Recently, the weather was so lousy that it took a list of 50 favorite food things to put a smile on my face.
Oh, the difference a week can make! The sun finally is shining. And, right now, I’m laughing to the point of tears, hoping I don’t fall off this stool at the kitchen island, my preferred writing space. I’ve also cleared the surface of all liquids — coffee, tea, ice water. Otherwise, I risk snorting them out my nose.
I blame my slap-happy state on a recent tweet from Sam Sanders, the host of NPR's "It's Been a Minute":
“Tell me your Weirdest eating/drinking habit you had as a kid! I’ll go first: When I was like 8 years old, I used to carry a little bottle of apple cider vinegar around wherever I went, taking a swig every now and then like a lush w/his flask.”
Wait. What?
I phoned Sanders to understand why he would quaff apple cider vinegar.
“It was tart, bitter. I liked the way it felt between my lips. I was hooked,” said Sanders, who now is 34 years old. The habit lasted a year or two — apparently with the full approval of his mother. “She would just buy it for me,” he recalled, noting that his family was dry, so there never was any alcohol in the house. “I didn’t even know what a flask meant,” he laughed.
Not only did Sanders’ bizarre childhood habit make me belly laugh, so did the more than 6,000 responses that his tweet elicited.
"My sister and I ate 'pool chips' — tortilla chips we dipped in the swimming pool outside of our apartment and ate, religiously, for like a year," divulged @RachelCharleneL.
"I only ate 9/10 of any fry. I was sure that I could tell what end was the 'bad end,' leaving a left over pile of fry nubs at the end of a meal," shared @JoelmCummings.
And, @rebecca_decker "used to carry around a packet of Swiss Miss cocoa mix and use it like chewing tobacco."
"I had a McDonald's plastic toy watch that didn't tell time, but had a secret compartment in which I stored Baco-bits," posted @hellojoesmith.
There were paper eaters and pickle juice drinkers. Raw noodles for some, raw noodles dipped in peanut butter for others. Some kids made their own Pixy Stix by combining powdered Kool-Aid and sugar in a ziptop bag. Squishing Wonder Bread into a tiny ball for a one-bite wonder still gets high marks of approval.
As for cereal, there were rituals to eating it, as well as unorthodox liquids — 7-Up, anyone? — poured on top of it.
Have you tried 3D Doritos drenched in Coca-Cola? What about a peanut butter on bologna roll-up? And did you play with your Cheez-Its?
Confessed @lmigaki: "At snack time I would chew cheez-its into a pulp, store them in my cheek like a chipmunk and then go spit the mash in the toilet to see what cheezits 'looked like' when they were in my stomach."
However, @_ChelseaH08 took it further. She would chew a Cheez-It, then "put the chewed mush on another cheez-it, then top it with a second cheez-it, and make a chewed cheez-it sandwich."
Mmm. Delicious.
But not as delicious as a Milk Bone dog biscuit. Or cat food.
"I use to give my little sister Meow Mix with milk like cereal. My mom tried to give her a bowl of cereal and she said she wanted her favorite with the cat on it. I got in so much trouble," confessed @PugMafia66.
Getting in trouble for tormenting my siblings over food is something that I can relate to, more than any strange concoction. My three siblings, too. Dinner basically was a never-ending quest to get each other kicked out and sent away from the table. The guilty party would spend the rest of the meal sitting on the stairwell around the corner, periodically peeking into the kitchen to make goofy faces at the rest of us. We’d bite the insides of our cheeks, trying not to laugh, so we didn’t also get booted.
My sister shares my sense of humor, so I called her, read her a few of the more memorable tweets (Ha! Ha! Ha!), and asked what food moments she remembered from our childhood. Yes, yes, she remembered the dinner kickouts. And, she ticked off odd food combinations that she still likes — peanut butter and pickles, peanut butter and daikon radish (“I highly recommend! Phenomenal,” Delphine said) — and one that she’s grown out of: pasta with ranch dressing.
What she most vividly recalls is the day Bug Cake ruined everything. My mom had made a brownie, of sorts, that held chocolate chips, coconut flakes and a bunch of other sweet toppings that I can’t remember. It was one of our favorite baked goods. But, that day, she used weevil-infested flour. We saw those black dots in that white dust and caught her adding it — bugs and all — to the mixing bowl.
Busted!
Whatever that dessert was called before, from then on, it was known as Bug Cake, and we were skeptical any time she made it.
The takeaway: Kids do strange things with food when left to their own devices. Sometimes, adults do, too.
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