carts (not healthy at all). Sometimes I drive to the Vietnamese deli near the N.C. State campus, but I digress.

What I do in order to keep from patronizing the nearest hot dog stand is bring fruit for snacking. I'm not a big candy bar freak, and chips just don't do me much good. Fruit, on the other hand, tastes good and gives you a nice, natural sugar rush. Plus, as my grandpa would say, it keeps you regular.

I'll bring in dried fruit if what's in season isn't appealing to me (I don't like grapes all that much), but usually I can find something fresh. Plums, apples, grapefruit, pears, tangerines; all of those are great. I particularly like just-ripe plums. They explode with a barely-tart sweetness, and there's enough fruit to make a meal.

Tangerines, too, are one of my favorites. I like to peel the fruit and I like to spit out the seeds. Tangerines aren't as sweet as oranges, but I like that. I'm not a big fan of sweet things in general. So the tarter fruits do get my attention.

It then should come as no surprise, then, that my favorite fruit of them all is the kumquat.

While I have been entranced by the word "kumquat" for as long as I can remember (I can recall hearing a George Carlin routine about kumquats while I was in my early teens), I first came across an actual kumquat when I lived in Florida. A couple neighbors had trees. After making a couple discreet inquiries, I learned that the little marble-sized oranges were actually kumquats. But I didn't eat them. Not yet.

It was another three years before I tasted the flesh of a kumquat. I bought a handful at the grocery store last December. I learned that the way to eat them is to chew the peel and fruit together. In fact, the fruit is the tart part. The peel is sweet. This is the exact opposite of most citrus fruits. With oranges, and grapefruit even more so, the pulp and peel are tangy and bitter. That's one reason why canned grapefruit juice is so bitter: There's more peel involved. Again, I digress.

To properly eat a kumquat, you simply plop it in your mouth and bite. Chew a bit. Spit out the seeds. Swallow the rest. Repeat.

That's all there is to it.

Some friends of mine have an indoor kumquat tree. I think it resides outdoors during the warm part of the year, but when the temperatures turn during fall in the New South (as they don't in sub-tropical Florida) the kumquat tree comes inside.

For reasons that are beyond me, my friends had never partaken of the flesh of their fair fruit tree. I made such a ruckus about this that they gave me a baggie of homegrown kumquats. I ate them last week at work.

The homegrown variety were a bit tarter than what I was used to from the store. I would pop a few kumquats and then suck on a date or two to help return my mouth to a normal shape. These also had many more seeds (one had about 20) than the store-bought hybrid. But, well, a kumquat is still a kumquat, and I'm not gonna look a gift kumquat in the mouth.

I'm gonna put it there instead.

There's really not much more to it than that. Around the beginning of December, I start looking for kumquats at the grocery store. They're usually on the shelves until sometime in January. Not a long season at all. Just a couple of months for my kumquat love to flourish before the fickle hand of nature takes them away for another year.

But that's more than enough exposure to make me happy. For a time, there are kumquats. And then there are none.

Would that all of life's lessons were this simple.

Jon Worley also has a fairly sick thing for lentil sprouts smothered in vinegar.