The Art of Snacking

Caesar once said, vene, vidi, veggie, which translated into English means, I came, I saw and I snacked. Back then though, they were limited in their snacking foods, so he made do with a vegetable plate and some kind of dip. This was unheard of back then, dipping vegetables. And so he was taken out of power by a few of the snacking purists, including Brutus. They dethroned him right after a bedtime snack of cauliflower. Caesar was so proud of himself, breaking a personal record; just before he died he looked up and said, “I ate two, Brutus!”??I come from a long line of snackers myself. My grandfather once was looking forward to a bedtime snack of cheese and crackers and the cheese turned up missing. My grandfather was so irritated he wrote a booklet called, ‘Who Moved My Cheese?!’ It didn’t catch on. He was ahead of his time. He also wrote, “The Seven Secrets of Successful Snackers.” But, alas, his books were lost during a dust storm in the 30’s.??My father used to have snacks like a piece of cake in a bowl with milk poured all over it. But then he ate oyster soup, too. Allegedly he was looking for a ‘pearl of a snack’. He passed on to me the desire to snack. When he would take us to where he worked, he would give us a few pennies so that we could get peanuts out of a snacking machine. Back in the 50’s that was all the rage. Machine snacking. In fact that’s where that famous saying comes from; “Mechanized snacking will never replace the horse.” This was said by the infamous non-snacker, Sir Isaac Fig Newton. Later he recanted his non-snacker status and invented the famous snack that bears his name.??My mother would often smuggle snacks into the house, hoping to not expose her family to her snacking habit. This was kind of her. At least that’s what she told us. Even so, we would eventually find the chocolate covered peanuts, or fudge, or chocolate chip cookies and have a snack ourselves. This only goes to prove the old adage, ‘give a kid a fishstick and he’ll go hungry, but teach him to snack on chocolate and he’ll snack for life’.??When I was a senior in high school, I wrote a term paper about that famous author guy Shakespeare. You know he wrote that play about MacBeth who stood up during a commercial during a football game and uttered those now-famous words, “To snack or not to snack. That is the question.” I compared the snacks in that play to the ones in Romeo and Juliet; Where Juliet gives Romeo a snack that only her family ate. When Romeo ate it he discovered it was the same snack his family ate, it just had a different name. Then he said. “A snack by any other name would taste as sweet!”?Snacking was even an issue during the French Revolution. Marie Antonette decided that her subjects were all nice people and she said, “Let them snack on cake!” Then the poor people ran out of food and that’s where that saying comes from, “You can’t have your snack cake and eat it too.”That’s along about the time when the French decided to modernize their army, getting rid of the sword fighters and hiring only guys that could shoot muskets. Three work guys tried to make themselves a name and some money by making a new candy for snacking. They called it ‘Three Musketeers’.Our country was founded upon great snacking principles. That famous American patriot, Patty O’Henry (who later invented the O’Henry candy bar) once shouted, “Give me liberty, or give me a snack!” And then he was answered by another famous patriot. “I have not yet begun to snack!” I think his name was John Paul Jones. And we all remember what the hungry submarine captain said when it was time to fire torpedoes at the enemy ships. “_____the torpedoes, hand me my snack!”??A rock and roll band made history by singing, ‘All You Need Is A Snack’. Another band was quoted in The Rolling Stone “It’s not the singer, it’s the snack!” I’m not sure what their point was, but it’s a statement that’s hard to argue with. And I think it was the astronaut Buzz Aldrin, who, while eating a cheese sandwich on the moon quipped, “That’s one small cheese snack for man, one giant cheese snack for mankind”. And the ill-fated Apollo 13, when it ran out of tubes of snacks for the astronauts radioed, “Houston we have a problem!”??Our politicians often take sides on the snacking issue. “A car in every garage and a snack in every pot” got somebody elected. When Dwight Eisenhower ran for president they printed up thousands of buttons that were supposed to say, “I like Ike like a good snack.” But the printer was low on ink so he being an anti-snacker just printed “I like Ike.” The irony is Eisenhower was elected anyway.??His successor, John F. Kennedy was in Germany where he uttered the now famous words, “Ich be ein snackergrubin.” Some in the press misunderstood him, not knowing German very well. They messed up the quote, but history will show what he said.??In present day times we have a divided country. There are the chocoloate snackers on one side of the issue and the non-chocolate snackers on the other.??And the independents take the middle ground of undecided chocolate or not snackers. This is what makes our country so great. We can all agree that there needs to be a guaranteed national snack plan. I mean its really quite un-American and almost unbelievable that the richest nation in the world would let some of its citizens go to bed without a bedtime snack. What are we thinking???Anyway let’s get behind our leaders and line up for a snack. Let’s remember all famous American snackers. And the logic of that famous guy from Oklahoma that once said, “I never ate a snack I didn’t like.” Or did he say, “You can’t tell a snack by its color?”  No, no, no! He said, “Diet and you diet alone, but snack and the world snacks with you.”