I’ve often wondered from childhood through adulthood why people put some of the things they do in their mouths. When I was younger, there were items that were specifically not meant for eating, like paste, blocks or parts of other people - hence the no-biting rules of our old classrooms.

These rules, as I remember, were to prevent us from eating very nasty things that in all likelihood were not very good for us. Things made from chemicals or artificial fibers and materials. Y’know, not real food.

So why is it that now, different food companies are inventing a slew of products that, also created from chemicals and artificial materials, should not be placed in our mouths?

I’m not a food snob. I’ll eat stuff if you put it in front of me; I really don’t care too much about sodium intake or fat calories or sugar. I’m fortunate enough to be able to burn fat and calories while engaging in the strenuous activity of watching paint dry.

What concerns me is when a simple bag of potato chips - which should generally contain potatoes, salt and oil - also contains half the product line of Dow Chemical and a year’s recommended safe intake level of Tert-ButylHydroQuinone or some other random unpronounceable additive.

And that’s only the tip of the iceberg. There are infinitely more terrifying items on the shelves of your local grocer, which I believe may even rise up and attack us one day, if they aren’t already conquering us from the inside out.

Things like Zebra Cakes, little cupcake-like things coated in a hard shell of almost-frosting. They’re about as resilient as zebra mussels, which are destroying the ecosystems of the Great Lakes. I do not believe this is a coincidence. Marshmallow Peeps, that Easter holiday-themed candy, which after a week become much like tiny bunny or chick-shaped bullets, and can be used with about as much deadly force. And alcoholic water - not necessarily containing the strangest ingredients, but it still makes me wonder one simple question that I’d love to have answered: Why?

Another one of these items can be found next to the cheese in the refrigerated section. But this had nothing in common with curdled milk - I hope. Called P.J. Singles, they have this tendency to resemble American cheese singles except for the striking difference in that they are supposed to be made out of peanut butter and jelly.

What initially frightened me about these is that while both peanut butter and jelly tend to take the shape of their container and change based on outside pressure, P.J. Singles resist any kind of shape change whatsoever, whether you try to bend them, throw them or run them over with a car. There are rumors on the Internet that the government is using them to design a new space-age polymer to create new anti-ballistic protective gear for military use. It’s a better use than for a sandwich. I find they taste quite like tree bark.

I took a couple of packages to Janice Harte, a visiting assistant professor of food science and human nutrition at MSU. Hoping she could tell me a little something about the contents of these things, we underwent the fearful task of taking them out of the package. They latched onto our fingers immediately, (much like zebra mussels) and while Harte would say differently, I could swear they were eating through the table.

But she assured me the ingredients in the list came from all natural sources, like peanut oil, fruit and tree bark. This is meant to be a joke of course - there was no peanut oil in the singles.

In the end, she told me many new food items, such as these, are created out of a growing demand for convenience. And to achieve this convenience, people are willing to sacrifice things like authenticity or actual nutrition.

Not completely convinced when I left her office, I tried to set fire to one of the P.J. Singles. Drawing on my wealth of knowledge from my high school chemistry class, I remembered that certain dangerous chemicals and substances will burn funny colors, like lavender, or plaid in extreme cases. But it only got slightly charred on the “jelly” side and a little warm on the “peanut butter” side, which lead me to believe that P.J. Singles are also impervious to fire, and if they and their sandwich companions were to rise up against us, they most likely will not die. (Hollywood could even make a movie out of it - “Night of the Living Bread” starring Freddie Prinze Jr.)

Food these days is becoming more and more of an adventure than it needs to be. Perhaps some things on the shelves don’t contain enough Tert-ButylHydroQuinone to drop a mouse, but I’d rather eat something that took an hour to put together than grab something out of a box that was created in a lab. And I urge others to do the same.

Your stomach will thank you for it, and you’ll be doing your part to help prevent that upcoming sandwich revolution.

Chris Boyer is the State News opinion writer. His column usually appears Mondays. Reach him at boyerchr@msu.edu.