I don't mean.. the stars that are, the stars that appear in the sky every evening. I mean the stars that I see, the ones that float in my mind as thought'y matter but seem to almost exist in a peculiar reality.

I like to imagine that stars are palm-sized, fruit-like, perhaps this is because of starfruit. I picture something much like a starfish, but more neutral not really alive in the traditional sense. The star.. that no one could eat but would hold and the taste would be the very sweetest of all tastes in the world.

I'd like the stars to taste similar to..
        starfruit
                        plums (for you)
              
               a clementine
                                 candy apples but..soft
root beer floats
                       sweet lovers lips.
Ah, let us consider this question scientifically. The quick, coy answer would be 'hot,' and expanded therefrom to the observation that stars burn so hotly that (unless you were a weird star-inhabiting lifeform), you'd be incinerated before one ever got near enough to tickle your taste buds. But what if we were to take a bite-sized piece of a star and put it someplace cold (like a remote corner of outer space), and there allow it to cool down to about room temperature? Well, though the star would then be tastable, the taste would depend -- on which star, when in its life cycle the morsel was taken, and even what part of such star. From the surface or from deep within? From a whispy tendril extending spaceward, or from the center of a sunspot blackening the churning surface?

If we were to look to the average bite of star stuff, it would be the material from which most stars are composed for most of their existence: hydrogen. The gravity-ignited burning of hydrogen is what lends to most of the starlight experienced in our night skies. But that makes our inquiry problematic, for hydrogen is odorless and tasteless. And, perhaps more problematic even, hydrogen is not exactly in an edible form at room temperature. Flammable, yes, edible, no. Don't get us wrong here, we love hydrogen -- in fact, we think it's a gas!! But an odorless, tasteless gas doesn't exactly make for a delightful comestible-- no matter how combustible. Now, hydrogen might be helped by adding a few other elements commonly found in stars. Helium may leave you lightheaded. Carbon, Oxygen, Nitrogen -- hey, now you've got all the building blocks of the amino acids of which life itself is made (and so, the source of virtually everything we eat).

In fact, you could throw in other elements commonly found in stars, and you would literally have every element found in all the food we eat, because the stars themselves are foundries of matter, taking their stores of Hydrogen and crunching them first into Helium, and then progressively into everything else, up to the heavy ones -- this is the source of all elements except a few crazy heavy ones which have only ever been made by scientists in a lab, for a few fleeting seconds. So now we've gone from no taste at all to pretty much 'every combination of matter in our Universe.' But, no, there is no logical probability that one bite of a star would taste like cherry chocolate chunk, while the next would be butterscotch rum, and the next still, artichoke quesadilla. In all likelihood, taking the average of the composition of stars, it'd be mostly that hydrogenic absence-of-taste, with just some slight effervescent metallic neon notes wafting about in the background.


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It has been suggested to me that we might ask a black hole.... or Galactus (who generally eats planets, but theoretically could probably eat a star).

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