There are more grains of sand on Middle Beach than there are times I have spent in inner city cafés listening to pregnant women droning on about food cravings.
I appreciate these things are endemic to pregnancy, but despite my mountainous sensitivity to women, I am a man with a whirling head, and I have far huger fish waiting to be fried than a list of craved food.
And yet, there are rare times when talk of food cravings becomes thoroughly acceptable, indeed something that can better the greater world.
I look no further than myself for evidence of this.
I have been mired in food cravings for some time as medical experts fly in from sophisticated European hospitals and witch-doctors paddle across from South America to try to diagnose my nine-month intestinal disorder, a disorder which has seen me replacing lifelong favourite food with all manner of strange stuff.
Every day is different.
Yesterday's food craving will never be today's, and yesterday's might not even have worked, though it seemed like a good idea at the time.
Because such a small percentage of available food appeals to me right now, I find myself trawling the shelves of New World waiting for lip-smackers to leap out at me - which they hearteningly usually do.
I have also been well-educated by Consumer magazine and know the best stuff is not at eye level, but inaccessibly placed down by the floor where the big companies don't want you to find it.
Hence, I have had no shame in crawling along a supermarket aisle on all fours, my nose a foot from the shelves.
The battle begins at breakfast.
My day-in, day-out food since birth, toast, has become a kind of cloggy dry glug to fight through, so the trick has been to find an edible spread.
Up until this year, I swear there wasn't a toast spread I didn't love to bits, but it wasn't until the middle of last week that I found something - the oh-so-simple sliced tomato - that helped the toast go down with enjoyment and ease.
This was after trying and rejecting peanut butter, which I have eaten since I was10, all manner of jams, avocado, tomato relish, cheese, mashed banana, Marmite, honey, cracked pepper fish paste, sardines in Louisiana hot sauce, and a horrendously expensive little jar of stuff made from figs we bought at a vineyard.
In fact, one of the very best food cravings was virtually nothing, just a light smattering of Olivio.
This even worked for a few days and bland does make sense if your intestines are crackling like popcorn in a pan.
But I have not got to where I am today by saying yes to Mr Bland.
I have had some very enjoyable food cravings over the past few months.
I rediscovered many former delicacies like malt biscuits and butter, leeks, the absolutely lethal Mountain Dew - beautifully marketed in North America as The Truck Driver's Delight- gingerbread, lychees and hundreds-and-thousands licorice lollies.
This last one was hard work, as they are hidden in the licorice allsorts jar, and one needs the eye of a cat to find them.
"You have a lot of patience," said the woman at the checkout as she surveyed my plastic bag of only hundreds-and-thousands licorice lollies.
My rejoinder should have been perhaps they could be put in their own jar - jelly beans are not mixed with chocolate raisins - but I am not a vengeful man.
Besides, I didn't want her calling for the manager when all I wanted to do was get outside and assuage the craving.
You don't leave a craving simmering on the stove.
I have no idea what will happen gustatorily today.
In the meantime, I will find a pregnant woman friend to have coffee with in an inner city café and spellbind her senseless with tales of my food cravings.
• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
