Long before potato chips were uniformly molded and stacked in tubular canisters, and decades before candy bars were reduced to small, round pellets sold by the bag, we had plenty of treats in my childhood home. We didn’t need novelties and gimmicky packaging to fill our bellies with junk food.

Homemade snacks were standard, with Mom often greeting us home from school with a cupcake or warm snickerdoodle. But delicacies from the kitchen weren’t our only choices. A handful of vanilla wafers would do the trick. And a couple of armloads of pop bottles returned for deposit could get us a pocketful of penny candy from the local grocer in our small hometown. It didn’t seem we were lacking variety.

Today, food is more than just nutritional sustenance or an occasional satisfying of the sweet tooth. It is a multi-billion-dollar facet of the entertainment industry. Even foods once considered household staples are packaged and marketed to make eating fun. Dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets and peanut butter and jelly swirled together in a jar are considered “must-have” items. Television lures us toward food that is downright weird – green ketchup, or yogurt in a cardboard tube.

Today’s children are accustomed to stopping into a sandwich shop for a gourmet hoagie with “triple the meat.” They can have their turkey smoked, oven roasted, honey baked or peppered. They can choose from among eight kinds of bread. They choose from a plethora of cheeses – Swiss, American, white American, cheddar, Jack, Colby Jack, or pepper Jack. When I was kid, we had three choices for sandwich fillings – peanut butter, bologna or pickle loaf – and I liked it that way. Give me a pickle loaf on white bread any day over a sandwich of water-packed turkey that tastes like the bread, which tastes like the paper it comes in.

Call me crazy, but social taboo aside, I still love processed meats. Occasionally, when waxing nostalgic, I will furtively look over my shoulder as I pull a can of SPAM off the supermarket shelf to take home and douse in butter and brown sugar. Recently, I stopped at the supermarket deli to satisfy my hankering for something salty. “I’d like a half-pound of pickle loaf,” I ordered. “What’s pickle loaf?” a young boy behind me asked his mother. “It’s an unhealthy cold cut people used to eat in the old days,” she said. “Is that lady old?” he queried. I was mad and purposefully ignored the answer.

And I get mad when the fast food industry claims to offer a healthy lifestyle with fruit cups and chicken breasts. The calories in a chicken breast sandwich from a popular drive-through restaurant amount to 470, compared to two slices of bologna with ketchup on white bread at 390.

Let’s face it. Whether we live by today’s standards or the devil-may-care health habits of yesteryear, most of us are overindulgent eaters. I’m not critical of that. I, myself, am guilty. But I do see some irony in the fact that, contrary to my childhood days when we ate for nourishment so we could play for fun, we now eat for fun and then have to play hard to work off the calories.

Last week, I was browsing the candy aisle and came across chocolate, sliced and uniformly molded into the shape of – I couldn’t believe it – canned potato chips. I shook my head in wonder at the woman next to me. “That’s a bunch of bologna,” she said. “Bologna? You use that word like it’s a bad thing,” I said. “It is,” she answered, and waddled on down the aisle.