Wayne and Rebecca Madsen

When I was a Junior in high school, I worked with Jacob Ames at a Dunkin Donuts on the corner of one of the two major streets in our tiny town. We would sit all afternoon in that donut shop and discuss life; and the day we saw Clerks together, we understood how art mimics life (or does life mimic art?). Sitting all afternoon in a donut shop allowed us many hours of dead time to contemplate why we were doing nothing. It brings to question a man's morale when he's getting paid minimum wage to have creamer fights.

But across the street from Dunkin Donuts was a Dairy Queen. This particular Dairy Queen had been in business since long before my family moved into town and according to maps.google, it still is peddling (un)cheap ice cream to the baseball teams after their hot summer games. Jacob and I would stare out from the large fishbowl windows of our store, praying that a hot girl would feel the need to purchase overpriced ice cream -- because there was no chance anyone would want to get a stale donut on a hot summer afternoon. And occasionally, we would tag team and cross Michigan Avenue to use our hard earned tips and cool off with a blizzard.

Jacob and I debated endlessly on the principles behind the perfect blizzard, but I believe that at the end of that summer, we came to the conclusion that the best blizzard was a nerds blizzard.

In 1985 the blizzard made its debut. You can't make a better dessert than a nerds blizzard. The rich creamy weight of the ice cream is off-balanced by the crunchy sugary pang of the nerds as you catapult your way past sugar buzz and into a surreal realm of head freezes and diabetic shock. The best part? After the blizzard melts -- which it inevitably did on those hot afternoons -- the soup at the bottom was where most of the nerds fell (due to their heavier mass) and coalesced into a puddle of cream and sugar-rocks.

Sounds disgusting, right?

I hadn't been to a Dairy Queen in years until my wife and I were driving cross-country and stopped to get something on a hot summer day. My first thought was a rush of memories from the summer of nerds blizzards. The menu advertized nerds as an available topping, I requested it, and they told me they no longer carried nerds. I kept trying. For several years at several different Dairy Queens across the country, I attempted to get a nerds blizzard. And failed. Until we drove through Roswell, New Mexico. That's right. The holy grail town of alien abductions and memoriabilia is the only place I found where you can still get a nerds blizzard.

That was until my brilliant spouse came up with the open source food plan. We bought a box of nerds, took it to our local Dairy Queen, ordered a blizzard and when they asked for which topping I desired we slapped that box of nerds on the counter. The first attempt didn't go as well as planned: the minimum-wage-high-school-attendant had a hard time understanding what we were trying to do. The system set up in most restaurants is based on a predetermined selection of items put together by the master chef -- we wanted to override that order. However, we were able to communicate succintly our request and the kid oblidged us and suddenly, every Dairy Queen was my ticket to getting a nerds blizzard. In fact, any Dairy Queen we walk into, we can put anything on the table and ask them to toss it into a blizzard -- they do it without a second glance.

But what is the point of going some place to eat and determining the ingredients yourself? Open source foods, while an interesting novelty, are nothing more than that: a novelty. Places like ColdStone and Fuddruckers offer you unlimited flexibility in what you can make, but what they take away from you is the outside intelligence behind making a good product. A master chef, even of such terrible foods as frozen goods, provides unique taste experiences at the cost of limited choices.

I go out to eat for a few different reasons, but I believe the primary reason is to taste something which I was incapable of creating because I begin with a set of expectations, understandings and reasons for choosing the ingredients I like. Our personalities only allot us to be able to create within our sphere. We can expand that sphere, but I will still, always, only exist inside my local sphere. Food sensations which reach beyond that sphere provide a glimpse of something unique to my experience, something other.

While I won't quit bringing in my nerds to the local Dairy Queen -- I'll always do that to remember Jacob -- it is at the expense of isolating myself from touching something in the "other."