Daily Inspiration Quote by George Ade

Ade’s line turns a backyard nuisance into a neat little scandal about taste: what makes one person itch is, for someone else, lunch. The joke lands because it refuses the solemn language of “subjectivity” and gives us a bodily, almost slapstick metaphor. Poison ivy isn’t just “not your thing”; it actively punishes you for touching it. Spinach, meanwhile, is the righteous vegetable, the emblem of sensible preference. Put them in the same sentence and Ade collapses the distance between refined judgment and raw irritation.

The intent is comic, but the subtext is social. Ade was a playwright and columnist steeped in the performance of American manners, and this reads like a deflation of moral certainty. In polite society (and in the culture wars of any era), people love to treat their dislikes as evidence: that it’s trash, that it’s corrupting, that it’s objectively bad. Ade suggests the problem might be closer to the skin. Your “poison” may be someone else’s nourishment, not because they’re wrong, but because they’re built differently - socially, psychologically, even physiologically.

It also sneaks in a warning about universal rules. If your system for judging art, food, politics, or people can’t account for wildly different reactions, it’s less a standard than an allergy. The line’s durability comes from that mild cruelty: it grants everyone their palate, then quietly mocks the impulse to legislate it.