When I was a kid, I used to go to my friend Dan Stern’s house every Wednesday after school. We’d play Castlevania, make vinegar and baking soda rockets, attack each other with rakes, concoct oozes from the stuff in his parents’ pantry and watch them burn in the oven, and do all kinds of stupid things. Like Bill Bryson wrote in his memoir Thunderbolt Kid, childhood now seems short, but those were long pre-adolescent afternoons, and we would do anything to fill them.
One oddly clear memory I have of those times is sneaking into Dan’s kitchen to get my hands on a Tiger’s Milk bar. These were little sugary bricks of peanut butter coated in carob and wrapped in foil. So many snacks were hard to get at–Handi-Snacks, Fruit Roll-Ups–but a Tiger’s Milk wrapper would yield satisfyingly. And the texture! That’s what I really remember. Somewhere between a Three Musketeers and a Watchamacallit, a Tiger’s Milk would resist your bite just enough.
When I moved to New York last January, I noticed that amidst the array of energy bars now on display in all delis was my childhood friend. At first I bought them infrequently, as a treat, a little nostalgia pill. But recently, I’ve been buying one almost every day, finishing lunch with it. That is, until yesterday. That’s when I ate my last Tiger’s Milk ever.
Yesterday I turned the wrapper over, lifted the flap, and read the ingredients list. Now, I had read the nutrition facts before, and they stack up all right: it’s not a head of lettuce, but for what is essentially a candy bar, it’s not bad. Moreover, I always assumed Tiger’s Milk was healthy because Dan’s parents used to give us good food from Cornucopia, the little natural foods market in our home town.
Boy, was I wrong. The ingredients read like a Michael Pollan hit list. Top ingredient: high-fructose corn syrup. And farther down were all the hallmarks of processed non-food: partially hydrogenated oil, soy protein isolate, a bunch of chemicals you can barely pronounce. I have a firm policy of not eating not-food, and so, grudgingly, I decided never again to eat a Tiger’s Milk.
I’m sure that my body will thank me, but in all honesty, I’m sad. I feel like I’ve discarded something that made me happy and severed a connection to my childhood. When we’re choosing what to eat, is the food itself all that matters?
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