Smarties, revisited

A few days ago an Easter care package arrived from my mum. First of all, it’s probably worth mentioning that included in the care packaged, amongst the home baked cookies, the flax corn chips, and the chocolate easter eggs, were two hair brushes. I now own five hairbrushes. But there was also a bulk bag of Easter-themed Smarties. Easter-themed Smarties are just Smarties, but with only “Easter” colours—if you can even call them colours now that the artificial colouring agents have been removed.

Readers may remember a highly critical review I once wrote about Smarties and how they’re essentially garbage now that Nestle has opted to only use natural colouring agents. I adamantly believed that the best part about Smarties was the taste of the artificial colours. And for the most part, I still stand by this assessment. Any time I have tried to eat the post-2009 Smarties that come either in boxes or holiday-themed packaging, I’ve always been disappointed. But I have to admit that these bulk Smarties were pretty good, even without the artificial colours. I don’t know if this okay-ness is specific only to bulk Smarties or what, but yeah, they were pretty good. They still weren’t as good as the old Smarties, and they certainly looked like they had already been sucked on so that their former bright colours are obscured by the melting chocolate, but yeah. I don’t know. They were pretty good.

I don’t know what this means for me or anyone, but 2015 might be the year that I rediscover Smarties. I also want to add, just as a point of interest, that one time I bought a Halloween pack of mini Smarties because it wasn’t mentioned anywhere explicitly that they were made only with natural colours, and I hoped that I discovered a cache of probably expired Smarties, still featuring the artificial colours. But I was wrong, and I was disappointed.

Ultimately that these bulk Smarties tasted better than their packaged counterpart comes as no surprise. Bulk Smarties from Overwaitea have always been the best Smarties.

In case you're wondering, yes I did manage to pick up a copy of Jonathan Safran Foer's Tree of Codes, published by
Visual Editions  (VE2) in 2010 and now out of print.

Phoenix Mountain Pizza Bun

I don’t know exactly how many of my readers are familiar with Phoenix Ski Hill Pizza Buns (probably all of them because I am fairly certain that I am my only reader), but they are the best thing. They are also somewhat of a scientific anomaly because they cannot be reproduced outside of the Phoenix kitchen. I’m not exactly sure what that means for science, but I do know what that means for me, and that is that approximately once a year I get to feast on one of the most delicious foods ever concocted.

Here's the pizza bun that I made for myself on January 4, 2015. It was delicious. The only way it could have been
improved is if it had been prepared on double bun bottoms, instead of a top and a bottom. Every pizza bun
aficionado knows that the best pizza buns come on a double bottom.

Pizza buns are literally just buns with pizza sauce and melted cheddar cheese on top. Back when I first started eating pizza buns, the cheese was just plain orange cheddar, but now it's Tex-Mex shredded cheese, which has really served to improve their quality and appearance. They are typically served with two round pickles, but I learned early on to order mine without, and when I was old enough to work in the Phoenix kitchen and make my own pizza buns, I obviously omitted them.

I also made, what I believe to be, a few crucial improvements to the traditional pizza bun when making one for myself. First, and most importantly, I usually try to make them on two bottom bun halves, rather than a top half and a bottom half. I find that the toppings-to-bun ratio is slightly off with the top half, and that the bottom half is always much more satisfying. Secondly, although not evident in the above photograph, I try to leave them in the toaster oven slightly longer than usual because I like to get a nice browning effect on the top.

Here's the more traditional pizza bun with the pickles. Unfortunately it is
accompanied by a disgusting dish of loaded nachos with pizza sauce
ON THE NACHOS. I made those too.

I don't know a single person who has skied Phoenix since they were little who did not consistently order a pizza bun for lunch. I didn't even know there was anything else on the menu until much later. I've worked in the Phoenix kitchen for the past 11 years—at least one or two days a year—and the most striking change is the sharp decline in pizza bun orders. Presumably there is no correlation between my time working there and their unpopularity, but what are these kids thinking? There is nothing on the menu (anywhere, not just Phoenix) that is better and more satisfying than a pizza bun.

