A short time ago, I wrote for this very magazine an article about rare and bizarre foods which would shock our Western palates, such as maggoty cheese (Sardinian casu marzu) and fermented shark meat (Icelandic hákarl), among others. Well, our Western palates are not shocked by the things on this list, which are, or in some cases were, mass-produced for national or even international consumption, and we didn’t bat an eye. Before criticizing people in foreign lands, I feel we must turn the lens of scrutiny on ourselves in order to find out what food crimes we are collectively guilty of.
Here begins the list of evidence, in no particular order:
Around the turn of the millennium, international ketchup and catsup-mongers, Heinz, decided that the familiar, sugary red sauce just wasn’t cutting it anymore. Changing nothing but the color of the stuff, they proceeded to launch a line of what they called "EZ Squirt" (fill in your own "yo mama" joke here) colored ketchup. EZ Squirt came in purple, green, pink, orange, teal, and blue. At a point, there existed a tie-in promotional bottle with the first Shrek movie and the green stuff, which was billed as "Shrek Sauce," and the less one thinks about that, the better. Marketed to kids, it had a rather impressive 6-year run in the mainstream before people decided that red was the only color they really needed ketchup in, leaving EZ Squirt to exist only in certain markets and overseas.
I saw a cardboard supermarket display a while ago, which was encouraging people to put the tart, gummy candies known as Sour Patch Kids into cookies, bearing that tag line "yeah, that’s a thing."
That should not be a thing.
That’s a fundamentally ridiculous idea, and I want to know who greenlit this, so I can FedEx them a punch in the dick. If you’re going to make cookies, make them with something that’s not just a wad of gelatin and citric acid. Presuming people would do just that, cookie brand Chips Ahoy! released their own pre-made Sour Patch Cookies, which are, as of this writing, readily available at a store near you.
For people who’d rather drink a soda when they get up instead of a cup of coffee, Pepsi had you covered. Featuring 25% more caffeine than a standard can of the brown beverage, it was still much less buzz than your average cup of coffee. The ad campaigns aired for about a year, on the golden cusp between 1989 and 1990, when eventually, the product was dropped from shelves and forgotten before MC Hammer could be in a commercial for it. Hell, if someone out there was truly bent on chugging down a cola instead of coffee as their get-up sauce, Jolt Cola had been around for decades by then, and that does have more caffeine than a cup of joe.
Introduced in 1998, these were regular potato chips, save for one thing—they were billed as completely fat-free. The nation was overjoyed that the traditional, salty potato snacks were now free of "guilt," which comes from eating all that fat. However, the way they managed to make them fat-free was, instead of using traditional fats such as vegetable oils or animal by-products, to utilize a newfangled type of fat substitute called Olestra.
Olestra’s claim to fame was that the body does not digest it like normal fats, allowing it to go into and out of the human body without being absorbed. WOW, indeed! However, one of the side effects of this is that since it isn’t absorbed by the body, it passes right through. In moderation, this causes no significant issues, but given the propensity of North American snackers to plop down and eat an entire bag of chips at a go, it causes all that "not-fat" to, well, simply slide out your backside. The Lay’s company really should have more deeply considered people’s dietary habits.
Anyhow, the words "anal leakage" were bandied about in the news media, and the chips went from sensational to unsettling nearly overnight. Sales dropped off, while stupid Saturday Night Live jokes at their expense went through the roof. They were rebranded as "Lay’s Light" in 2004 and quietly left the market as late as 2016.
This offering by the Hubba Bubba bubble gum company resembles a small, palm-sized, pink jerry can of chewing gum. Marketed to kids, where all the worst ideas go, this jug was full of powdered bubble gum, and you would quite literally dump various amounts of it into your mouth, where it would coalesce into a wad suitable for chewing. It is one of the few instances where foodstuffs were offered in a jug, boasting the words "shake n’ chug" on that jug. It shakes n’ chugs along into the present day if you’re so bold as to want a jug for the road.
More of an addendum to the Bubble Jug, was it any better an idea to offer kids "six feet of bubble gum, for you, not them?" Also, this is not the first time a food marketed to children encouraged being greedy with it.
