What Not to Eat

When I was in high school, I ate many lunches from the school cafeteria. These meals ranged from fairly edible to merely recognized as food by law. Needless to say, the cafeteria food itself was never the highlight of lunch time. That honor belonged to the snack I'd purchase to supplement my meal.

Back then, I had a particular weakness for apple pie. Not the all-American standard with a crisp lattice crust covering a filling of fresh, succulent apples. My obsession was the Drake's version, which was a sugared pastry shell surrounding apple tidbits covered in a thick plasma-like substance that was fried to perfection – just like grandma used to make 'em.

 

Looking back, the only thing more disturbing than my daily intake of this fiendish treat was the fact that I regularly ate two of them. Not just two individual pies – because that's what each wax-paper-wrapped packaged contained – but two entire packages. Every day. I imagine my daily intake of fat back then was equivalent to my monthly intake these days.

 

But hey, there were apple bits in there, right? It wasn't entirely unhealthy. I mean, it's not like I was just gulping down bagsful of sugar straight up. That was only done on special occasions in the form of Fun Dip, the ultimate coup from the sugar industry. It's just a bag filled with flavored sugar. But you don't just dump it all down your throat; that would be absurd. Instead, you retrieve it with a small stick made entirely of sugar... until you've eaten the stick and are left with half a bag of sugar. Then you dump it down your throat.
 

It's hard to believe that Fun Dip is still being made. You'd think there would be at least a dozen health-conscious groups out there saying, "Umm... you know that Fun Dip is just sugar right? That's it. It's sugar dipped in sugar. I don't think that's entirely nutritious. In fact, what's the opposite of nutritious?" And yet there it is. I'm amazed they haven't made some kind of spin-off product, like Fun Dice – flavored sugar cubes that you roll from a cup made entirely of sugar. Yahtzee!

 

"Snacks" such as these (and I use quotation marks to distinguish these products from snacks that at least bear some resemblance to actual food) were part of my childhood and teenage diets. And yet, while I could certainly stand to do a few more sit-ups in the morning (there are numbers greater than zero, right?), I wouldn't consider myself an unhealthy adult.

 

Somehow I made it through. And yet I now feel a tinge of hypocrisy as I lord over the snack selections of my kids. It's not as though I force them to eat only organic snacks that are like twigs and leaves, but without the flavor. However, I will veto countless foods that found their way into my system at one time, such as Pop Tarts – another food I look at now and wonder: what was I thinking?

 

Does this mean my children will grow up healthier than I did? Possibly. After all, I did grow up in a household where we made fruit punch almost every night for dinner from a powdered sugar mix -- a drink so artificial that it didn't even pretend to have nutritional value, unlike certain other drinks with their superior "natural flavors" (whatever those are supposed to be). My family affectionately called this drink – and I'm not kidding about this – red slop. So not only did we choose to consume such a product, but we went out of our way to emphasize the less-than-natural quality of it.

 

Still, I don't think this makes my kids better off overall. If food was the only factor that determined one's health, I'd probably need the jaws of life to get through a door frame. However, if I can get my kids to realize now that there are lots of great foods that are relatively good for them, then I feel a little bit better about their health down the road. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a jar of peanut butter that's not going to eat itself.