A buddy of mine chews on sunflower seeds.  Some guys chew tobacco, some bite their nails and others chew seeds.  He’ll sit on his deck and spit the shells out over the railing.  Eating sunflower seeds is a healthy habit.  Did I mention he also smokes like a chimney and can put away a 6-pack over the course of an afternoon?  The seeds are the best option of the three!

Dr Pepper now comes in cherry and vanilla flavors.  There’s a Dr Pepper cream soda.

The other day, I was grocery shopping when I saw the pictured seeds at the checkout.  There has been an explosion of various flavors for snack foods in recent years.  You can get chips that taste like wing sauce.  There must be a dozen varieties of Cheerios.  I bought both blueberry and pumpkin spice a couple of weeks ago.  Pumpkin spice was a flavor of Spam marketed a few years back.  I love Spam but I didn’t see the option on the shelves.  Apparently, it didn’t return the following autumn.  Pumpkin spice has become the butt of jokes.  I saw a meme this week for pumpkin spice motor oil.

For my beer drinking friend, the last few decades have featured an explosion of flavors (including pumpkin).  Shelves of local stores offer huckleberry beer.  Dr Pepper now comes in cherry and vanilla flavors.  There’s a Dr Pepper cream soda.

One of my colleagues posted some months ago about vegetable-flavored ice creams.

You realize, these are all products from an affluent culture.  In some parts of the world, survival is based on digging for roots.

As strange as some of these flavors may strike you, we should consider the options a blessing.

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LOOK: Best Beers From Every State

To find the best beer in each state and Washington D.C., Stacker analyzed January 2020 data from BeerAdvocate, a website that gathers user scores for beer in real-time. BeerAdvocate makes its determinations by compiling consumer ratings for all 50 states and Washington D.C. and applying a weighted rank to each. The weighted rank pulls the beer toward the list's average based on the number of ratings it has and aims to allow lesser-known beers to increase in rank. Only beers with at least 10 rankings to be considered; we took it a step further to only include beers with at least 100 user rankings in our gallery. Keep reading to find out what the best beer is in each of the 50 states and Washington D.C.

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