Horrifying Food Products I Have Seen

The Bacon Explosion



A fore-arm sized sausage patty ,latticed with bacon, then barbequed to a fine crunch on the grill? Why, I'll have two! The putting bacon on everything craze seems to have reached its zenith with this amazing taste-treat - no longer is is enough to put bacon in chocolate, bacon in macaroni and cheese, bacon in your chocolate chip pancakes! No, we're able to do lines of bacon, now - perform the equivalant of shooting the stuff right up our nostrils. I imagine the Explosion of Bacon will be ganked from the internet and marketed as America's next taste sensation by Carl's Jr or something in the near future. Pigs everywhere will quiver with the fear of the hunted.

Sausage Football



Speaking of Twenty-Five Ways to Debase a Pig, how about this sausage football? Bringing the notion of the pigskin into horrid and immediate relief, this tremendous lump of summer sausage in the shape of a football - complete with weaving! - unsettles me to my core, touching on a part of my pysche that would rather not consider these things. We're told not to play with our food from an early age, and then we're at the family Super Bowl party or something and Uncle Vern is slicing up the sausage football and we think, What? What? Prevent childhood cognitive dissonance. Avoid the Sausage Football.

Belgian Dark Chocolate Dipped Pork Rinds and Caramel Bars



Have you found yourself concerned about your weight, about your eating habits? Has the dawn of the new-year and the meteoric rise of your dress size compelled you to change your ways, turn over a new life, pick up some Tae-Bo videos? Another healthy choice for 2009: switch out your usual chocolate covered pork rinds for sugar-free chocolate covered pork rinds! Yes, you too will be able to fend off diabetes, heart disease, and an early death - just make sure it's sugar free.

All kidding aside, I really want to know how this tastes. Are there pork rinds in the caramel too? Is this like a pork rind Snickers bar? A sugar free one? I just don't know.

Chocolate Covered Cuttlefish



Produced by a Hawaiian chocolate company, this innovative treat combines everyone's favorite dried cuttlefish and delicious chocolate. I just don't see what could possibly go wrong.

I like dried cuttlefish and I like chocolate. Combining the two strikes me as so unwise as to be prosecutable. May be of use when at college drinking parties when you want to one-up the asshole eating goldfish.

Heinz Canned Curry N' Beans!



I have gone through my life with a horror of canned beans. Sometimes I've had nightmares where canned beans trail me throughout the house and dangle malignantly before my nose. This Heinz spec-i-ality combines Mulligatawny soup and the perennial English favorite of canned beans into one easy, convenient, and imperishable horror show.

Taco Bell Home Entrees: Chicken Bowl, SHELF STABLE!



Shelf-stable Taco Bell meat? What could possible go wrong? There is a photo of one of these on Heat Eat Review that tells you all you would ever need to know, will ever need to know about the nature of this MRE for college boys.

Gummi Chicken Legs



Further contributing to the debasement of food animals, we have gummi candy attempting to imitate meat, complete fake plastic chicken bone and "oranges and cream" flavor. Will they soon make meat that attempts to imitate gummi candy? The world's once clear-cut line between CANDY and MEAT is already being bridged wantonly as evidenced by bacon chocolate bars and sugar free chocolate pork rinds. What new frontiers lie before us? What then?

(I have eaten the Vosges Bacon Chocolate bar and very much enjoyed it. It was akin to eating a really high quality salty bacon bit that dropped in the fondue pot. If you think about it's a good thing. I still felt a bit ugly afterward but recovered quickly, happily.)

A Field Guide to The Tandoor

The Indian subcontinent is ruled by the tandoor oven, a big clay device in which meat and bread and other things are cooked. Tandoor ovens, super heated and long burning, are encountered all across central America, turning out delicous and spiced food from Kabul to Kerala. The ovens date to almost before time, far as anyone can tell: India's very-first Harappa people used them to make their suppers, and even the Akkadian Epic of Gilgamesh sees fit to give the tandoor oven a brief if atmospheric cameo. Tandoor-workers (themselves shriveled up and gently roasted as the food) perform many tasks: they spike meat onto kebabs, fish out leg-of-lamb and chicken parts from the seething charcoals, and slap rotis and naan onto the oven's clay walls. These heat-impervious men are among the world's great culinary heros and should be properly honored some day, as they create plate after plate of succulent meats and vegetables - but I digress. The cooked tandoor food will be served to business men and kids on motorbikes and people on packaged tours, and many more then I can possibly name.

