Munch

Every so often, I get a yen, a craving, for some kind of food or snack. I have been temporarily hooked on chocolate pudding, Craisins, pretzel (sticks and traditional), cheese crackers, peanut butter-cheese crackers, peanuts, M&M Peanuts, orange juice, Snickers, incredibly sharp cheddar cheese, Honey-Nut Cheerios, various fruit nectars (mostly Mango), Gatorade, various flavors and mixes of sherbet and, of course, Green Tea with Honey and Gingseng. And that's just in the past 2 or 3 years.

I have to be careful about these mini-addictions. Faye is an enabler and makes sure I get plenty of whatever it is I am hooked on. Maybe she knows what she's doing because I eventually move on to something else simply because they are there in abundance in the pantry or fridge. Familiarity breeds indifference, it seems.

When I was a much younger man, I wouldn't vary my diet much. I could eat the same food over and over and over. Looking back, I think the underlying reason was economic. I ate cheap. As cheaply as possible. This does not provide much opportunity for variety. After all, foods keep for just so long and then they grow weird life forms, get stale, or go sour (or possibly toxic). Nothing worse than finding that quart can of some fruit juice in the back of the fridge, pouring some into a glass and watch it come out in chunks. I learned early in life not to just chug from a can found in the fridge.

My meals were simple in the few years right after I got out of the Navy. Mostly cheap ground beef, browned and mixed with rice or barley and maybe corn or peas in gravy. Took all of ten minutes to make, took care of the hunger, and was reasonably tasty. I've already told you about my tuna and macaroni salad [link], which was my other culinary mainstay. No snack food laying around the old apartment in those days. Just couldn't afford it.

Now I am not so poor so I can afford to have snacks around. So we have things like individual puddings, strawberry applesauce, grapes, cherries, blueberries, raspberries, and all sorts of things in the fridge. And oatmeal raisin cookies, chocolate chip cookies, "bite-size" Snickers and 3 Musketeers bars, and M&M Peanuts in candy dishes around the house.

It's a miracle we're not all 100 pounds overweight.