"Dear Food Thoughtz:" The Dangers of Dumpster Diving

A friendly Dear Food Thoughtz reminder that the garbage you're eating might be poisoned.  If you think you've been poisoned by garbage in the past, please write in at food.thoughtz@gmail.com

Dear Food Thoughtz

Is it acceptable to eat food out of a dumpster? I have a friend who is an expert dumpster diver. There is no limit to what he will find in - and pull out of - a dumpster. I mean, seriously, no limits. Cigarettes, gatorade, organic pineapples, rice flour, power tools, vacuum cleaners, lawnmowers, elliptical machines you name it. When we were younger I used to accept his dumpstered wares without a second thought - I was a broke philosophy student with no life prospects and no standards, who was I to judge or turn down free food? But now I have a job where the dress code is "business casual", and I have a kid, and a pension, and I wonder if it is okay to keep eating from the dumpster. I really need you to answer this now, because he just gave me a case of Campbell's chunky chicken noodle soup, the kind that is ready to eat, and I'm freaking out about whether I should be eating it. And feeding it to my child.

Sincerely,
Divided on dumpstering

PS We had chunky chicken noodle soup for dinner tonight. And also lunch yesterday.
PPS He said he checked with Campbell's and there have been no recalls on the soup...yet.

Dear Divided on Dumpstering,

Sometimes when I am walking to school I will see a bottle of Nestea just sitting out in the open, on a bench or on the edge of a planter or on a desk in an empty classroom.  Sometimes I slow down and pretend that I have to tie my shoe so that I can get a better look at the bottle.  Sometimes it is still sealed.  And sometimes I think about taking it, because free iced tea, right?  I mean, I’m not going to spend $2 on a bottle of Nestea myself, but sometimes I really want it.  Why shouldn’t I take it and enjoy?  Eventually someone is just going to throw it out anyway. 

But aside from the humiliation that accompanies picking up a bottle of juice off the street and drinking it in full public view, the main thing that always stops me is that episode of Criminal Minds.  I know you know what episode I’m talking about.  It begins with a father and a son driving back from a movie, and during the drive, the father begins to hallucinate and I think he ends up killing his son.  And then it turns out that there have been several similar cases, and somehow a bunch of random people with no connection to one another have been drugged with LSD (or something like LSD) because they all took a wrapped candy from a candy dish in a bank—some of which had been poisoned.  It was all a test run and the unsub’s primary target are all of the high-ranking members of a corporation that recently screwed this guy over somehow, but of course the team figures it out before the damage is done.  I mean, I think that boy still died and definitely a woman died.  But still.  BAU!  BAU!

And so I always think: what if?  What if the reason this sealed iced tea is just sitting out in the open, free for the taking, is because some asshole has drugged it with something?  Did you ever consider that maybe the reason Campbell’s hasn’t issued a recall is because they’re not the ones who injected their own Chunky Chicken Noodle Soup with LSD?  Did you consider that someone might have bought a case of it, laced it with drugs, and then put in a dumpster knowing that someone wouldn’t be able to pass up on that bargain?  Did you consider that?!

ps. Hope you don’t get botulism!  Or something even worse…

Burger Round-Up

I am currently on hour 55 of my 64+ hour trip home.  So far I have consumed 3 airport burgers, and one Kelowna burger at The Keg before taking the Greyhound to Vancouver.  Here is a brief overview of those burgers:

1. The Keg:

No photos exist of this burger experience, and frankly, if photographs are supposed to serve as memory keepers, I’m glad: eating at The Keg isn’t really an experience I am eager to remember.  The burger tasted a bit strange, possibly because I believe it was prime rib burger (I have no idea what that might mean) or possibly because there might have been BBQ sauce on it.  The fries were truly terrible, which was surprising because I expected The Keg to, first of all, have steak fries, and second of all, have good fries.  Adding to this already disappointing dining debacle, the waitress was truly abysmal, and at one point referred to my empty plate as “that little guy,” as in, “Let me get that little guy out of the way for ya!”


2. Vera’s Burgers:

Vera’s Burgers are all over Vancouver and are always being touted as “Vancouver’s Best Burger.” You’d think that with all that bragging, they might actually be able to produce a decent burger, but you would be wrong.  After The Keg, this was the second worst burger on the trip.  Everything about it was terrible: the bun, the meat, the cheese, the packaging… It was really disappointing.  I think my burger might have been composed entirely of chunks of ground beef that broke off from previous patties.  I have eaten at Vera’s once before, and I remember thinking that it was okay, but not amazing.  
This burger didn't even register as okay.

