Stupid Food Tricks

A few months ago someone at work said that it was impossible to eat 6 saltine crackers in 1 minutes. Obviously, being the skeptics we are, the challenge was accepted. After a day or two of planning for the event, we snagged several packages of saltines from the lounge and gathered round the table for a good ol' cracker eating time. Needless to say, the events that transpired during this contest were not exactly clean. I was shooting cracker dust at the guy across the table from me and there wasn't a whole lot he could say about it considering he had a mouthful of crackers.

What you fail to realize when you hear such a simple challenge is that you only have 1 minute and you're not allowed to drink anything. The saltines pretty much dry up your mouth instantaneously and when you're sitting around with 6 other people, it's difficult not to laugh at the predicament you have placed each other in.

Fast forward a couple months to Tuesday when someone claimed they could eat 100 freeze pops in 20 minutes. Now, there was no way but it opened the door back up to the food challenges. While unsuccessful, this human ate 20 freeze pops in 20 minutes, which is quite an accomplishment in and of itself. You can only imagine how cold it would be to hold those freeze pops. And the sugar shock if you actually accomplished would probably not be good. But when I told the people at work about this, it reopened the cracker debate. Thankfully, since then, I had heard of another challenge which they were happy to undertake: Eat 1 tablespoon of cinnamon.

Everyone likes cinnamon and a tablespoon isn't that much, right? Wrong. Having seen someone attempt this, there was no way I was partaking in such a game. But Pam was more than willing to step up to the plate. A brief preparation and in went the cinnamon. The look on her face was priceless and I nearly fell out of my chair at that moment. As she spewed cinnamon forth like smoke from a chimney, I had to leave the room. My sides were hurting so bad that I wasn't sure I would ever get right again. For the next minute she was spitting cinnamon. Out her mouth, out her nose, cinnamon was everywhere. After a glass or five of water and a brush of the teeth, she was back to work but still complaining about the taste of cinnamon.

Thankfully, Tim had missed Pam's episode so when he returned from a support call we laid the challenge down to him. Of course, it's only a tablespoon of cinnamon...how bad can it be? So, once again we dip out the requisite amount of cinnamon and Tim gets a drink of water to get prepared. As the cinnamon reaches his mouth, it is clear that disaster is on the way. Within seconds, Tim is grabbing the trashcan and expunging brown powder. I really believed Tim was going to vomit but instead he rinsed with water for awhile and completely annihilated a perfectly good trashcan. After wiping the tears from his eyes, he agreed that eating cinnamon may be more difficult than it sounds.

While issuing the challenge to others, no one else will bite. I think we might have one more victim who would try it next week when she gets back to the office. Maybe we'll tape the next one. In the meantime, we're looking for peeps for the next challenge is eating 24 marshmallow peeps in 5-minutes. Once again, I believe that it is probably impossible considering that is eating a peep every 12-seconds for 5-minutes but someone believes they can do it and I'm more than willing to spend a few dollars on some peeps for the entertainment it provides. Immature? Perhaps. But when you have to deal with what we deal with on a daily basis, a little immaturity may be a good thing.