(Or, What to Eat When You’re a Kid in the 1980s and Your Stay-at-Home Mom is a Low-Key Alcoholic with Major Depression)

Cereal: Crispix, Kix, or Frosted Mini-Wheats. Pour into a cornflower-patterned Corningware bowl. Add 1% low-fat milk to cover. Repeat as desired.

Pairs well with: Marathon runs of early-morning cartoons featuring clever and resourceful rodents – Danger Mouse, Mighty Mouse, Tom & Jerry – and the occasional Ron Popeil home appliance infomercial.

Frozen Drink Concentrate: 5-Alive, Minute-Maid lemonade, or Donald Duck orange juice. Pop metal tab; squeeze frozen, syrupy cylinder from its cardboard sleeve. If necessary, leave the can on the counter until the juice block goes slushy around the edges. Dump into a beige or maroon Tupperware pitcher. Fill pitcher with lukewarm tap water. Stir until juiceberg dissolves.

Pairs well with: Times when your mom is sobbing uncontrollably to one of her sisters over the phone about something you don’t understand.

Chicken, Broccoli and Cheddar Hot Pockets: Place Hot Pocket in cardboard crisping sleeve on a pale green melamine plate. Microwave on high three minutes or until hot enough to sear the flesh from the roof of your mouth. Your mouth is now rough and stringy, so you can’t tell where your soft palate ends and the melted cheese begins.

Pairs well with: Five hours of eye-blurring side-scrolling through the 8-bit, 64-color, looping landscapes of Super Mario Bros., Excite Bike, Mega Man, Battletoads, Double Dragon, and Adventure Island.

Fruit Snacks: Welch’s, Fruit Wrinkles, Fruit Roll-Ups, or Shark Bites with Great Whites. Tear open packet at perforated tab; pour into palm. This way, you can eat them one shape and color at a time, in inverse or ascending order according to preference – yellows first, reds last.

Pairs well with: Rummaging through boxes in the basement, unearthing memorabilia of your parents’ long-buried, pre-parenthood pasts: a battered pair of cross-country skis; a rusted tennis racquet, loosely strung; a scuffed orange motorcycle helmet; a dusty crate of ‘70s soft-rock records; a musty-smelling, abalone-inlaid acoustic guitar.

Handi-Snacks Mini Breadsticks and Cheese Dip: Dip the first seven sticks sparingly, leaving one further breadstick and a majority of the orange processed spread. Dunk the eighth and final breadstick with gusto, scraping corners and edges, to collect all remaining cheese-goo. Done correctly, you will have made a cheese-paste lollipop. Eat this in a single bite; feel the edges of the cheesy blob squish between your teeth.

Pairs well with: Hunkering down and holing up in your bedroom during psycho-barometric pressure changes and the ensuing emotional storms.

Kid Cuisine Fried Chicken Dinner: Remove plastic meal tray from cardboard box; set box aside. Pierce each section of cellophane covering film with a butter knife to vent steam. Microwave on high 3-4 minutes. Eat yellow corn kernels first, then damp fried chicken leg, then cinnamon-sugar apple wedges. Afterward, rip open box neatly along one edge and complete coloring activity and word search.

Pairs well with: Rewinding and rewatching, for the some-dozenth time, staticky VHS copies of An American Tale and The Land Before Time.

Pepperoni and Cheese Fold-up: Place one slice Kraft American cheese (cellophane wrapper removed) and three slices Hormel pepperoni in a soft white-flour tortilla. Microwave about 45 seconds, or until cheese is melted into a glossy, soft-edged, square puddle. Fold into thirds; eat while first several bites are still uncomfortably hot, sucking in air to cool.

Pairs well with: Times when you’re hungry and wondering about dinner but hesitant to ask because there’s no telling what response you’ll elicit, so it’s easier to keep quiet and get yourself something to hold you over ‘til whenever.

Popsicles: Orange/cherry/grape, Fudgsicles, Jell-o pudding pops, Flintstones orange sherbet push-ups, or Fla-Vor-Ice.

Pairs well with: Hiding out for a bit in a low, shady crook of the flowering crabapple tree in the backyard.

Pop-Tarts: Brown sugar cinnamon, chocolate fudge brownie, or unfrosted blueberry. Break off crispy pastry edges, which everyone knows are the best part; eat the filled center first, edges last, snapping them into bite-size pieces as you go.

Pairs well with: Sitting at the kitchen table, staring at the wall clock, waiting for the school bus, hoping it won’t come. At school and on the bus, threats are overt, aggressive, will corner and pursue you; at home, they’re mostly silent, stationary, spectral—easier to retreat from by venturing outside or turning further inward, adopting a blank façade that leaves you free to drift beneath, ungraspable as a flavor fading from your tongue.