When I was a kid my mother claimed that she could track me around the house by following the discarded cheese wrappers. In those days we classified cheese into two broad categories: mouse cheese (Kraft American cheese, in individually wrapped slices) and rat cheese (cheddar). It was mouse cheese that was my weakness and my undoing. I ate it all the time, and I could not be impressed upon to take the wrappers to the garbage can. Wherever I opened my latest slice, that is where the wrapper would lie. Sometimes I would roll the slice up like a burrito and eat it in just a couple of bites. Sometimes, I would allow my slice of cheese to live long enough to become part of a sandwich that included sweet pickles.

What might our choices of snacks say about our personalities? You be the judge: my sister Laura loved to eat Hershey’s syrup sandwiches, and my sister Mary would go to the cupboard and get a large spoonful of brown sugar, and eat it. Cousin Byrd, according to family lore, had a baloney sandwich and a box of raisins every day throughout high school. No exceptions. Sometimes the five of us would all happen to get a Hershey bar at the same time, and we would have a contest to see who could keep theirs the longest. I usually caved in early. Byrd always won. She would have the remains of her candy bar melded to the skin of her palm, and would lick it once every hour or so.

Another fan favorite was sugar and cocoa. What you do is, you get equal parts sugar and baking chocolate (what my children referred to as “yucky chocolate” when they were small), stir it up, and eat it with a spoon. If you are careful and don’t slobber too much, you can blow chocolate smoke for a moment before you scarf it down.

Peanut butter was often featured in our choice of snacks. Sometimes we would mix peanut butter and honey, but too much of that and I would get a gooey feeling, not unlike the feeling I get after eating pancakes with syrup. I would have to say that the best peanut butter snack of all is peanut butter and raisins. Here’s what you do. Get the biggest spoon full of peanut butter (creamy kind) that you can manage, and cover it with raisins. When I say “cover,” I mean something akin to laying tile. My goal would be to cover every millimeter of peanut butter surface with raisins. Then I would eat the top layer. Once all the raisins were gone I would put down a new layer, repeating this process until all the peanut butter was gone.

If I’m going to be doomsday-prepping my coffee, I had better do the same with peanut butter. And mouse cheese.