Pro Tip: Try to order them later in the day when the toaster oven is so full of grease that grease actually gets baked into the bun. Delicious.

Kids these days don't know what they've shunned:

There's nothing better than a Phoenix pizza bun.

Just a bun and some sauce and some melted cheese—

The Phoenix pizza bun will never displease.

Individual Yogurt Cups

You guys. Something has changed. I’ve started bringing individual yogurt cups for my lunch, and I don’t know how to feel about it. I used to have them when I was in elementary school and loved them. They were a perfect amount of yogurt for me, but they were also these Dairyland yogurts with the fruit on the bottom (peach was, obviously, the best one, but strawberry wasn’t bad either) and those ones are no longer available. But now I’m not sure what role these yogurts could continue to play in my life. I’m bringing two yogurt cups for lunch because one is no longer enough for me. They’re really tedious to eat, and I am afraid that I tend to throw out a lot of the yogurt just because it’s difficult to access to it in all the nooks and crannies of that small container. Would it not be better to buy a large tub of yogurt and redistribute it to other containers that better suit my needs? Well, probably, yes. And that is what I had done throughout the summer. But then there are all these individual cups of yogurts that were 50% off at Loblaws, so I just went for it.

This yogurt expired two weeks ago.
Still eating it.

I guess I don’t regret it. I don’t hate eating yogurt out of a tiny cup designed for a baby. But I don’t love it either. I guess one good part is that I bought one pack of 16 yogurts and got 8 different flavours. I would probably buy the individual cups again if they were 50% off again, otherwise I think I will just get a big tub. Or who knows? Maybe I’ll take a break from yogurt for a while. There are a lot of directions this could go. Well, there are three. There are three different directions this could go.

Anyway, whatever. I’m sorry for this post. It’s truly terrible. School is starting to ramp up and I don’t really have time to Food Thoughtz anymore.

Is it reasonable as an adult to sup
On fruit-flavoured yogurt from a tiny little cup?
Or can it only be considered as far too juvenile
To gel with my new professional style?

Borscht

Look. I don't need you to tell me that there is no discernible structure of reason or meaning underlying my food choices. I know that already: I am a rogue palate. But early on in my life I constructed some general guidelines that served as justification for certain decisions regarding what I would or would not eat. At the broadest level, these include rules like "no mixed food" and "individuals servings of one food cannot come into contact with other individual servings of another food." There are multiple and obvious exceptions to these very general rules: I love spaghetti bolognese, I love hamburgers, I'm generally okay with baked goods which are typically, by nature, a mix of various ingredients. But perhaps the most surprising and flagrant exception to these rules is my love for and devotion to borscht.

Borscht from the USCC. Thank you, graduating class of whatever.

Before we get started, a general note of caution to all the Ukrainians out there: what you refer to as borscht is not borscht. It is two different colours of puke layered on top of each other. When I say borscht, what I am referring to is Grand Forks Doukhobour borscht and nothing else. I also have no patience for that watery vegetable substance that I believe some non-Doukhobour Russian peasants incorrectly classify as borscht.

Grand Forks borscht is made up of 100% cream, 100% cabbage, and about 30% of other vegetables, like potato and carrots, equaling 230% of all of the deliciousness in the entire world. Sometimes there is also dill. Given the makeup of this soup, there is 0% reason for me to like it. I hate cabbage and I don't think that dairy has any place in a soup. But for whatever reason, it just works. I can't figure out if it's because I started eating it at an age before I began to develop a capacity for reason, or if it's just because it's that good. Probably a little from column A and mostly from column B.

