I read the packaging my food comes in. Not just the nutritional label and ingredients (which are studied intentionally) but also the type that takes up space on the back of the box. Usually I regret this, but never so much as with Cheetos bags. In fact, I usually try to keep my eyes unfocused (a trick I learned for Magic Eye pictures) while handling the object to make reading harder, but sooner or later the thing is read and the weight of the world is on my shoulders. My first impression is always that the authors would be shocked and amazed if they knew their words had been read. Advertising type usually is not fit for human consumption, but this reminds me of the kind of thing 8th grade boys write on a chalkboard at the end of a long field trip in which a lot of sugar was consumed, and they feel the need to work off the high spirits before the teacher comes to erase it all. Generally the theme is best described as an aggressively-conceived campaign for crack cocaine in which the only downside is that if you eat cheese snacks until you have split yourself open from mouth to elsewhere (like the fellow in The Inferno) you must at least pause while you figure out if namebrand snack foods exist in the afterlife.
But all of this needs to be changed to the past tense. A few weeks ago a new bag of Cheetos forced itself upon me, and I found they'd fired the 8th grade boys and hired a Victorian spinster, one Miss Letitia Sprue, author of "Why Too Little Is Better Than a Feast: A Moral Fable." In earnest terms it urged me to eat 21 and no more (repeating this several times, by the end of which I had begun to figure out that they wanted me to eat 21 pieces and then stop). At the bottom was a little coupon which, if clipped out, filled in, and mailed, would automatically enroll you in The Temperance League, which would send you pamphlets on "The Demon Rum (Which Can't Be Imbibed Moderately, Unlike Name-Brand Cheese Snacks which Are the Soul of Moderation.)"