I friggin' hate it when buns have a hard shell.  So many unnecessary crumbs,
and it really takes away from the overall experience.

 3. Moxie’s Burger:

You guys.  You guys.  Air Canada put me up in the Sandman City Centre in Calgary after my connecting flight to Toronto had been cancelled and I couldn’t be rebooked until 5pm the following day.  In addition, they gave me a dinner voucher and breakfast voucher to use at the in-hotel Moxie’s restaurant, and another $10 to spend on lunch at the airport.  The Moxie burger was pretty good, and while I couldn’t put it in my Top 10 Burgers, it did taste better because it was free.  I had fries on the side and the waiter didn’t know what malt vinegar was and claimed that they “didn’t have any,” which I find really hard to believe. 


I have no idea if that pickle that was skewered atop my burger was edible or plastic, but I didn't appreciate the gesture.

 4. Montana’s Cookhouse Saloon Burger: 

Okay, despite a few drawbacks, this burger was by far the best of the four and in general is just a really solid burger.  At first I was a bit put off by the high prices because my $10 voucher wouldn’t cover the $15 burger, but then I noticed that they had an “unloaded” option for $11, and I went for it.  And let me just say thank you, Montana’s Cookhouse Saloon, because I have been waiting for an “unloaded” option at a cheaper price for my entire life.  But let me also add, why doesn’t anyone who works at your restaurant know what “unloaded” means?  When my burger arrived, it was topped with lettuce and tomato, and with a larger pickle-quarter on the side.  I promptly put it on a napkin so the waitress could see how she had failed me.  (I didn’t get a refund though.  Montana’s Cookhouse Saloon, if you’re reading this, please give me a free unloaded burger).  Once again, the waitress had never heard of malt vinegar, but she was decent enough to inquire about it for me, and obviously they had some because obviously.  Take note, Moxie’s.  Once again, the fries left something to be desired, but were undoubtedly improved by the malt vinegar.


"Dear Food Thoughtz:" Hamburger-Pizzas; Breakfast Ideas; & Attire Choices

Welcome to the very first installment of Dear Food Thoughtz, a free advice column where I do the thinking so you don't have to!  All relevant questions welcome.  Email: food.thoughtz@gmail.com

Dear foodthoughtz

Last night I ate pickles on a pizza. Don't freak out - hear me out. Everyone has heard of cheeseburger pizza before. All pizza chains - especially the grossest ones - have it. Who even orders it? It's just ground beef, tomatoes, and the addition of cheddar cheese to the mozzarella.

This cheeseburger pizza was different. It had the regular ground beef, tomatoes, cheddar. But it also had pickles, and mayo and mustard zigzagged all over it.

Foodthoughtz, this was the best pizza I've ever eaten. I can imagine what you're thinking, and let me just say I'm not thrilled about it either. Today I didn't do anything other than wander around aimlessly, crying, wearing tights as pants and wishing I had that pizza.

I need your tough love, foodthoughtz. Help me.

Sincerely,
Pining for pizza on the prairies

Dear PPP,

Thank you, first of all, for being the first to write in to Dear Food Thoughtz.  Your support does not go unnoticed.

Now onto the pizza!  I think I'm going to have some surprising advice for you: when it comes to pizza, as long as it doesn't have pineapples on it, just be true to yourself.  If a pizza with hamburger toppings is what you're into, then don't be ashamed!  Honestly, I'm not thrilled about the pickles -- and especially not since M admitted to once melting a block of cheese with old pickle juice in a microwave and then eating it. 

I am not sure why you were expecting tough love from me, or if you wanted me to forbid you to ever eat this pizza ever again.  The mythical hamburger-pizza is actually something I've spent a lot of time thinking about.  Not because I would ever eat one, but because I am fascinated by those who would.  I say "mythical" because we clearly have two very different ideas of what a hamburger-pizza entails.  I don't doubt that your pizza had hamburger-influenced toppings, but it's not, in my mind, a hamburger-pizza.  A hamburger-pizza must have literal hamburgers as toppings.  Pizza Hut came pretty close, but as far as I know, this pizza only exists as a photoshopped image and probably in real life in Japan:

Admittedly this would be really difficult to eat.  I've never understood the appeal of those novelty foods that are, like, 80 burgers stacked on top of each other and then someone eats all of them as one giant burger.  That is so disgusting.  When you bite into a burger, you should be able to get a piece of everything in your mouth at one single time.