There has always been a tradition in Grand Forks of arguments amongst Doukhobours about whose baba makes the best borscht. As someone with no Doukhobour ancestry, I can say with objective and indifferent certainty that the USCC ladies make, hands down, the best borscht in Grand Forks--no exceptions. That borscht is delicious. This is not to say that there aren't other perfectly acceptable borscht recipes floating around Grand Forks. There are. Of course there are. The Grand Forks Hotel used to throw together a decent borscht, there's always some nice looking borscht for sale at the Farmers Market, Megan makes delicious borscht, and every once in a while there will be a great (both in volume and quality) jar of borscht in my mum's fridge, courtesy of one of her friends. All that aside, none of these will ever compare with the borscht on offer at the few and far between borscht feeds at the USCC. I have long maintained that the only reason Grand Forks Secondary School should continue to exist is because inevitably the grad class of whatever year will organize a borscht feed, and hopefully it will coincide with my visit home.

Here's a picture of some borscht that I
discovered in our fridge at home. A
very welcome and pleasant surprise.

It would be unfortunate to finish this post without mentioning the delicious, thick, pillowy Doukhobour bread that accompanies borscht. That bread is the best. It is so good. It's so much better when slathered with about an inch of butter that then melts into the borscht when you dip it in. Pro Tip: the only way to eat borscht is to sop up all the liquid with two slices of break from the outset, and then finish up the stew-like, cabbage-heavy remainders.

There is nothing in this world that I love more 

Than the borscht prepared by an old Doukhobour. 

Frankenberry Cereal

I've been lusting after a box of Frankenberry cereal ever since I can remember. There were always advertisements for it on American TV channels, but as far as I could tell, the cereal was either never sold in Canada or my mum refused to buy it for me (which seems somewhat unlikely, considering the amount of Lucky Charms I used to eat).

But tonight all of my wildest dreams came true and I bought a box of Frankenberry cereal that was on-sale at Metro. This, along with Count Chocula (another cereal that seemed to only be available to American audiences, but one that admittedly never appealed to me in the same way as Frankenberry), are back for a limited time, presumably coinciding with Halloween. These were part of a monster-themed collection of breakfast cereals produced by General Mills in the 1970s.  Others in the series include Boo-Berry and Fruity Yummy Mummy, both of which I would really like to try, but which I think have been discontinued even though they were briefly revived in 2013.

You can see here that there are about 3 marshmallows
to a bowl of cereal. Pathetic, but also kind of welcome
because the marshmallows are not very good.

 Despite what any sane-minded individual would think approaching this cereal, Frankberries are actually delicious. They taste really similar to Cap'n Crunch's Crunch Berries (also, as far as I know, not available in Canada, but one of my favourites). There are marshmallow bits in there, but I can't figure out why because the cereal-to-marshmallow ratio is terrible.

I guess if this cereal was readily available all of the time, I probably wouldn't eat it--at least not very often. It's good, but it's not as good as Lucky Charms or even Honeycomb or Golden Grahams. It's still a pretty good children's cereal. I like how sweet it is because even though it's good, it's too sweet to have more than one bowl at a time, which is always the problem I have with Lucky Charms. I'm really glad I went for it tonight though, because wanting to try this cereal is something that has been bothering me since I was about four years old, and now I can finally put that to rest.

Even though Count Chocula doesn't really appeal to me (I've never been too crazy about chocolatey cereals, but would definitely still eat them if provided for free), I think I will probably pick up a box if it becomes available.

So, that's it. That's my experience of eating Frankenberry cereal. It was a really solid cereal experience.

Oh. It might also be worth mentioning that when Frankenberry first hit store shelves in 1972, it contained a kind of pink dye that couldn't be broken down by a human body, so it turned poos pink. (Note: the "Embarrassing After Effects" tag refers to this).

Also, in all seriousness, has anyone ever completed any of the puzzles/games on the back of cereal boxes by actually filling in the blanks with pen? Because I never did. I always completed the mazes or matching puzzles, but I never actually wrote on the box. I wondered about this again because of the activity on the back of the Frankenberry box, which, let me just say, is a pretty lame activity for a box of cereal that is only released once a year.

