Boy was I wrong! A few years ago, I predicted the gag gift Chia Pet would morph into the next great food fad. I predicted that the little green chia ram would gallop back onto the popular scene, but this time, instead of chuckling at them, we would be herding them onto our plates and attacking them with a knife and fork.

You see, I read an article in Saturday Evening Post that claimed chia was a big part of the Aztecan diet. The ubiquitous corn and bean diet was their mainstay, of course, and amaranth was another (I’m not sure what amaranth is, but I think it was a prehistoric natural form of Viagra, which probably accounted for Indian blue corn).

According to agriculture experts whose names I might Google one day when I’m bored out of my rocker, the germinating chia grain was second only to corn in importance. Chia, the article said, is packed with more nutritional perfection than any other grain.

So when it comes to inanimate holiday pets, we should have been nipping the ears off our Chia Pets instead of our chocolate bunnies. And the Chia crockery probably has a certain “colon-cleansing” value as well.

It shames me to think that for decades we’ve been wasting this uber grain on sprouting grassy Afros on Homer Simpson clay heads and laughing our own goofy heads off. The joke’s on us. It turns out, our mothers should have been admonishing us, “Eat your Chia Pet, Timmy. There are starving children in Africa.”

I must have given away a dozen Chia Pets as silly gifts over the years. I had no idea I was giving away Aztecan farm stock. No doubt, they were tossed in the trash, so we might want to start looking for feral Chia Pets roaming our landfills, round them up, and slaughter them for their chia meat, which we could donate to local food banks.

We would be helping to solve the problem of our burgeoning landfills, too. And while we’re at it, I wish nutritionists would discover that used tires are actually Aztecan whole-rubber-grain donuts. Talk about fiber – especially steel-belted tires.

I thought once the word about chia was out, there would be a huge run on Chia Pets. I imagined little clay United Nations-certified Chia Farms, packaged with designer coveralls and tiny gold-plated crop tools, would be all the rage for upscale shoppers.

I also thought the next diet fad would be the Dr. Aztec and South Border diets. Everything would contain chia, “the rediscovered grain of the gods.” I expected to see whole-chia bread and pasta. Weight Watchers and Lean Cuisine would develop a new line of low-calorie frozen chia meals, like Chia-roni and Cheese, and Red Beans and Chipotle Chia. I thought we would be washing down powdered chia capsules with swigs of our Mountain Dews.

But I guess I’m no Nostradamus. And now, I just don’t know what to do with those 250 Chia Poodles in my closet.

Read more of Sharon’s humor in “Laughing Matters: Everyday Adventures of a Dorky Life,” available on amazon.com and bn.com.