To shell or not to shell?

I’m a reasonably big pistachio fan.

It was not always thus.

When I was a kid, pistachios came in little boxes and the shells were dyed bright red. They were tasty enough, but it was a pain in the butt to do the shelling, as you ended up with vile red stains all over your fingers. (The dye was to cover up blemishes that resulted from the harvesting methods of the day. Today’s mechanized processing has done away with the need to dye them.)

My most vivid pistachio memory of childhood has nothing to do with the shelling or eating of red pistachio nuts.

It was one of the last days of school. The Gates Lane Plain patrol line (as opposed to the Gates Lane That Crosses [Main Street] patrol line) was wending its way up Main Street. We were nearing Henderson Avenue, the patrol line itself having gotten rather ragged and dispersed. Most of the kids peeled off at Brookline Street, and with them the official patrol line leader, with his dirty white patrol safety bandolier and belt.

Just as we neared Henderson, Gregory Hinsley – a second grader to my first grader – stuffed a couple of red pistachio nuts up his nostrils. Where they got stuck.

Panic ensued.

Oh, we all knew he wasn’t going to suffocate. Believe me, kids in Main South Worcester knew all about mouth breathers, even if most of those mouth breathers were pubs, not kids who went to Our Lady of the Angels. No, Gregory wasn’t going to suffocate, but who wanted to appear before their mother with pistachio nuts shoved up their nose? No one, that’s who.

Fortunately, Mr. Sarasin, the mailman, was on the scene. As we stood, slack-jawed, in a circle around him, Mr. Sarasin managed to remove the pistachios from Gregory’s nostrils.

Fast forward to my adult years, when pistachio nuts were no longer red and when I began incorporating them in my diet.

I like them in salads. I like them on pasta. I like them to snack on. (And I really like Talenti Pistachio Ice Cream.)

Occasionally I cheap out (or accidentally) buy them with the shell-on, but mostly I’m a lazy old shell-off kind of pistachio eater. Shelling them involves breaking fingernails and chipping teeth. Shards of pistachio shell on the tongue. Too much nut meat left in the shell.

In any case, I was interested in Christopher Ingraham’s analysis of the shell-on vs. shell-off situation that appeared recently in the Washington Post. As a shell-on man, Ingraham assumed that shell-on nuts were cheaper than pre-shelled pistachios. He decided to test his assumption.

My materials were an eight-ounce bag of shell-on pistachios and a six-ounce bag of the shell-off variety, purchased from my local grocery store. A quick price-per-ounce analysis seemed to confirm my priors: The shell-on pistachios cost 75 cents per ounce, while the shell-off kind were twice as expensive, at $1.50 per ounce.

But that's not the comparison we want. While the contents of the pricier shell-off bag are 100 percent edible, the shell-on pistachios contain an unknown percentage of shells and empty space. For a proper pistachios-to-pistachios comparison, we need to convert a quantity of shell-on pistachios to its shell-off equivalent.

So I took a cup of shell-on pistachios and set about the tedious work of removing the shells. I was somewhat surprised to find that in the end, it boiled down to half a cup of unshelled product. You need two cups of shell-on pistachios, in other words, to get one cup of edible shell-off nuts.

The two cups of shell-on pistachios in the eight-ounce bag worked out to exactly one cup of ready-to-eat nuts. The six-ounce pre-shelled bag, on the other hand, contained 1½ cups of ready-to-eat nuts. I converted the cost per bag to cost per shelled cup and was shocked to find they were identical: $5.99 per cup of prepared pistachio.

Shell-on or shell-off, in other words, price-wise it makes zero difference when it comes to what ends up in your belly.

Ingraham went further, going on to factor in the time it takes to shell pistachios. I won’t go into the details, because I think it’s kind of ridiculous to assume that time spent shelling pistachios would actually be directed to something that was money making. When I’m removing pistachio shells, I’m sitting in front of the TV letting MSNBC raise my blood pressure, or watching someone on HGTV bitch about the lack of dual vanities in the master bath.

Needless to say, factoring in the cost of labor – however dubious – increases the cost of shell-on pistachios. Since the costs were already pretty much equal, there’s no reason whatsoever to choose the shell-on pistachios.

For the record, I can’t remember whether Gregory Hinsley’s pistachios up the nose were shell on or shell off. (God, could he have been dumb enough to shove a hard-shelled nut with sharp edges up his nose???)