Another option that I thought of last night was to have a hamburger baked into a pizza, like a calzone, only to wake up this morning and discover it already exists on the internet!  In a way it bothers me that it's a calzone and not an actual pizza, but this seems like a really practical way to bring these two worlds together.  I honestly don't understand why calzones always get so much hate--they seem delicious--but it's true that they are not pizzas.

Finally, a Burger King restaurant in Time's Square launched a pizzaburger which is probably one of the best fusions of these two foods I've seen because it maintains crucial characteristics of both foods.  It's in the shape of a pizza, but each slice is clearly a bun.  Inside, there's a hamburger patty topped with pepperoni and mozzarella.

So these, to me, are hamburger-pizzas.  You just ate, I don't know, a pizza.  There's nothing to stress out about.  It's definitely not as disgusting as a dessert pizza or a Hawaiian pizza or lord knows what else.  Own it.  I mean, really.  Sure, there are a lot of foods that I think are disgusting, and by extension, I think that the people who eat those foods are disgusting.  But at the end of the day, what Food Thoughtz is really about is acceptance.  Not accepting others for their food choices, but accepting yourself for your own.

Dear FoodThoughtZ advisor:

Could you please comment on what would be an appropriate breakfast to serve for:

    a 32-year old daughter who will eat anything,
    her 3-year old daughter who will eat everything,
    a 26-year old daughter who will eat buns, rice and potatoes,
    the last-named's friend who is a vegan,

all of whom are visiting for breakfast on December 23.

Dear Nameless,

I’m confused as to why you are asking this question at all seeing as you have already answered it: potatoes. 

At least this would be the answer if you had not neglected to mention that the 3 year-old daughter of the 32 year-old daughter does not in fact eat everything; she does not eat potatoes.  There is no reason to force the other guests to abide by her strict dietary needs, so I would still recommend pan-fried potatoes, perhaps with servings of fruit, toast, and yogurt on the side to appease your fickle guest.

Coffee, of course, is expected.

Also, you have the date wrong.  Two of the four will likely be there on the 23rd, but the other two will not be arriving until the morning of the 24th as part of a Christmas miracle.

 dear foodthoughtz

I am really confused. What are you wearing in this picture?

your sister

Dear Inquisitor,

First of all, I am going to assume that your sign off as “your sister” was meant as a ruse to trick me into addressing this response to “Dear Sister.”  It did not work.

To answer your question, it’s a dusty pink boyfriend-style women’s shirt from the Gap that I bought on sale in Spokane.  It’s weird that the style of shirt is called “the boyfriend” given that these shirts are so lesbian-y.  I'm wearing a charcoal-grey cardigan overtop, purchased at the Gap Factory Outlet Store in Toronto.

I assume this question was meant as an insult, but it fell flat because I love this shirt.  In the future, please limit yourself to food-related questions.

EveryBurger Chocolate Biscuits

When I found these in an international food store (yes, in Lethbridge), they were nestled between two different kinds of ramen.  The only clue I had to go on was their name, EveryBurger, and that there were “two inside.”  But even these snippets of information seemed to raise more questions than they answered. 

I’ve never been seized so firmly by a desire, nay!, need, to know what something is.  And so in a moment of reckless passion, I purchased the only box of EveryBurger available in the store — possibly the entire world.

For a short time I worried they might be a savoury treat rather than a sweet one, or even a weird kind of burger-flavoured bouillon cube; they were, after all, in the ramen aisle.  When I opened the box, I discovered two individually foil-wrapped containers. Ah-ha! A portion of the mystery solved: the “two inside” marked on the box clearly referred to the number of packages, rather than the total number of EveryBurgers in the box.  My prayers were answered when I carefully ripped open the foil and slid out a plastic tray: the “burger” filling was undoubtedly chocolate; the bun was undoubtedly a kind of sweet biscuit (similar to the ChocoBoy mushrooms but denser, and because it had some sort of glaze on it, the biscuit was not quite as crunchy as the ChocoBoy) peppered with some other kind of sweet meant to represent sesame seeds.


