I went shopping Sunday night to buy my normal cache of groceries for the week: honey wheat bread, some yogurt, some lunch meat, a few boxes of pre-packaged servings of crackers and cookies, whole wheat bagels, and some vitamins. Normally I trade trips between the Winn Dixie that is a little closer to my house and Publix, but lately I have been going to the Publix more since my friend Katie just transfered there from the Vestavia Hills location.

I grab a cart and hit the bread aisle first for a loaf of over-sized, double wrapped wheat bread and a bag of bagels. As I start to walk off the aisle I catch sight of the orange juice section in the corner of my eye. OJ is not on my list--and in fact I normally just drink a cuppa tea and a bottle of water with my bagel in the morning--but something stirs and then flares inside of me. An intense and sudden need for orange juice crashes over me and washes me past the produce section towards the juices. I pick up a bottle of some high pulp stuff and move on to the rest of the store to complete my shopping. While I am putting the groceries away at home I down two glasses of the juice.

This is, of course, not the first time I have bought something in a grocery store on impulse. I have heard it said that guys are more prone to going into a grocery store without a list and thus are more apt to buy things on impulse, but in this occasion I had a list and I don't think I am overly disposed to pure impulse buying. I am also aware that supermarkets lay out their stores in very specific ways so that you, the shopper, must pass by all sorts of tempting things before you reach the things that most people come in for: meat, cheese, milk, etc. But this did not feel like a sudden impulse buy, the way picking up a pack of Little Debbie Swiss Cake Rolls or a six pack of root beer would.

I have heard that, to use a specific and possibly apocryphal example, some girls (not sure why it is always said to be girls and not guys) crave chocolate it is because there is a certain ingredient in the chocolate that they need, and their brain triggers the specific craving in order to get that ingredient. Not, in other words, just because the girl in question happens to love the taste of chocolate. This idea, that craving and intense desire for a certain food would be based on the body's understanding that that food contains something specific that it needs right then, is a fascinating one, I think because of what it says about the way the body processes the food we put into it.

I am not sure which of those two explanations--marketing pressure or the body's internal monitor-- is the truth, and I'm not sure why the idea was interesting enough to me to warrant a post here. But, the intensity of the felt need leads me to believe that it was some internal sensor that picked up on the visual information regarding the presence of orange juice and sounded an alarm. Why it would do that, I have no idea, but that is the tale my gut tells, the "truthiness" of the situation to put it another way.