28 years ago, I had a friend / massage client, my first career was as a massage therapist, whose husband ran a business as a jobber, buying out overstock and stuff from businesses that were closing down, and then selling it to places like Big Lots and Dollar Tree. I was at their house one day, giving Anna a massage, when her husband offered me a five pound bucket of cookies from a lot he'd just purchased.

I said, no thanks, I don't eat sugar or flour. He said, what? You don't have any fun anymore. It took every ounce of self-restraint. I had not to respond. I prefer sex. Thanks. I was reminded of this a while back when I was driving behind a Frito-Lay delivery truck beneath the Frito-Lay logo was the slogan.

Good fun.

Not an hour later watching Law and Order reruns, I saw an ad for blue bunny twist cones. Their slogan was. We make fun! And who hasn't heard of fun sized candy bars? We are surrounded by friends, acquaintances, and businesses who equate junk food With fun, and who do not hesitate to tell us so.

Have you turned down cake at a birthday party recently? Now I can do this without pushback, because I have a reputation as a hardcore nutcase low carber. No one expects me to eat cake, not at a birthday party, not at a wedding, not at any celebration. Fortunately, I also have a reputation for sprightly conversation, a sense of humor, the ability to tell a story entertainingly, and to listen to the stories of others, and a readiness to dance my butt off.

My friends have figured out that I am fun. My oddball diet, notwithstanding. But if you have not been doing this for nigh on 29 years, and made writing about it your career, chances are good that someone, somewhere, sometime, will try to convince you that passing up the junk food makes you a buzzkill. This is where I usually go into my suggestions regarding how to derail such pressure tactics, but I'll save that for another time.

Instead, I found myself thinking about how we came to equate junk food with fun, to the point where many people cannot imagine, say, enjoying an awesome movie, unless they also have a big bucket of popcorn or a bag of chips. How did this happen? For most of human history, I have a few ideas. First, for most of human history, sweets were expensive and hard to come by.

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