There are far too many kinds of tandoor delicacies and new ones seem to be invented all the time- but here, we have prepared a list or a field guide, which can be clipped out and put in your pocket and stained with grease and juices.



Tandoori chicken is the cover girl of the tandoor-oven pantheon, the Salma Hayek of the lineup, the Taste Which Everyone Knows. Tandoori chicken has ambled across continents and across nations, findings its way into African fast food, Japanese pizza pies, Cincinnati instant-microwave-meals and British submarine sandwiches. This is because it very, very, delicious. Skinless chicken is marinated with spices (and a bit of red food coloring) and cooked til' just right, spices seeping all the way through the meat and reaching the red-stained bone. There is a lot of heinous tandoori chicken out there, especially in the USA, but a really good version will make you spit at the concept of vegetarianism. Tender, juicy meat beneath a crisp and slightly fatty skinless crust, perhaps accented with lemon juice and cilantro yogurt sauce and onion: too perfect:



Chicken tikka is, simply enough, marinated chunks of chicken (usually white meat) charred up a bit in a tandoor oven. They function as one of India's favorite Men Drinking Beer snacks, in hot contention with chili chicken. It can be encountered in various incarnations, from spicier to garlicky and so on and so forth but are a dependable (and boneless) snacky.


(Photo jacked from, oddly enough, a Milanese Indian restaurant.)

Boti kebabs are tender chunks of lamb muscle meat, marinated yogurt and spices and cooked until falling apart. They have a rich, decadent buttery texture in their best incarnations and are absolutely irrestible. They are especially popular in Mumbai and are eaten on pretty much any decent pretext for snacking. I especially liked the tender little nibbles served up by deeply suspicious Muslim kebab-makers from the neighborhood stands near the Taj hotel, perhaps eaten with a side of tandoori gobi or chili-sauce drizzled bhindi masala. They are not particularly difficult to make in the oven and I really advise every sane carnivore to eat them at least once or twice or a zillion times.




The Galouti Kebab is made of mutton that has been ground to just about nothing then made into a patty and cooked and cooked and cooked. They have a fine and gentle consistency and can be eaten by just about anyone, even those too lazy to chew or someone who has just undergone invasive dental surgery. Shah Jahan used to eat small portions of them while looking across the water from his prison at the Taj Mahal, in his imprisoned dotage, though they may easily be enjoyed in happier times then that.



Machi tikka kebabs are made of fish and especially enjoyed by the people of Goa and other Southern countries, who couldn't find lamb to save their lives anyway. Insofar as I can tell, tuna is most often used, and marinated in yogurt and spices for a nice healthy time and charred to tender perfection in an oven. They are best in Mumbai and other coastal towns, but can be procured pretty much anywhere - especially delicious with cilantro-yogurt sauce, eaten when cream-infused lamb curries are beginning to grate on the pysche and the digestive tract.



India is a vegetarian-supportive nation, and it stands to reason that vegetables are given the tandoori treatment: and how delicious they become. Cauliflower, India's seeming vegetable of choice, attains bizarrely transcedent levels of flavor when soaked in yogurt and turmeric and charred a bit: the innocent sprouts take on a rich, creamy, slightly perfumed taste, a million trillion miles removed from the sickly cauliflower-cheese casseroles of American larders. I survived on a diet of roughly 40% tandoori gobi in India and was incredibly healthy all the time. This means something.



Ground meat or Sheekh kebabs, packed around metal skewers and cooked in a tandoor oven, are extremely common and always delicious. They are usually made out of lamb or mutton, mixed with aromatic spices and served with the usual pickled onion and lemon. Some varieties are made of ground, tender chicken - I tried one tasty variety (the name of which escapes me) comprised of spicy chicken rolled around tomato. The picture above shows a special and expensive variety of sheekh kebab made of mutton wrapped around chicken and everyone knows two tasty animals are better then one.




