Food for Thought

Ever eaten cereal after you’ve just found ants crawling in it? Mmm… Kellogg’s Basic 4 (a cereal I’ve never even heard of until I opened the kitchen cupboard this morning)… now Kellogg’s Basic 5 with essential vile (oops, we meant “live”) black ants! Hey, it’s just like the picture on the box! Oh wait, that’s just ants crawling on the box too. Alrighty… stooping to new lows, some would say. Desperate hunger, foolhardy indifference, or bitter frugality?

This goes right up there in my list of Meals To Remember with:

-the fried cockroach á la bibimbab (when I was in a hole-in-the-wall Korean restaurant. Okay, our six-legged friend had to be picked out before I could eat the rest of my meal);

-the tomato-spinach-chicken-smoothie (when I had my wisdom teeth pulled out but was determined to have a “power dinner” nonetheless);

-the Gerber “apples and wild cherries” (hey, pretty tasty) and “chicken and wild rice” (hey, pretty nasty) baby food taste test (served over rice);

-the fuzzy and moldy breads that are “still good” if you just tear off the green parts (hey, if it was good enough for the hostess, it was good enough for me);

-the hard-boiled egg in ketchup water (Leave the ketchup alone! I swear it was the egg that did me in, which I refused to inform my hostesses about until many moons later);

-the questionably clumpy or sour milk products (or do they then count as by-products?);

-the bowl of hardened cold rice with Sprite (TM), with some pepper and Mexican hot sauce of questionable age for flavoring.  (It was the Mexican hot sauce that did me in, I swear.)

-and the many oh-so-tasty fast-food and cafeteria hamburgers I’ve downed throughout the days of my youth. (Oh, c’mon, you know what’s in there. Or do you?)

Well, what doesn’t kill you can only make you stronger… or at least you hope it doesn’t kill you later, or stunt your growth, or slowly turn your brain into mush and make you fully dependent on the delicate symbiotic relationship between your body and the various alien critters residing within… (Be still, little alien critter, be still. Your time will come.)

Speaking of food (oh, is that what we’re talking about?), I ate a whole apple pie by myself yesterday. Yup, half after lunch and half after dinner. And it was even less than a week old! And no crunchy and tangy ants in it either. Can you say “comfort food”? Sweet.