The Vanishing Crackers
By Jeff Eckenrode
It was half past 1:00pm when Old Pete came into the back office holding an entire sleeve of crackers he'd clearly already made significant progress on, the kind of progress that suggested this wasn't his first sleeve of the shift.
"I've got a theory," he said, mouth half full.
"About the crackers?" I asked, half-listening while I examined the silver Canadian maple leaf I'd picked up from Marv last week.
"About why I always want crackers. Every shift. Same time, everyday more or less. I think it's psychological."
He said "psychological" like it was a word he'd recently acquired and was still deciding whether it was the right one.
"It's not psychological," Berny said, looking up from her inventory sheet. "It's your CB1 receptors."
Pete looked at Berny and blinked. "My what receptors?"
"THC binds to them," she said, her voice warming up the way it did whenever she got to explain something she found genuinely interesting. "There's a whole chain reaction after that. It bumps up a hormone that tells your brain you're hungry, and it also messes with your sense of smell, so food ends up tasting saltier, sweeter, richer than it normally would."
"So my nose is in on this too?" Old Pete asked, munching another cracker vigorously. A single crumb drifted down and landed square on the delivery manifest beneath my coin. I brushed it off without looking up.
"Your nose is very much in on this," I said, setting the coin down on top of the stack like a very expensive paperweight.
"Cannabis leans on some of the same brain pathways your body uses when you're actually starving. It's not tricking you exactly. But it is borrowing a system that already exists, turning the dial up."
Pete stood there, stroking his crumb-speckled beard while considering this. Then he looked down at the remaining crackers in his hand, and a genuine look of betrayal washed over him.
"So it's not that I have no self control? It's biology?"
"It's mostly biology," Berny said. "There's probably some expectation mixed in there too, if you're expecting to get hungry, you might notice it more. But the receptor part is real. That part isn't in your head."
"Well, that's reassuring," Pete said with relief, and ate another cracker to prove it.
I went back to my maple leaf while Pete made his way toward the door, leaving a trail of crumbs along his path. Somewhere in the last two minutes he'd gone from a man defending his own willpower to a man who'd made peace with being biologically bamboozled by his own brain, which struck me as a reasonable trade.
He'd already reached the door, hand on the knob, when he paused and turned back, a hopeful note creeping into his usually husky voice. "Does this mean I can expense the crackers?"
"No," I said.
Pete shrugged. "Worth a shot," he said, already halfway out the door.
He wasn't wrong about that either.