Lookin’ at you, Trix. If you have six fuckin’ feet of the stuff, you can share it! Naturally, the temptation to try and chew all six feet at once was overwhelming. Hockey pucks of Bubble Tape are still readily available at convenience stores all across the USA.
Pop-Tarts are timeless. That quick-and-ready toaster pastry has been the savior of many a person who was either really busy, really poor, or really stoned and who needs a quick caloric fix. Toasted or untoasted doesn’t really make much difference, taste-wise, but the flavors definitely do. However, in modern times, Kellogg’s, the manufacturer of Pop-Tarts, has decided that we need A&W Root Beer-flavored Pop-Tarts, as well as Orange Crush-flavored Pop-Tarts. Nothing about either of those screams "breakfast." Either they’ve lost their heads, or the stoners have truly won. These are currently available for purchase wherever Pop-Tarts are sold.
I’m going to assume everyone here is familiar with Go-Gurt. No? Well, not just a nickname for semen, Go-Gurt supposes that your modern youth are so on-the-move that they must consume yogurt in a convenient squeeze tube—presumably, while skateboarding to rollerblade class or going to the X Games or something. So, now that we comprehend the principle behind squeeze-tube yogurt imagine if someone suggested, "why don’t we carbonate the yogurt?" And lo, Fizzix was born. It’s carbonated yogurt (hence, the "Fizz" part) that comes in a squeeze tube.
Is it just me, or does this sound like one of those things that would show up in a "dystopian future" movie as a social trend, along with one-syllable street drugs called "nuke" or "quake" or some shit? Well, guess what? It’s a social trend in our dystopian future, though admittedly not much of one.
Of note, the commercial for this product features a CGI tube of yogurt fighting a disembodied tongue in a gladiator arena, where the seats are also full of tongues, interrupted by a brief segue to two kids talking about how great the yogurt is, until one of their heads explodes in a gout of blue goo—10/10 advertising. The product is still out there, should you be bold enough to risk your head exploding.
I like Swedish Fish. I like Oreos. Did these things need to be combined? No.
But, they’re out there... waiting, in the dark.
Within the last year, someone decided, "let us bring back Dunkaroos," and they hit the shelves once again. Presumably targeted to now-grown children of the 1990s, who will recall that, according to the jingle, one does not simply eat one "Dunkaroos."
Using the same ’90s-style product design, which they did back in the day, Dunkaroos packaging reminds one of the bumper screens when Saved by the Bell went to commercial, or possibly Rocko’s shirt from the cartoon Rocko’s Modern Life. Aggressively ’90s.
For anyone who wasn’t there, or doesn’t recall, these are Handi-Snack-like two-compartment food, wherein one chamber contained tiny, kangaroo-themed cookies, and the other chamber contained vanilla or chocolate sugar frosting, into which the ’roos would be dunked. Sure, fine. It’s a snack you pack in your kid’s lunch—no big deal. So why did we need a cereal? No idea. However, I’ve heard an account from an associate who was suckered into purchasing some, and that individual described them as "absolutely disgusting," stating then that he "threw out the rest after two bowls."
Okay, this one’s a kind of cheating, but a company called Illegal Chips recently started manufacturing chips that taste like food forbidden for consumption in the USA. One of the flavors amidst horse meat and casu marzu (the maggot cheese mentioned earlier), is fugu. Fugu being the pufferfish—a delicacy in Japan and elsewhere, but requiring very skilled hands to prepare, given the significant risk of death, if you eat the wrong part of the fish (which is 90% wrong part). The chips have no such risk, and I’ve yet to try them, but they made the list all the same.
So, there’s my list. If I missed any notable food crimes, please be sure to look me up using the information below, and send me a profanity-laden account of why I should have included your choice in my article, and perhaps I’ll include it in my next. Our society continues to produce these food abominations, so I’m sure there will be another.
Snack well, good people!
Wombstretcha the Magnificent is an anal leakage supporter, AM cola drinker, bubble tapist, writer, and retired rapper from Portland, OR. He can be found at Wombstretcha.com, on Twitter as @Wombstretcha503 and on Facebook (boo!) and MeWe (yay!) as "Wombstretcha The Magniflcent."
