It Always Starts Out As Nothing

It was a mundane purchase on a Friday in May. Doing the weekly grocery shopping, I picked up a package of English muffins for breakfast the next morning. They were on sale (never pay full price unless you have to), and my girls do enjoy them toasted with lots of butter.

Yet, the next morning, and the one after that and so on, my family decided instead to eat cereal, toast, and anything else BUT the muffins, so they sat, unwanted and untouched, on top of our fridge.

Little Did I Know

…that this package of muffins would take up residence in my humble kitchen for weeks, then months. One morning in June, I reached up for the bread-stuffs on top of the fridge, and lo and behold, there were the muffins, untouched and unchanged after sitting out for three weeks while heels of bread that had sat out for only ten days were becoming foundations for penicillium colonies.

Puzzled by the unnatural stasis of the muffins, I opened the bag to examine them closer. No sign or smell of spoilage nor staleness nor desiccation. At this point, the mad scientist in me decided to do an experiment: just how long could these muffins live?

July, then August passed, and still the muffins looked, felt, and smelled as they did when they first entered our home. I then moved them to the top of the microwave to keep a closer watch on the Muffins Out of Time and warned my family NOT to eat them, partly so as not to interrupt my experiment and partly to save them from the oddity itself.

It’s Just Not Natural

A strange combination of curiosity and horror has crawled through me as I attempted to puzzle out how something made of flour, yeast, and a few other ingredients could last six months without refrigeration or freezing and still look, feel, and smell exactly as they did the day I plucked them off the grocery store shelf.

Is this perhaps the real reason Americans are living longer, not because of advances in medicine but because of the preservatives in our food? Are we being turned into a new type of undead that never dies in the first place? Are these muffins and other eternal food stuffs our blood we need to live, our brains we greedily devour, or our jolt of electricity that animates dead flesh (and I am not talking about coffee here)?

The Non-Toxic Avenger

Hear me and learn from my dabbling with darkness, or at least my observations on English muffins that not even mold will touch: read the labels and know what you are feeding yourself and your loved ones.

Look for ingredients that pose no threat to the well-being of you and yours. Health is not in the size of your body; it is in how you treat it and what you feed it.

Do you have any food ‘horror’ stories that have made you wonder what is in your food?  Please share them and give everyone some frightening food for thought.

Happy Halloween!

Born and raised in Northeast Ohio with her BA and MA from the University of Akron, Mary has 20 years experience in the corporate sector working for local companies and Fortune 500s in customer service, PR, sales, advertising, and broadcast media. She currently teaches English Composition at Stark State College and UA. Her passion is living and teaching tolerance while pushing for Size Acceptance. She hopes to inform as many everyday Americans that the issue of Size is not an issue at all but merely a distraction from the real issues, such as the decline in public education, our infrastructure, economy and healthcare system. Mary loves irritating people by speaking her mind and presenting them with annoying facts, contrary opinions, and life's little ironies; when not doing that, she loves being with her family.