The Secret of the Wiggle

As a child, I was blessed with the bookworm hunger. No book was safe from my little blue eyes, not even the cheap World Book encyclopedia that had been collecting dust on the bookshelf for a number of years until I had discovered how to read. I'll admit, almost twenty years later, the nerdiness involved with spending your spare time with your nose stuck in the encyclopedia far exceeds acceptable levels of the normal populous, but I will also admit that World Book prepared me for some of life's greatest mysteries: reproduction and Jell-O.

Jell-O, the jiggly magical substance of our childhood, had always interested me, as no one really gave me an explanation as a child to what it truly was. I knew from visual observation that Jell-O derives from a packet of colored dust, but quickly removed the fairytale thesis as I got older that perhaps there was a land somewhere out there in the wide world that had soil made of this delicious dirt as I had imagined when I was knee high. Particularly puzzled after a restaurant visit involving an encounter with some yummy green jiggly, I ran to the comfort of my World Book collection to discover the secret of the wiggle. I read carefully, taking breaks with my dictionary to decipher words I had yet to discover, my feet thumping excitingly against my chair.

Well, that is until I looked up gelatin.
In disbelief, I counter-referenced in my encyclopedia.
Sure enough, it was the boiled afterthoughts of my cuddly barnyard friends.

Gelatin, as I discovered, starts with the boiling of bones, hides, and sometimes hooves of animals such as cows and pigs. After removing the collagen and a complicated filtering process, the product is dried, grounded into a powder, and mixed with numerous substances, such as sugar, sodium citrate, and other vocabulary words I wouldn't encounter until high school. Not being a large fan of meat after being told the horrors those cute animals you pet at the farm go through to end up on my dinner plate by my mother years earlier, I was heart broken. This yummy pile of jiggly goo was the leftovers of brethren that grazed in a field behind my house. Needless to say, I never touched the wiggly wonder again. Well, until I discovered the substitute agar in my teenage years, but the story didn't stop there.

The glorious part of learning the dirty tidbits of what exactly is on your plate and how it got there is sharing the knowledge, which can be a powerful weapon at times. When encountered with the assigned seating at an elementary school lunch table next to a bunch of well dressed snobbish girls who were fond of picking on my God given gift of being larger than their thin rail physical frames, I decided to put my knowledge to good use. Today's subject: the red cubes of our favorite gelatin desert adorning a section of their lunch trays.

Obviously, they didn't appreciate the gelatin refining process.

The sight of half chewed Jell-o being spat out all over the lunch table by the elite of the third grade class sticks with me; even to this day. There are no words I can enter here that can describe the sight or sound of their comfort being broken down, one small red bit at a time. While the food itself hadn't become a happy point in my childhood memories, the consequences of knowledge surely have.