As a child, the cereals I dreamed of were always American

The Canadian counterparts paled by comparison.

Several years later, my dream has come true:

I have an entire box of Frankenberry to munch through!

Remembrance of Tacos Lost

Remember that time I tried a taco and really liked it? Well, within a week of that positive experience I tried another taco and it was disgusting. I recently found pictures of the experience.

 This is what they looked like. Gross, right? Raw onion and cilantro?

And here's a picture of me eating one.

And here's another. I think I ate three in total.

Frosted Mini-Wheats Cereal

This is probably the highest level of
frosting I've ever seen on a Mini-Wheat.

I used to eat this cereal quite a bit when I was younger, but then one day I stopped and to this day I am not entirely sure why.  Prompted by a reader’s recent comment on the Lucky Charms post, I decided to investigate the matter further and I bought a box of Kellog's Mini-Wheats cereal (the frosted kind).

Like most other cereals, I used to eat these without milk.  I would typically skin the frosting off with my teeth before tackling the wheat square.  This is probably because there’s so little frosting for so much wheat that it seemed like a waste to not savour the frosting in some way.  The wheat squares were usually pretty difficult to swallow on their own because they’re so dry, but I was never driven to trying them with milk.

Until last night.

In hindsight, one of the reasons that I may have abandoned mini-wheats cereal is because they actually were pretty difficult to eat and always scratched at my throat on the way down.  I was pleasantly surprised to discover that this is not the case when eaten with milk, but I still don’t think I’ll be reintroducing them into my diet any time soon.  I mean, they were okay, but they were just okay.  Eating them seemed more like a necessary chore than an enjoyable pass time.  Even though the frosting ratio is really hit or miss with mini-wheats (someone should really talk to quality control about that because it's been a problem for forever), it was definitely less of an issue with milk than it is if they’re plain.

I guess Kellogg's recently re-branded
Mini-Wheats, and the result is
even worse than the original.

I also always found the mascot to be kind of lazy.  Lucky Charms has Lucky, Trix has the rabbit, Froot Loops has Toucan Sam, Honey-Nut Cheerios has the bee, Cap'n Crunch as the Captain... And Mini-Wheats has... what?  A wheat-square with a cartoon face slapped on it?  C'mon, Kellogg's.  Does that mascot even have a name? Lazy, lazy, lazy.

Of course I'm still going to finish off the box.  They're perfectly fine to eat, but I guess what I'm realizing is that with so many other cereals out there, these just aren't worth the effort or the cost.

I used to eat mini-wheats, but then I ceased;
They were never really a food worth the feast.

Lucky Charms

I have always loved Lucky Charms cereal — presumably just like every other child always has because it’s not even cereal, just marshmallows and sugar-coated crunchy-pieces that pay lip-service to the idea of “cereal.” When I would have a bowl of Lucky Charms, I would spend twenty minutes painstakingly picking out and eating the cereal bits until I was left with a bowl of marshmallows. The appeal of eating the marshmallows on their own has always been that the marshmallows are firm in their structure, but offer no resistance when you bite into them. There has always been a bit of a thrill in biting a marshmallow and half, and then examining its cross-section. Sometimes I would put a marshmallow—usually a red balloon, because they were my favourite—in my mouth and suck on it until it disintegrated. It’s a different experience than letting chocolate or a popsicle melt in your mouth because you can actually feel individual bits of sugar coming loose from the balloon until nothing is left. These two approaches to eating the marshmallows is contingent on their dryness.

Here's a screenshot of a picture I uploaded to Instagram of the first bowl of Lucky Charms that I ate after buying the
box, including a caption lambasting all of the fools who have eaten Lucky Charms with milk.

Here's a picture of what's left after
picking out the cereal bits.

