Everyone Loves Unidentified Meat

Occasionally people bring goodies into the office to share with their coworkers. Most of these offerings are of the baked variety- brownies, cookies, an occasional birthday cake. The generous Mo Money brought in a massive tub of oversized oatmeal raisin cookies just the other day, and it didn't take long for the community stash to disappear in this office of junk-food-lovers. But nothing has disappeared quite as fast as today's random blast-from-the-past goody, the Slim Jim.

I have no idea who purchased the elongated red and yellow box, a cardboard container I almost exclusively associate with 7-11, but about ten minutes ago someone ran through the dub room sticking their hand inside the convenience store carton to distribute the salty sticks. Almost no one who was offered the snack refused. And these weren't the wussy mini-Jims, they were the real deal, foot-longers, the ones where about a quarter of the way through you can already feel your blood vessels turn to processed meat.

Now I LOVE those things. They smell like breakfast meat mixed with two-day-old sock, and somehow that is irresistable to me. I love Slim Jims in much the same way I love hot dogs. The satisfying snap of the casing, the so-salty-I-can-feel-my-blood-pressure-rise tang of the meat. What's REALLY in a hot dog? Not sure I really want to know. I didn't really want to know what is in a Slim Jim either, but my loverly coworker CD pointed out that the meat is not "unidentifiable" if you simply read the vacuum packaging.

Ingredients include: meat (very specific), mechanically separated chicken (praise technology!), water (in everything), SALT (duh), corn syrup, dextrose, FLAVORINGS (again, the specificity here), paprika, SPICE (and everything nice), hydrogenized corn gluten, soy and wheat gluten proteins (need your daily dose), SODIUM nitrate (more salt), lactic acid starter culture (to help you cultivate your very own supply of lactic acid).

I chose to skip out on the snack (even before reading the ingredients) as I'm still in breakfast mode around noon these days. But I did derive much pleasure from people's attempts to make snapping sounds as they tore huge chunks from their personal logs of stringy, smoked flesh, exclaiming, "I haven't eaten one of these since

a) I was a kid!"
b) the last time I was stoned!"

It's a communal snack of an overindulgent, sickening unhealthiness that will be hard to top. After all, it's pretty hard to share SPAM.