The other night I was having a lovely dinner at a new restaurant on the island. As I was trying to decide between salmon and marinated flank steak, something bright red came sailing over my head and wiggle-splatted onto my menu. It was a gummy worm hurled by a toddler at another table. The parents ran over immediately, apologized, and removed the offensive confectionary.

It didn’t leave a mark. Most food items would have made a mess but not a gummy worm. It’s not actually food. It’s a “food-like substance”, much like most of the convenience foods sold in the United States. Michael Pollan writes extensively on this subject, and how these edible items are ruining the health of Americans, actually decreasing our lifespans. Convenience stores in North America are a cornucopia of these edible, non-food items.

Yet, in Japan, where everyone goes to the neighborhood 7-11, these same stores are chock full of vegetables and proteins. The Japanese are thinner than us and live longer than we do, in spite of the fact that a third of the population smokes.

A few months ago, my sister and her husband were driving across the state, when they heard what they thought was the unsavory sound of a tire blow out. It was that whomp-whomp of something smacking the wheel well. They stopped, got out of the car, and inspected what they thought was going to require hours of work to fix. Instead, they found a gummy worm stuck to their tire, with a trailing end flailing around, pounding on the car’s fender. They had a good laugh. Something edible would have disintegrated at some point but this did not.

I really recommend never eating something that survives a car tire traveling at 60 miles an hour. I really think kids shouldn’t eat them either.