The thing is, I’ve always loved to eat. I mean, yes, technically, everybody likes to eat. We’re sort of biologically engineered to like it or we die. I just happened to like eating beyond the point where eating was necessary for survival and into the point where you’re only stuffing your face with cold mac and cheese because there’s nothing better to do at three in the morning on a Tuesday. It didn’t help that I was also generally averse to any and all types of physical activity, and preferred watching reruns of Three’s Company with a bag of potato chips indoors over running around with the neighborhood kids outside.

My family never had an unhealthy relationship with food, but we weren’t exactly the picturesque vision of American vigor. We’re midwesterners, which means we liked food and we ate it more than we did anything else. Sure, we never had the best diets, but never for lack of trying. We ate our vegetables, if “eat your vegetables” meant “eat your gravy-covered mashed potatoes and broccoli casserole.” We ate healthy snacks, if healthy snacks included a heaping bowl of sugary breakfast cereal as a midnight treat before bedtime. And we sustained consistent, stable diets, if consistency included being regulars at the local Dairy Queen. Seriously, we could walk into that place and leave with extra-large Brownie Blizzards without having to say a single word. Plus, our diets were economical. Whenever Oreos were on sale at the grocery store, my mom stocked up like we were preparing for the zombie apocalypse and the only means of survival was hidden between layers of cookies and cream.

We also weren’t a particularly active family, and the activities we did participate in usually revolved around food. The year McDonald’s released those Beanie Baby Happy Meal toys, my mom drove us to every McDonald’s franchise in the greater Chicago area, until we tracked down every last piece-of-garbage Beanie Baby in the set. (Maybe we didn’t have problems with food. But we did have problems with Beanie Babies.) And yes, obviously, we ordered Happy Meals at every stop, but only because you had to order the meal in order to get the toys. Still, we ended up with enough burgers to last for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the next three years.