It’s hard not to compare these EveryBurgers with the ChocoBoy mushrooms, and invariably the ChocoBoy mushrooms come out on top.  Like the ChocoBoy mushrooms, I really loved the shape of these sweet little snacks. As you can tell from the photos, they’re actually quite realistic, and although they were certainly tasty, it’s their shape that really sets them apart from other chocolate/biscuit combos.  But when it comes to munching pleasure, they just couldn’t compete with ChocoBoy.  The main factor is the quality of chocolate: ChocoBoy was simply better.  Of course the quality of chocolate is important when enjoying a chocolatey snack, but what really stuck out for me was the design.  EveryBurger just had too much biscuit, and the biscuit also wasn’t of the same calibre of ChocoBoy.  So the process of eating a chocolate mushroom that I laid out in the previous post and that was so enjoyable for me, just wasn’t there with the EveryBurger.  It felt like just eating a generic cookie.  Like one of those tea biscuits or something.

I don’t want anyone to think that I didn’t wholeheartedly enjoy these little baby burgers.  They tasted pretty good and their form really was divine.  I really took a leap of faith when I purchased them, but you know what, sometimes taking a risk really pays off.

I really struggled with whether or not to put these EveryBurgers in under the Cartoon Food Update.  After all, they really look like Jughead’s burgers—more so than the gummy burgers.  But I guess what stopped me is that now my idea of “cartoon food” as a genre of food is so wholly wrapped up in the idea of gummy food that I just couldn’t bring myself to include these chocolate and biscuit burger cookies.

Here's me immediately after I found the EveryBurgers.

UPDATE:

I now have a direct line to EveryBurger.  They can be purchased at the same Korean grocery mentioned in the post about chocolatey biscuits.

 Few things in life have worked me up into such a fervor
As these chocolate filled biscuits in the shape of a burger.
I didn’t know what it was, but I had to find out
Whether savoury or sweet, I had to eradicate doubt.
EveryBurger is not like every burger that I would eat
Their patties are chocolate—not made of meat.

But inspite of this flaw, they're still just as sweet.

Cartoon Food Update

When my sista and I arrived in Calgary from Montreal, we drove through the hamlet of Nanton on our way to Lethbridge.  That there’s an antique-style candy store in Nanton comes as no surprise, but that they had one of the most well-stocked sections of gummy candy that looks like food was unexpected and ultimately bittersweet. 

Okay, so the selection wasn't that great, but still, I had never seen these before.  The "Lunch Bag" collection wasn't too
exciting because, with the exception of the hotdog and fries, I had already see all these candies before (there are two
Coke bottles obscured by the "Lunch Bag" text).  I have to admit that the fries were a really exciting find, though.  By
no means was the Lunch Bag collection a disappointment, but the Mexican collection was especially fun, if not slightly
disgusting. I'm not sure why there's a hotdog in there. It also comes with two corns and two peppers.

You know that feeling when something is so powerful and overwhelming that you’re certain it could happen only once in a lifetime?  And the whole time it’s happening to you you’re playing Celine Dion’s video of “A New Day Has Come” in your head and watching the camera pan around her as she stands in the clouds looking down on the world like the angel that she is?  But then that exact same experience happens again, and it almost cheapens the initial experience?  As if someone with a much weaker voice was now singing “A New Day Has Come”?  You know?  But at the same time, you’ve been here already, you know how great this can be, and to be lucky enough for something great to happen to you twice, let alone once, is really phenomenal and humbling.  These are the thoughts that were rushing through my head when I saw the different gummy candies available in the Nanton candy shop.

I don't want to spend any more time talking about these gummies, so I thought I would just provide a series of photos and perhaps make a few brief comments.

Here are the burgers from the Lunch Box series. Nothing we haven't all seen before.

The fries are new to me, however, and really appreciated.  One thing
that I think is really special about the fries is the sour sugar coating,
meant to stand in for salt.  Without it, they would have been just
gross strands of yellow gummy.  The cardboard fry container
is a really nice touch, too.

Here's the hotdog. I think it's a pretty decent representation, but sometimes these gummy
foods can really suffer when the makers put too much emphasis on condiments. 
I think I would have preferred just the hotdog and bun--just like in real life.

I stand by my original criticism of the gummy pizza, but one detail I really appreciate is that the pizza actually is in
five separate slices.  And, actually, that one mushroom looks pretty good.

Here they are all together, including the cola bottle which I didn't
provide an individual picture of because we've all seen it before.

Moving on to the Mexican collection, these peppers were probably the biggest
disappointment of the pack.  I'm not sure why. They felt like a lazy afterthought to me.

The corn was a really nice surprise for me. I really didn't see that coming.  I worried that I wouldn't enjoy eating
them because they were made of that weird marshmallow candy, but they were actually pretty good.