Tandoori lamb chops combine fatty and gamy lamb meat and rich Indian spices, coupled with a skilled and delicate char: it is hard to imagine them not being delicious. They generally only are found on the menu of rather upscale places but are absolutely worth the expense. I advise doing like most Indians do in the presence of really fine meat projects and eschewing your knife and fork, since everything really does taste better on the bone.

One of the world's minor miracles is that these delicious lamb chops can be replicated at home: Food and Wine's Tandoori lamb chop recipe is one of my go-to's and has provoked intensely positive reactions from everyone I've fed them to. Make them as soon as humanly possible.




Pomfret is a small and curiously flat fish that is very popular in India and basically unknown in the USA. I developed a taste for it extremely quickly: the flat little suckers have sweet and delicately flaky fish, which is served extremely well by the tandoor oven treatment. Whole fish are usually scored, rubbed with spices, and cooked head-and-all - the delicate, nearly translucent little spines can easily be lifted out. As I have mentioned in the past, I derive a curious and perverse sort of pleasure from eating an entire animal and thus enjoy these very much. Be vigilant and careful to ensure you are getting a decently sized pomfret for your supper: I have occasionally been served two bite fish and been hungry for the rest of the evening.

Those are some of the more commonly encountered taste-treats: I'll post more as I dig up photos. You should probably try them all as a scientific endeavor.

terrifying kid food

SCARY FOOD OF MY YOUTH

I am a food snob. I opt for whole, organic, tasty foods. I do not eat fast food and try to let as little processed food as possible pass my pure, holy lips. In other words, I am the classic Asshole Californian, prone to sacrificing farmer's market nectarines on the dark alter of Alice Waters, and whatnot.

This was not always the case.

Kids love weird food and I was no exception. If it was blue, microwaveable, artifically flavored or "crackling", I was all over it. Foods that I now do not even associate with being "edible" were my manna from heaven. I look back in astonishment that there was a time when I would be delighted to eat this stuff, but then again, I'm also worried about there being long term health repercussions. How long DOES blue food coloring stay in in the system anyway?



- Nerd Blizzards

A Dairy Queen Blizzard swirled with rainbow colored Nerds? Where the hell do I sign? I used to adore these: the combination of mild, soft vanilla ice cream with crunchy, tangy Nerds was about as good as it gets for the kiddy palate. Extra points when the Nerds dyed the ice cream a jillion different artificial colors. They don't make these anymore, and trust me, I mourned. (I have to admit, I would probably make these a once a year habit if they were still around.)

Why the hell do they call these things "Nerds" anyway? Isn't that discriminatory against the pocket-protector adorned segment of society? Should I start an interest group?

-Kid Cuisine

Bug nuggets!

Patriotic brownies!

Ah yes, microwaveable instant meals for kids - what could possibly go wrong? Ahem. I think even I subconsciously knew these things were vile in my misspent youth, but the novelty of coming out of a box and containing candy outweighed any watery-Mac-N'-Cheese and creepy, mushy chicken nuggets concerns I might have had. There was also the benefit of a Free Included Toy, which was worthy any amount of crap food in my seven year old mind - have you ever wondered why people still eat Cracker Jack?

Today's Kid Cuisine varieties are, if anything, even more concerning then the ones I had in my (admittedly not far off) youth - I mean, look at it: bug shaped chicken nuggets?

Okay, I would have loved those.


- blue poptarts


Pop-tarts are of course a classic crappy kid food: shelf stable for yawning eternities, composed of entirely non-natural components, just as tasty cold as warm - and toasters take so long! Yes, we loved us some Pop-tarts, but you can bet we loved them even more when the Wild-berry flavor debuted, featuring - you guessed it! - blue and purple icing. They tasted okay in a bizarre, laboratory way, but the absolute best part of sucking down one of these bad boys was the blueish purple residue left on face and tongue and hands afterwards.

Look, when you are eight, that is the French fucking' Laundry, okay?

I looked on the totally surreal Pop-tarts website and discovered, to my horror, that these were just discontinued. They can however still be bought on Amazon. Who wants to go in on a case?!


