Nutella is disgusting.

Now, I realize I might come under fire for daring to critique Nutella, nectar of the gods, the milk and honey bestowed upon us by a gracious Lord to spread upon our Wonder Bread (for lo, it is wondrous indeed). But I'm just going to take a stand right here and now, and say what everyone knows to be absolutely true: Nutella is freaking disgusting.

For those of you who are lightly confused and bewildered because you are unfamiliar with Nutella because you are American, I'll tell you that it's the gross chemically hazelnut-chocolate spread that your grandmother might spread on her whole wheat toast in the morning, depending on where your grandpa was stationed during World War 2. My grandpa was stationed mostly in Africa, therefore Nutella was not a staple food item in my grandma's kitchen. He did mail a leopard back to my grandma from Africa, but no Nutella.

A brief aside: my grandfather mailed a leopard to my grandma during World War 2. That story goes like this: my grandpa was in Africa during World War 2 for some reason and heard about a leopard that was terrorizing a village. It ate a small boy, so my grandpa shot it and mailed it back to my grandma. I like to imagine that he shipped the corpse of a jungle cat to my grandma without any forewarning, with a thousand and one blood-smeared stamps through 1940s mail (when you could ship exotic animal corpses, no problem. Picture two 1940s mailroom clerks in suspenders with their sleeves rolled up smoking cigarettes and wearing cabbie hats. "Say, Jiminy, this giant heavy package is leaking... leaking blood!" "Well, Amory Blane, just throw some of that new-fangled cel-lo-phane 'round it and send it on its way! This is the Postal Service, for Christ's sake, our packages can't be late because of a little guts and gore, now can they?"), so that one day she just opened up a package from her husband overseas and had the gory, bloody, fanged open mouth of a leopard staring up at her with rotting dead eyes. I then like to imagine my grandma rolling her eyes and throwing it up on a wall in the basement where no one could see it, and taking it out every once in a while to hang it on the wash line and beat the dust out of it, sighing over her cockamamy husband's antics.

This story is patently untrue on several counts: One, because my grandmother was actually still married to her first husband during the war, who died heroically in the Battle of the Bulge, so my grandpa wouldn't be mailing her giant dead cats from Africa as he wasn't actually married to her yet, and you just don't mail dead cats to anyone but your spouse; that would be quite irregular. Two: While the cat looks giant and terrifying to a small child's eyes, as an adult I can see that it's actually pretty small for a leopard. It was probably a baby, which is a real bummer. It probably didn't eat a little boy, and died just for being a leopard. Ugh, that is really depressing.

But I'm actually still pretty sure you could totally just throw a dead leopard in a box and mail it overseas in the 1940s, so at least that bit holds up.

My point is that my grandma didn't have Nutella in her kitchen. But for those of you who had grandmas who did have Nutella in their kitchens, I ask you to please recall some of the other things your grandma had in her kitchen, and then make your own judgements on how great this Nutella thing really is.

For instance, my grandmother always had a stock of Combos, the pretzel bites with fake, powdery cheese inside that sometimes came in pizza flavor. She also had those Entenmann's boxes of neon colored cupcakes with three inches of icing made entirely out of congealed sugar and Crisco, sometimes with an additional little sugar four-leaf clover on them for St. Patrick's Day. She also had a cookbook from the forties that suggested using sliced hot-dogs as the meat in a lasagna. My point is this: grandma is not the person to go to when it comes to delicious snacks that won't slowly kill you.

So, your grandmas might have some Nutella in their kitchens alongside their canned meats-in-water. Your grandmas, and my husband. He smears it on everything, and eats it on bread for breakfast in the morning. Call it what you want, nothing on Earth will make that abomination breakfast.

I don't want you thinking that I'm totally Nutella-intolerant. I accept Nutella as a complement to things like ice cream, where Nutella-flavoring is pleasant and light, or perhaps smeared on a banana like something you'd buy from George Michael Bluth, because bananas+chocolate+nuts is already an acceptable treat in civilized society. But you don't smear glorified chocolate icing on bread and call it a snack, and you certainly don't call it breakfast. You just don't.

And before you start taking nutritional tips from Europeans because they're all skinny or whatever, let me remind you that French cuisine especially is basically just eggs, fat, cheese, eggs, and cholesterol piled on top of each other for every meal. They're not skinny because they eat properly, they're skinny because you can only eat so much (or, incidentally, so little) of that shit until your body physically rejects it out of any and all orifices.

So go ahead and drink your Nutella shakes and gobble up your Nutella cookies and smear it all over your bread products and limbs and big round bellies gorged to bursting with hazelnut-chocolate icing spread. You and I both know that when it comes right down to it, Nutella is fucking disgusting, and it's your sick little addiction, not mine.