My memory bank contains some odd food entries. I’m sure I put small things in my mouth when I was a toddler, and I remember biting my fingernails and learning the pleasures of reading-and-eating when I was a child of single-digit age, but it was when I was 10 or 12 that I consciously tried items I’ll never eat again.

I learned that raw bacon tastes mostly like butter. I found out that raw potato is surprisingly bad, given how delicious just about any form of cooked spud is. My brothers and I already knew how much like bologna an uncooked frankfurter tastes, but that’s about when my friend Candy and I took to molding bread.

This was around 1960. All houses contained sliced white bread and most housewives stored it in breadboxes, so when someone asked “Is it bigger than a breadbox?” we knew exactly what they meant. Bread companies were big on ads then and touted their advances (Sunbeam’s batter-whipped dough: “Look, Ma: no holes!” and Wonder’s vitamin fortification: “Helps build strong bodies 12 different ways”).

Candy’s house was on a corner. At the curb was one of those green mail storage boxes – you know: shaped like a letter receptacle but with no point of entry for the general public. We already had a habit of clambering up on the thing and straddling it like a barroom bull. That’s when we took slices of white bread to the mailbox with us, munched off the crusts and then compressed the insides (against the green metal!) into unsanitary unsavory bread balls. We ate them or tossed them at boys.

I also remember a love of oyster crackers. I knew they were just saltines in better shape, but I liked to put one in my mouth, split it at its seam, and tongue its inside before chewing and swallowing. And then another. And another. One day my mother carted me and a handful into the bathroom, tossed the crackers in the toilet, watched with me while they swelled in the water, and tried to convince me that’s what was happening to crackers in my gut. Nice try, Mom …

That’s also about when I started Spanish in school. What a smart language: the verb saber means both “to know” and “to taste.”