When I was a younger lad, my mother insisted on buying us carob rather than purchasing us chocolate. I’ve honestly no idea why she did that – although maybe she had a little somethin’ somethin’ going on with the guy working at the health food store.
Since I was quite the sugar fiend, I think she was doing it to prevent the mystical migraines that I would have daily – although these days I’m sure it was because I wasn’t eating anything for lunch except Cheez-Its and maybe a single Babybel Cheese. I’ll never forget the little red wax pouches those little cheese things came in. By the time it was lunchtime, the red wax was sweaty, and the cheese was warm. Capri Sun was the name of the game for drinks. I still cringe every time I think about how nasty those were – especially warm. My worst memory of those is the last sip, where your straw sucks at air, and you’re inhaling warm air, warm juice, and whatever carbon dioxide you’ve already breathed into the thing. But THAT WAS MY LUNCH. That’s it. I don’t know how I managed to live on that – since I pretty much quit eating Cheez-Its after a few days.
Anyway.
What this meant is that it was very, VERY rare for there to be junk food in the house. The one treat I was allowed to have (occasionally) was Fruity Pebbles cereal – which is about as close as I was allowed to get to sugary nirvana. Most of the time, the house was stocked with random peppermints (picked up from one of my mother’s many forays into restaurant cuisine), or some really plain Tea Cookies – which were no match for my ravenous-chocolate-loving appetite.
Occasionally, somewhere around Christmas time, shortbread cookies would show up. In my sugar feasting ways, I would eat shortbread until I was sick of it. Another poor substitute.
So, my mother went with carob – the cheapest, palest imitation of chocolate there was.
Only in truly, TRULY desperate times did I eat it. Of course it was always, “Eat as much as you want!”. Ick.
To this day, whenever my brother and I are talking about sweets, we’ll invariably ask each other if there’s any carob in the house. And then chuckle.
What were my parents THINKING?!?!?
