The Mini-Snickers Gamble--Part 2
I took the risk. The risk won.
When I told you last week about the return of Mini-Snickers Ice Cream bars to grocery store shelves, I mentioned the little tag at the end of the ingredients: “May Contain Wheat.” And I said it was worth taking a chance on my favorite ice cream confection—Celiac disease be damned. Maybe, just maybe, that wasn’t the best idea…
The bars were just as I remembered: whipped ice cream, caramel, and half a peanut. They made a wonderful after-dinner snack, each bar weighing in at less than 100 calories. They were a perfect complement to a steaming cup of decaf tea after all the dinner dishes had been washed and put away.
But after a day or two, I began to notice my stomach rumbling a bit more than usual. There was no pain, but a mild sense of discomfort pervaded my body. Being me, I ignored it and kept eating one bar each night.
And so I made it through the first box. Last night, I opened box #2.
The two boxes were side by side in the grocer’s freezer aisle. I am sure both were made at the same plant—probably during the same shift. But within a few minutes of my first Snickers from the second box, my mild discomfort had been transformed into a full-blown gluten attack. I knew that for box #2, “May Contain Wheat” could be better quantified as “Absolutely, positively loaded with it.”
I gambled, and I lost. The house, it turns out, always wins, and I’ll be paying the price for a day or two more. But for a few moments, I enjoyed a treat that I thought had long ago been lost to me.
I consider that a decent pay-off—or at least, breaking even.