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The other day we were at Food City. After admiring all the beautiful salsa bottle labels and marvelling at the strange medicinals for collicky babies, we thoroughly inspected all the packaged meat products in gleeful mock horror.

Oooo, neon cheese inside mystery meat! Ooh look -- this has both corn syrup and partially hydrogenated cottonseed oil in it! Oh boy -- MSG! However, I was most taken / appalled by a foodstuff labelled "ham and water product." It was a 65% ham (a portion of which is ground ham) fully cooked boneless ham cured in a soup of -ates and -ites and dextrose and corn syrup and modified potato starch.

What happened to just plain ole ham? With a bone and some nice crinkly fat on top?

I will spare you the outraged diatribe against Big Food, but I will say that this nonsense is veritable oppression and leave it at that.

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Tuesday I ring up Buster while I am outside of Trader Joe's and ask if he needs anything for Christmas dinner. Nope, he says, he's all set and guess what -- he got a ham from the food bank instead of a turkey; do I know how to cook a ham?

Oooh, ham! Not a turkey! This I can get behind. I can make a pea soup afterward and have ham on rye sammiches. Mmm, mm! Country ham! Piggie is my most favourite of barnyard meats! I'll happily fall off my pseudo-vegetarian little Radio Flyer wagon for ham, yep.

Later Tuesday, I'm rearranging Buster's refrigerator for him, trying to cram all his free food bank food (chock full of corn syrup and partially hydrogenated oils, I am certain) into it and he says, Hey while you're in there why don't you grab that ham and take it up to the house with you.

I look down at the bottom shelf and...why, it's a "ham and water product."

Boy oh boy, watch what you mock or it'll come right back and bite you in the ass -- worse yet, you'll have to eat it.

So, I am warming up a ham and water product for Buster's Christmas dinner (meanwhile, there will be some Alaskan king salmon waiting for me, heh, heh). I hope I can glaze the product with enough marmalade and mustard and cloves that it ceases to resemble the checkered baloney loaf it really is.

But for the next national holiday and associated shopping spree (the Stanley Cup of Football, I think -- or is it Arbor Day?) I'm getting the old guy a bonafide ham with a real bone and crinkly, plain ole saturated, non-partially hydrogenated fat on top.

...thanks to everyone who sent stuff for Buster! You'll be getting something special from me soon ...