Scribblings › Gimme Five!

Remember all those mornings staring at that nutrition pyramid on the side of your cereal box when you were a kid? The four food groups: Meat, Dairy, Grains, Fruits & Vegetables. Well, you're not a kid anymore and you know that life is hardly so simple. You know the truth about Group Five: the stuff with an oleaginous, hydrogenated, chemistry-set kick, the alleged "foods" that become strangely alluring at 2 a.m. when your blood alcohol has soared, your culinary inhibitions have dropped, and you find yourself drawn into the harshly lit horn-of-plenty of the great American convenience store. Dig into a feast of the fifth dimension:

Sno Balls

Beating out Fruit Pies and Ding Dongs for the number one spot in the uniformly rewarding Hostess pantheon, these primarily pink, coconut-dusted marshmallow devil's food domes—white and lavender versions exist, and orange pops up in limited editions each Halloween—win by Freudian advantage: When you find yourself dateless and wobbly drunk, twin-packed Sno Balls are not just snack cakes, they're a virtual reality experience.

Slim Jim

Bargain baby! Is there a cheaper way to imprint your tongue with semi-permanent spice? Compare the flavorsome grease stain of one 25 cent Slim Jim with the finger-fouling fairy dust of a $1.99 jumbo bag of nacho chips. Bite off one end of a Jimbo and squeeze: up through the fibrous faux-meat emerges the powerful orange ooze that varnishes your palate with the taste pro wrestlers love.

Yoo Hoo

Some say the little bottle of smooth, sweet, chocolatey brew takes the edge off an alcohol-agitated stomach. What it does for sure is take the edge off a decadence-wracked conscience. After a reckless night of violently-monikered Alabama Slammers and Kamikaze Shots, just uttering the silly little poem of Yoo Hoo's name begins to soothe the mind with nostalgic memories of yourself at a more innocent, chocolate milk drinking age. So when are they gonna start bottling this stuff in 40s?

Pork Rinds

First, you peel Wilbur's forequarters...In the great hog-butchering tradition of using everything from the feet to the snout (Care for a hot dog off of those rotating silver rods, fellas?) come the addictively crispy deep-fried dermatological specimens that red-blooded American carnivores always choose in lieu of wimpy vegetarian chips. Damn those wussy potatoes! Phooey to corn! And we won't even deign to discuss rice cakes. Pig out, dudes!

Easy Cheese

The ultimate canned good, known to the cognoscenti as Underarm Cheese, this is the product that put the lactose-laden grafitti on the wall: R.I.P. CRACKERS. What started as a Martha Stewartish product aimed at helping housewives create fancy little party canapes has degenerated into a drunken yuks-on-the-run classic, allowing the direct application of cheddary spew into hungry mouths and frat brothers' hair.