The downtown, Minneapolis Target now stocks four varieties of Combos.

This is serious, people. This may be the single greatest danger to my ongoing health since the three months the (now closed) convenience store near my office started selling Zingers. Dolly Madison Zingers. God, that was like a snack food version of Field of Dreams, but the body's decreasing tolerance for creme filling as it ages* made for an interesting time.

And now Combos, bags of which had, around here, been relegated to gas station peg hooks, are readily within my grasp. Those little cheese-filled bastards. Not even "cheez" filled. They proudly proclaim that they are made with real cheese, and it is true, but only for a definition of "cheese" loose enough to slip under a defanged FDA's low bar. Not that I care. Michael Pollan may not call Combos "food", but what is food if not something that cheeses your hunger away? True, if you prick a Combo, it does not bleed. If you put it in the sun, it will not photosynthesize. Nor is it likely to support the growth of anything that does. But I love them still.

The traditional Combo is the cheddar cheese pretzel Combo, and these are fine. They have pretzel taste and they break apart cleanly to expose its golden treasure, the Trough Of Cheese Paste. But I'm a bit of a heretic in the Combo religion, because the one true Combo is the Cheddar Cheese Cracker. The cheese is the same as in the pretzel, but the shell is a marvel of food science.

I mean, I know they don't actually drill out pretzel rods and fill them with cheese goo to make the Pretzel Combos, but you can imagine that they could. The pretzel part is eminently recognizable has having a simolar flavor and texture as a hollowed out pretzel rod. The cracker shell, however, tastes like a deliberate attempt to mimic a Ritz. Only in tube form. Ritz crackers are already fairly ingenious laboratori concoctions to begin with, so mimicing them, then forming them into a short tube, then filling that tube with a cheese product three steps removed from a Hickory Farms tub? That's mad food science at its soul-destroying best.

And oh, the nutritional information! The deceptively appealing nutritional information until you do the math and discover that a seven ounce bag of Combos contains seven servings. And nobody ever eats an ounce of Combos. You either have the sense to stay away from them entirely, or the joie de vivre to dive right in, heeding neither scale nor abacus.

* Since it's true for both the body and the creme filling, the imprecise pronoun usage is acceptable.