Unlike some weeks, when it’s hard to scare up items for the Buffet, today’s buffet table might collapse under the weight of bacon, chocolate, Stacy’s pita chips, a whole lot of cereal, and one very stuffed lunchbox.

Does the Bacon Bomb Itself Explode, or Only Your Stomach?

For someone who doesn’t even eat pork anymore, I admit a strange obsession with odd, bacon-related creations. (Who can forget the bacon-flavored fizzing tablets and the all-pork Nativity scene, among others?)  Charles Kuffner of Off the Kuff loves to egg me on (Get it?  Bacon and eggs?  Sorry.) and this week sent over the Bacon Bomb, which just left me speechless.  In this case, a picture (or series of pictures with funny captions from the Wait! Wait! Don’t Tell Me Guys) is worth a thousand blog posts.

Chocoholism Is Real.  Duh.

Researchers at Yale have concluded that food addiction is a real disease, akin to alcoholism.  To which I can only say, did we even need to study this?  (Sorry.  I know I sound bitter.  It stems from my years-long battle with Stacy’s-Simply-Naked-Pita-Chip-ism.)

The Island of Misfit Cereals

Earlier this week, Mark Bittman tweeted a link to photos of fifty-four now-defunct cereal brands, and then Charles K. sent me two more links from Consumerist to add to your vintage cereal viewing pleasure (here and here.)  For those of  readers “of a certain age,” these photo galleries will be a trip down memory lane, since apparently there was no kids’ cultural icon of the 70s and 80s that wasn’t slapped on a cereal box by some cynical marketing executive:  Mr. T, Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, New Kids on the Block, C3P0, Smurfs, Gremlins and yes, even Urkel.  (What?  You don’t remember Urkel-O’s?)

A TLT Mystery Solved

Finally, if you read my post a few weeks ago about Associated Press Food Editor J.M. Hirsch’s Lunch Box Blues blog, you might remember that many of us were left confused.  While we all enjoyed looking at the creative school lunches that J.M. packs for his little son Parker, we simply couldn’t understand how a small child (I believe he’s six or seven) was putting away the insane amount of food that J.M. provides.  (Here’s one lunch J.M. packed for Parker:  a spelt tortilla filled with pepper-garlic jelly, cream cheese and leftover roast chicken and salami slices slathered with hummus and some hunks of pork sausage and pretzels and strawberries and apple sauce and a drinkable “Buddy Fruit!”!)

Well, I tweeted J.M. to find out what’s up and here’s his recent response:

Totally agree. Parker’s lunches are huge! I’m not quite sure where he puts it all. But he’s a tall, thin, active kid who loves to eat. I find that if I don’t pack plenty of food, he comes home starving. And that’s not good for anybody (including his teacher and me!). And yet when I pick him up at 3:30, he still needs a snack before dinner (we usually eat around 6). The lunches I pack are intended to cover him for both lunch and morning snack at school. I don’t designate one item for snack; he just picks what he wants from what I’ve packed.

The pouch is 100 percent fruit (no sugar or anything else). It was my compromise snack idea for Parker’s old school (he switched schools in January). They insisted that we pack a snack but that it had to be dry. Just one of many things I didn’t like about his old school — it basically made it impossible to pack real fruit or yogurt for a snack. So I compromised with those, and they’ve just sort of stuck.

And yes, he generally eats a large breakfast, too. This morning — 1 1/2 yogurt cups with about 1 cup of strawberries and blueberries and a few crumbled graham crackers all layered in a glass.

I fear how much he will eat when he is 14…

Thanks, J.M. for shedding light on the mystery — it does make a little more sense if part of the meal is eaten as snack — but I, too, fear for your food budget when Parker is a teenager.  Maybe you can set up a Pay Pal collection on Lunch Box Blues?

Have a great weekend, everyone!  More Lunch Tray on Monday . . . .