-Lick A Color Popsicles (and others)


Popsicles were of course the easiest way to get in our daily artificial flavor requirement, without which we would of course sicken and slowly die. My friends and I plowed through a lot of popsicle flavors, but a continuous favorite was the almighty LIck A Color, which changed colors and flavors as it was consumed. No one, of course, was patient enough to actually sit still and lick slowly through every-single-last flavor - no, the way to do it was to bite the thing in half then be impressed at the layers upon layers of Real Fruit Flavors lying within its icy core.

We also loved Timon and Pumbaa bug popsicles, featuring real fruit flavors filled with gummy bugs. The gummy bugs took on a really interest texture in the freezer: somewhere delightfully between slimy and firm. An epicurean delight.

Push Pops were another big favorite. With Flintstones on them. I do not know what the Flintstones have with rainbow sherbet but rest assured, someday I will find out and write a blog post and no one will care.


- Bagel Bites


Okay, these actually weren't that vile all things considered, but I am automatically now suspicious of any frozen meat item marketed as a Healthy Snack. These always had a tendency to cook really unevenly in the oven, which meant you'd be confronted with a stone cold, inedible Bagel Bite and a lightly charred Vessel of Cancer on the same plate, which really could cramp your style. I also snapped off one or two bonded teeth components on these bad boys. In other words, Bagel Bites give me a bit of post traumatic stress.

I am fully aware I am the world's biggest pussy.

- Quaker Dinosaur Oatmeal


This stuff was absolutely amazing: boring ass instant oatmeal infused with TRANSFORMING DINOSAUR CANDY. Let me repeat: TRANSFORMING DINOSAUR CANDY. There was really nothing else needed to sell me on this stuff. Admittedly, it was a pretty cool process: you pour hot water into the bowl o' oatmeal filled with pink candy dinosaur eggs, which dissolve and leave you with little cinnamon sugar flavored multi colored dinosaurs, floating around in your bowl. Nirvana.

- Lunchables



Like a salt lick in a box, these little pre-made Lunches In A Box were flagrantly bad for you, which of course meant kids simply adored them. I wasn't allowed to eat these very often but it was always a wonderful event when I found one in my lunchbox - apparently their inherent nastiness didn't make much of an impression upon me.

The most disgusting version was absolutely the Beef Taco, featuring shelf-stable taco "meat" in an easy squeeze tube. The stuff tasted and smelled exactly like wet dog food, but we ate it anyway - cold in the elementary school lunch room, mm, mm, good! Extra points awarded if you had the presence of mind to sprinkle pop-tarts/rainbow candy/nerds on the meat, creating the 4th grade version of "fusion cuisine." Or is that molecular gastronomy?

The Pizza version were beloved by everyone but me, primarily because a box (not surprisingly) made me barf once in second grade. I do recall observing kids eating chocolate frosting, pop-rock, and pepperoni pizza on a daily basis. We should totally do a study.


A brief disclaimer: My parents did not actively approve of this kind of crapola food and I did not eat it EVERY day, though trust me, I would have committed any subterfuge or crime to do so. Furthermore, eating this kind of crap actually 1. showed me by example what kind of food is REALLY tasty and 2. got all those urges out of my system nice n' early.

Organic free-range parents: your efforts are likely to backfire. I know a lot of kids raised holistically-organically-Anthrosophically-whatever and it is not a pretty site when they get to college and realize no one is forcing them to eat quinoa anymore. Many of them go on joyful junk-food binges that end only when they gain fifty pounds or go into Red-Lake induced shock, found slumped over a box of the Pop-tarts they've been hoarding. (I only exaggerate slightly: one kid I know in that situation got scurvy. Twice.)

So, parents: let your kids occasionally eat neon-blue-super-frozen-sour-crackle crap at least on occasion. Trust me, odds are good they will see the light of organic all natural Real Food - I did. I now enjoy cooking all natural healthy food for my parents and have not eaten a Lunchable, Dorito, or Bagel Bite in years (though I occasionally still have to have me some blue candy.) Befriend the chemicals!