Now we're getting into the exciting additions to the Mexican collection.  This tortilla is pretty disgusting
to look at, but I'm not sure where the happy medium would lie between this and the pizza. The
pizza is way too busy, and as a result loses the simply quality that cartoon food needs in order to be
appealing.  But this tortilla is too plain.  I think that Trolli missed out on a really great opportunity to
make something special, and the vegetables are obviously way too globular.  That being said, without it,
the Mexican collection would have really been lacking.

Along with the tortilla, this Chili con Carne is the other big draw of the Mexican collection.
It's really disgusting to look at, but a neat detail is that it comes in a little plastic "cast iron"
serving pan.  I could not bring myself to eat this.  One lingering question I had after unpacking
the Mexican pack is why wasn't there a taco included?  But then I remembered that for some
strange reason, there is a hotdog, and now I am thinking that the hotdog was probably intended
to function as a taco.  At any rate, I think that was a pretty major oversight and lost opportunity.

These Weird Chocolate Mushroom Shaped Biscuits

If the purpose of this blog is to create and maintain a catalogue of all the foods I have encountered, and a brief note on whether I will eat (or will eat again) that food, then let this post be one loud, resounding YES!!!

I bought these tasty treats in Lethbridge, Alberta.  I know what you’re thinking: Alberta? Lethbridge?  When did Alberta—let alone the rural southern part of Alberta—become such a trendsetter and the epicentre of novelty foodstuffs vaguely resembling non-novelty foodstuffs?  The easy answer is whenever the Real Canadian Superstore opened in Lethbridge, but the more accurate answer is whenever the Asian market found out about southern Alberta.

I was tempted to lump this, along with a few other recently discovered gems, under a generic “cartoon food update” header and be done with it.  But there’s something about these ChocoBoy chocolate mushrooms that sets them apart … and I think it’s the chocolate.  These biscuits really
don’t resemble food in the way the gummi burgers did, so I decided to treat them (along with the EveryBurger, coming up soon) separately.  The most important thing to keep in mind, which is something that I hope I stressed in the Cartoon Food post is that cartoon food (I mean that is onTV, not what you can buy in stores) sets a standard for that entire food.  For me, a cartoon mushroom must always be a white mushroom and always be on a pizza.  You know what mushrooms I'm talking about.

There are a lot of things I really liked about this snack.  For starters, I love the milk chocolate and biscuit combination.  It’s a pairing I really got into when I was in France—yes, France—and lived almost exclusively off of those biscuits with a thick layer of milk chocolate on top.   There’s something about the fusion of firm milk chocolate with crunchy biscuit that’s just … so … satisfying.  At first you might think the milk chocolate is too firm, but you would be mistaken.  Pushing down on that chocolately bulb is almost like plunging a French press: you get the same soft compression and slow resistance.  And just as you’re two rows of teeth are getting close to meeting, you snap the brittle biscuit because that tension—albeit slow, and albeit soft—has been building up and is finally released when it comes into contact with the biscuit. 

The second reason I really liked these choco-mushrooms is because they’re shaped like mushrooms.  In terms of balancing the biscuit-chocolate ratio, a mushroom design does make sense: it’s really nice to have all of the chocolate concentrated in one area so that you can decide which part, the chocolate or the biscuit, that you would like to really focus on and savour.  But on the other hand, isn’t it so weird to make a little cookie shaped like a mushroom?  And not even a normal white mushroom, but one of those weird, wild, really phallic mushrooms? Like, what a weird choice for a cookie.  But you know what? It works.  And it especially works for someone like me who would never actually eat a mushroom (or would I?).

The third great thing about this product is the packaging.  I remember going into the Shell when I was younger and being so jealous that they had entire box displays of Baby Bottle Pop or Ring Pop.  Until I realized you could just buy all that stuff in Costco, I really thought that it was a sign of success to have the display box.  These ChocoBoy mushrooms come in a similar display box, but obviously were not designed to be sold in the same way as Ring Pops (in part because there are too few in a box, but also because they’re all just loose in there and that would be disgusting).  At any rate, the packaging was a nice little bonus.  They didn’t have to do that, and you know, I really like when companies say to themselves (or so I imagine), “You know, we really don’t have to do this.  But I tell you what — I bet there’s a little girl out there who’s really going to appreciate it.”  (This is actually how I imagine a lot of businesses working.)  And this goes without saying, but the cartoon versions of the mushrooms on the packaging really wet my appetite.  At first I thought there was no way the real cookies would be anything like the depiction on the box, but then I opened the box and was like, wow, these cookies are really similar to this depiction.

