If you're not hungry already, you soon will be

What's on my mind this week? I'll tell you. It's food.

OK. I'll confess that food isn't a topic that comes and goes for me. No, I'm pretty much thinking about and interested in food all the time.

When my wife asks, at mealtime, if I'm hungry, my response is some variation of this: I'm still breathing, aren't I?

When she asks what I would like to eat, my response is pretty much always the same: food.

As you can see, I lead a simple life.

There are a couple of food-related topics I'd like to bring up. One concerns the TV series "Gilmore Girls." Maybe you've seen it, all 154 48-minute episodes that came out over seven seasons a few years ago. Maybe you've seen the four 90-minute episodes that Netflix released late last year, which reunited most of the characters (and the actors who portrayed them).

For some of us, though, the four new Netflix episodes would be difficult to fathom without the plot background of those seven regular seasons. We did not watch "Gilmore Girls" when it first aired, so my wife and I decided we should see those episodes first.

All of them.

You all know about binge watching. I'm sorry to say watching every episode of something, thanks to streaming video in our modern electronic world, is both the best and the worst of ways to spend time.

On the other hand, there is good cause for a victory lap and a celebration jig or two when you finish an entire run of a show like "Gilmore Girls" and live to tell about it.

So how does food connect with the Gilmores? Well, anyone who has watched even one episode knows that consuming edibles is a serious part of every plot. And except for Snookie's gourmet meals prepared in a gourmet kitchen by a gourmet chef but never, ever consumed by anyone but visitors, all of the food eaten by the regular cast of characters is junk. Pure junk.

The fact is I've eaten everything on the typical Gilmore menu: Chinese takeout, pizza, burgers, fries, muffins and enough salty snacks and candy bars to keep dozens of cardiologists in pocket change. In the Bible, these foodstuffs are called "manna."

However, one Gilmore menu item I had never tasted was the breakfast staple Pop Tarts.

So, when I took the grocery list, carefully prepared by my wife, to the grocery store last week, I added Pop Tarts to the basket on the spur of the moment.

To say this raised the eyebrows of a certain spouse is a gross understatement.

The next morning I had Pop Tarts heated in the toaster with my coffee.

Folks, I can now honestly say there is one junk food on the face of this good earth that I cannot and will not eat. Pop Tarts.

There must be enough folks like the Gilmores who love Pop Tarts. Why else have they managed to stay on supermarket shelves all these decades?

Just for the purposes of comparison, I tore off a piece of the cardboard Pop Tarts box and chewed it up. It was far better than the actual Pop Tarts. I am not making this up.

The other food-related item this week was a wonderful memory kindled by one of the Southeast Missourian's primo food columnists, Tom Harte.

He wrote about the faux apple pie made with Ritz crackers, the pie that looks and tastes so much like a real apple pie that it's hard to believe it's not real apples.

Many years ago my wife and sons and I were visiting in her hometown. We went to her Aunt Daisy's for Sunday dinner, and I topped off the meal with a piece of the most delicious apple pie I had ever eaten.

I poured out compliment after compliment to Daisy and praised her apple pie-baking prowess. I especially noted how each slice of apples was so uniform.

That's when everyone else at the table, familiar with Daisy's specialty, let me know those weren't apples. They were Ritz crackers.

I couldn't believe it. Folks, I argued with good and decent people till I was blue in the face that there was no way Ritz crackers could have been turned into such a delectable treat.

But it was true, as Tom happily explained in his recent column.

It was fun to relive such a pleasant memory. As a matter of fact, recalling the Ritz pie is so good and so overpowering that I have already forgotten the Pop Tarts cardboard incident.

If you like Pop Tarts, let me know. And please tell me why. I'm pretty open-minded, so maybe I just need a little convincing about the merits of so popular a breakfast item.

Or maybe not.

Joe Sullivan is the retired editor of the Southeast Missourian.