No one is precisely sure when and where the corn curl experiment came from. It related somehow, to their continuing conversation on the long shelf life of processed food. Someone had read on article on the miracle of Wonder Bread, which stayed fresh for ten years, and soon the four friends had extended that to potato chips. Corn curls, omnipresent at their high school parties, felt at once disgusting and strangely compelling to the group, with their powdery, salty, bright orange coating that left stains on your fingers and a made your tongue raw from sucking on them. Surely, something with the texture of a Styrofoam packing peanut would last at least thirty years. So they bottled a neon fragment of their high school selves and put it to the test.
How long can a corn curl last? The question is really how much a friendship can endure. Read the rest of my new nonfiction piece at The Good Men Project.