Overall, this was a really positive experience for me.


UPDATE: 
A fellow food hero has already written about these and it turns out the ChocoBoy (a Korean company) chocolate mushrooms are a knock-off of the Japanese Kinoko No Yama cookies, which have been in circulation since 1975 and, according to the author, have been the leader in the "'sweets that look like mushrooms' market."  What is it with all these amazing food blogs lately?


FURTHER UPDATE:

After reading about an entire world of chocolatey biscuits that I didn't even know existed, I used the internet to track down a cache of Japanese snacks.  I discovered that the Korean supermarket a block away also carried Japanese products, and so I hotfooted it over and bought the following:

I also bought a box of the meiji Kinoko No Yama chocolate mushrooms, but they're not in the picture because I
gobbled them up immediately. A picture of the empty package will follow.  From left to right: some Japanese chocolatey biscuit in the shape of what I assume are pinecones (by meiji); some Japanese chocolatey biscuit in the shape of tree trunks (by meiji); a Korean chocolatey biscuit in the shape of koalas and called "Koala's March" (by Lotte).

And here's a picture of meiji's Kinoko No Yama, which I believe translates to "mushroom mountain."

Here are some pictures of the tree stumps:

The interior of the carton is similar to EveryBurger: two foil-wrapped plastic trays full of cookies.  The others only
haveone large foil pouch, which you will see later on.

Here's a closeup of the biscuits themselves.

And now the pinecones:

The opened package.

The individual biscuits.  These were my least favourite of all the snacks, and it definitely had to do with the biscuit
part,which was much more crumbly than the others. It almost had an artificial nutty taste.

The actual biscuit in comparison to how they are presented on the packaging.  I wish they would have included marzipan
facial hair and sunglasses on the actual biscuits.

Last but not least, Koala March:

And finally, Lotte's "Koala March," which I haven't tried yet, but
am really excited to open. Apparently all of the koalas are different,
and there's even an "appendicitis panda," although I believe
it is quite rare.

A brief note on my experiences: The link posted above to serious eats is a taste test between ChocoBoy's mushroom biscuits and meiji's Kinoko No Yama. The taste test revealed ChocoBoy to be the better biscuit, despite a general consensus that Kinoko No Yama is better quality. What sealed the deal in favour of ChocoBoy was the taste of the biscuit, which is a lot sweeter than Kinoko No Yama. My impression is that while both are great, I too must side with ChocoBoy. Unlike the taste testers at serious eats, I didn't really discern any difference in the quality of the two chocolates, but I definitely did prefer the ChocoBoy biscuit stems. One point in favour of Kinoko No Yama (although this might just be an issue of shopping) is that there were fewer broken biscuits.

Next I tried the tree stumps, which taste nearly identical to the meiji mushrooms. I love them for their novelty factor -- seriously, tree stumps? -- but ultimately I preferred the shape of the mushrooms when it comes to actually eating the biscuits. What I don't like about the tree stumps is that you pretty much have to take bites that are both chocolate and biscuit, whereas I like to be the master of my own destiny when it comes to what section of the cookie is in my mouth at what time.

Finally, I tried the pinecones and as I mentioned in one of the photo captions, these were my least favourite. The biscuit was decidedly different from the others, and I didn't enjoy it nearly as much. What I think I would have liked a lot more is if they had made the biscuit a hollow cylinder because I think I would really enjoy lodging the point against the back of my front teeth, and then crushing the pinecone by forcing my tongue into the hollow cookie.

I have yet to try the Koala March biscuits, but it is my understanding that they are merely the Korean version of the meiji pandas, which I have had and which I really, really liked. I've always been a fan of cookies that are chocolate pockets, which is exactly what these are. The added bonus is that each cookie has a printed image of, in this case, a koala. Apparently each koala is different, so I will be sure to update this post with some individual pictures of the biscuits themselves.

And finally, to close things out, here's the poem that was missing from the original post:

So you have a selective eating disorder, what could be worse?
What sins did your parents commit to burden you with this curse?

You won’t eat sandwiches, salads, or fettuccine alfredo.
You won’t eat red pepper, beet, cucumber, or tomato.
But do not despair; there’s more to this world.
There’s the entire Far East just waiting to be unfurled.
Korea has ChocoBoy, the chocolate-capped mushrooms
And Japan has Meiji, with its entire forest in bloom:
Mushrooms, and pinecones, and tree stumps — oh my!
A whole new world of chocolately biscuits for you to try!