“What is tapioca, anyway?” someone asked.  They didn't ask in a mock professorial rhetorical  tone of voice, but that would have been cool.

            “Fish eggs,” said someone else who obviously didn't know but who was just trying to freak out the asker.

            “No way.”

            “Yes way.  Fish eggs.  Just look at them.  Small, round, kinda translucent.  Fish eggs.”

            Now, I should be clear here: the reason I wasn't putting my proverbial two cents into this conversation was because I didn't have a clue as to what tapioca was, where it came from, what its uses might be, or if it might be on the no-fly list of any international environmental consortiums.  All I really knew about the stuff was that chilled tapioca pudding was a durned tasty desert -- or at least it had been back when my mom used to pack it for me in my lunch.  I also knew that in a pinch you could use uncooked tapioca beads as ammunition for those little plastic pellet guns we used to play with back in my possibly misspent youth.

            “Fine,” said the questioner, whom we'll call Carmen, mostly because that's her name.  She turned to the wait staff.  “I'll take the tapioca.”

            Pretty soon, everyone was ordering up some tapioca.

            “Fish eggs for me,” I said, just to be conformist.

            When the pudding came out, I scooped up a spoonful and stared at it with, I'll admit, some intensity.  What was this stuff, anyway?

            “What IS this stuff, anyway?” I asked.

            Another diner, Michele, shrugged.  “No idea.  I ate the large beads once just by themselves, though.  Tasted horrible.”

            Wait, tapioca beads came in different sizes?

            “Er, tapioca beads come in different sizes?” I asked.

            “The ones I had were larger than this.” 

            Who knew?

            We continued debating for a while once we had eliminated fish eggs as a suspect.  There was a chance, we decided, that tapioca was a fruit, albeit one that was very, very, very small.  There was also the chance that it was a bean.  Or came from a bean.  I imagined tapioca being like a pea.  I suspected that clean-living country folk might sit out on their front porches wherever it is that the tapioca bean is grown naturally -- perhaps Vancouver -- shucking (or shelling, or shellacking) the tapiocas, popping all those little white beads out into a bowl.

            Somehow, though, that just didn't sound right.

            Not fish eggs, not a fruit, not a bean.  There was only one thing left for me to do: research.  Unfortunately, my usual source of information, the Internet (motto: Bringing you a higher quality of factoid than that guy in the trench coat on the street corner), was unavailable, probably out on a date with a frat-boy's iPhone.

            But I did have a dictionary.  [Insert sound of flipping good, old-fashioned, book-type pages here]: “Tapioca (n.): A starchy food product used in pudding for thickening.”

            A ... er ... starchy food product.  Food product?  Really?  What, exactly, did that mean?  I envisioned heavily-industrialized factories -- possibly in Vancouver -- pumping out tapioca beads by the quadrillions, perhaps produced by illegal aliens sneaking over the border from the U.S. who worked ridiculously long hours under terrible working conditions (conceivably involving toxic assets -- whatever those are).

            This vexed me for a while, keeping me awake at night and distracting me during the day from contemplating deeper thoughts such as “What do box jellyfish eat?”  Eventually, though, the Internet got back from its date (there was dinner, a movie, and a goat involved -- crazy fraternity parties, you know) and I was able to inquire about tapioca.

            “Tapioca (n.),” said the Internet, using its bedroom Wikipedia voice, “a starchy food product made from the root of the cassava plant.”

            Now we were getting somewhere.  I gave the Internet some flowers and it went on to tell me that if I wanted to make tapioca pudding, I'd have to soak the tapioca beads overnight, but that if I wanted to make a tapioca drink -- a tapioca drink?  Really? -- I'd want to cook the beads for about twenty-five minutes, and I'd want the larger ones (remember from earlier?  Large beads, small beads?).

            Nice.

            Now, what do those box jellyfish eat?  Tapioca, maybe?