Guilty

Gabrielle Hamilton says she doesn't understand the notion of guilty pleasure. She eats what ever she wants. I feel the same way. Pleasure and guilt are oxi-moronic.  But there are foods that embarrass me. Like baloney. At least once a year I crave a baloney sandwich. It's a childhood memory thing. My grandmother used whole wheat bread long before it was cool but sometimes she'd make a sandwich on doughy hamburger buns. I think there was lettuce and tomato but I'm not sure. These days I eat baloney on crunchy baguette or ciabatta, mayo and tomato, watercress if I have it. They make really good baloney, which I buy when I see it but I'm OK with any kind.
The three things that influenced my thinking about food were diet history, hippie health food as a way of rejecting the main stream and my years in restaurants. I'm not always sure which of those things is influencing me at any given time. My ideas about snacks are full of craziness.
Grandmom rarely served any snacks. Maybe a sour ball. Sometimes on summer evenings she'd make root-beer floats and serve them with pretzels. I'd scoop the ice cream with a pretzel. Salty, sweet and bubbly. If she had her Bridge club over she's serve mixed nuts and I could have a few. Potato chips were a side dish, like with a baloney sandwich.
As an adult I thought of most chip things as empty calories but I'm not sure why. It might have come from dieting but I think it was also part of the hippie health food thing. There were no hippie health food chips then. But for some reason corn chips were OK. Why was corn a better starch than potato? There might have been a reason but I can't remember it. Popcorn was OK too. Usually at a movie. Usually with brewers yeast.
Maybe part of why I didn't eat chip type thing was because I didn't usually have a lot of money. If I wanted something salty I ate nuts. I ate M&Ms with peanuts because the protein in the nut made the chocolate OK. I don't even know what I mean by that.
I do remember being offered some kind of salty snacky thing when I was a preteen hanging out with some friends. I'd been dieting and knew I'd be cheating but I also wanted to be normal and fit in. I might as well have been smoking crack. 
For some reason lately I've been wanting cheese puffs. I think I saw them on a movie or something and it stuck with me. So yesterday I bought some hippie health food type cheese puffs. I watched TV and ate empty calories. It was fun. I'm not sure it was something I'll do anytime soon again. They didn't sit that all that well. 
I don't feel guilty about these things but I do feel like I'm doing something wrong and I really don't know exactly why. I don't feel that bad. I mostly feel confused.