Not-so-guilty food pleasures make us swoon

She'd never admit it, but my sister likes to lick the inside of a bag of buttery popcorn.

Shelley Lucas is a food blogger in town who confesses that as a kid, she loved to eat banana and mayonnaise sandwiches. "Seems gross now but sometimes I just have to have one," she said last week via Twitter. Nicole Morgan eats almost all locally sourced food, but she still loves to put sour cream and onion potato chips on her peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I pick out Cheez-Its that are burnt around the edges, and I absolutely love the salty sweet combination of cottage cheese mixed with raisins, black olives and sunflower seeds.

Some would call these guilty food pleasures, but few of us feel guilty when we're eating them. We just don't broadcast them to the world. They are like a quiet affection for Justin Bieber or Harlequin novels or talking animals movies: We all have them, and we'd do anything for them.

"I don't have any guilty food pleasure because I don't feel guilty about it," says Rhoda Russell, whose favorite non-guilty food pleasure is lavender ice cream. "If I can get a hold of it, I really go to town on it."

Cookbook author Deborah Madison, who along with her husband, Patrick McFarlin, wrote a book called "What We Eat When We Eat Alone" (Gibbs Smith, 2009), calls these "personal foods," foods that "speak to you and something about you and your life that is not universal," she says. "I hate that guilt thing that we do in America. It's not about that."

What is universal is that we all have them. Last week, I put out a call online for people to tell me their secret food pleasures, and the corresponding hashtag (a way to track tweets on Twitter), #secretfoodpleasures, seemed to take on a life of its own, with people all over the country fessing up to the foods that make them go weak in the knees. Pickle juice and ice, popcorn and M&Ms, Cheetos dipped in nacho cheese, pretzels dipped in ranch dressing, french fries dipped in chocolate milkshakes, lemon frosting spread on saltine crackers, Americanized fried rice, tamales wrapped in white bread.

Personal foods are very particular, Madison says. "You probably wouldn't invite a friend over to eat it with you, but it works for you, even though it's weird." If the food isn't made or assembled correctly, it just won't satisfy, Madison says. She also points out that there's often a logic behind these seemingly strange food combinations. Broccoli and peanut butter might seem weird, until you think about broccoli topped with Asian peanut sauce, and it makes a little more sense.

People take pride in their personal foods partially to cover up any embarrassment they might feel about eating unconventionally. "Their revelations have made us see how many possibilities there are for feeding ourselves, possibilities that lie well outside the borders of what usually passes for normal, let alone ‘right'," she writes in the book. "What do we eat when we aren't following anyone else's rules."

What people eat when standing up in front of the fridge in the middle of the night might seem trivial to some, but to Madison, it's "a portrait of human behavior sprung free from conventions, a secret life of consumption born out of the temporary freedom — or burden, for some — of being alone" or not having to cook for someone else.

The connection we have to these foods often goes beyond personal taste preference and into the vast realm of food nostalgia. Rob Moshein says that he and his grandpa used to sneak herring in sour cream right out of the jar when grandma wasn't looking. Kay Marley-Dilworth still has a soft spot for the fried baloney sandwiches on white bread with American cheese and Miracle Whip that she used to eat as a kid.

Sometimes, our personal foods revolve around junk food that we weren't allowed to eat frequently as a kid, but other times, it's a food that you discovered later in life that you now associate with figuring out who you are.

I'd never had octopus, much less octopus served in its own ink, until I lived in Spain, where you can buy canned "pulpo en su tinto" for next to nothing. Sautéed octopus with rice, which the ink turned a dark purple, quickly became one of my favorite frugal meals, and just the thought of opening one of those cans takes me back to that transformative year.