One time, I think in the summer of 2006, I spent an entire day eating all of the cereal bits so that I could make a ball of all of the marshmallows in a single box of Lucky Charms and bite into it like an apple. It once occurred to me that I should just pick out the marshmallows and throw out the rest, but I realized that one of the best parts is the delayed satisfaction of eating all of those marshmallows all at once. This method of eating Lucky Charms taught me that if you work hard for something, the payoff will be that much sweeter than if you just go straight for the reward. For the record, I have not carried this life philosophy over to any other aspect of my life.

I typically always ate cold cereal dry. Rice Krispies is probably the only cold cereal that I consistently ate with milk (always with sliced up banana and a bit of sugar), and to this day, I have never had Cheerios, Golden Grahams, or Honeycomb cereal in milk. The thought of cereal and milk never disgusted me, but I was always certain that it would take away some crucial element from the cereal. I thought of it as a practice that was widely accepted, but never closely examined. I have always thought that cereal is best when it’s crunchy and that its crunchiness was central to its very identity. While I had often entertained the idea of eating my cereal in milk, I never did because I have always been a firm believer in sticking with what you know and what you know you like. Even if something turns out to be not bad, why waste that one experience when you know for sure that it could be as good as it has always been? For the record, this is a life philosophy that I have carried over to every other aspect of my life.

You can tell this is a store brand cereal
because the flakes are a much lower
quality than I have come to expect
from the branded cereals.

Things began to change when I went to Europe—the land of self-discovery—in 2005. I bought an 8€ box of Special K Red Berries and I had it with milk. Although I had had Special K Red Berries without milk in the past and really enjoyed eating those dried strawberries, after having a bite of my friend’s cereal, I realized that the strawberries only improved when they were soaked in milk and had the opportunity to soften up a bit. It was also around this time that I made the crucial switch from skim milk to homo, and while I still prefer skim milk for drinking, homo really is the best when it comes to cereal or milk in your coffee. The next cereal I tried in milk was something like NesQuik. It went over really well because on one hand, it turns the milk into chocolate milk, and on the other hand, those chocolate balls were always too dense and too hard to really enjoy. The milk softened them up an appropriate amount.

Ever since, I have been on a bit of a cereal-with-milk tear. As I mentioned, I still eat cereals like Golden Grahams and Cheerios without milk, but I’ve introduced a lot of new and exciting cereals into my repertoire as well—all of which I eat with milk. Over the past few years, I’ve really gotten into Kashi, Vector, Raisin Bran and any cereal that has dried berries in it (Jordans Morning Crisp, Honey Bunches of Oats with Strawberries, or the store-brand take on Special K Red Berries).

Lucky Charms is something that I’ve eaten less and less of over the years. Every once in a while it will go on sale so I’ll pick up a box, but in general, it’s just not a part of my diet anymore. There are probably a few reasons for this. Part of it has to do with how expensive it is, but more importantly, having a bowl of dry cereal has always been a mindless snacking activity for me. I eat it when I am watching tv or doing school work. I don’t want to have to focus on what it is I’m eating, and Lucky Charms is a cereal that, if you’re eating it dry, you have to give it your full attention. So it came as a bit of surprise to me when I picked up a box at Metro the other day (it was on sale for $2.99, down from the usual $5.50), but I was really excited to tuck into it.

At first I ate it as I always have. I poured a bowl, painstakingly picked out and ate the cereal bits, spent some time appreciating the beauty of all the colourful marshmallows alone in the bowl, and then gobbled them up. R was in the kitchen with me at the time and mentioned that his parents would never buy him Lucky Charms, but that sometimes his grandmother would. When I said that I never eat them with milk, he said that he had always enjoyed them with milk and that he would try to eat the cereal bits first because they were best when crunchy, but that the marshmallows really improved when saturated in milk.

On the cusp of trying something new. I regret getting rid of that box
because I could really use a new toque right now.

And then something happened. I don’t know what. I wanted to try it. I poured myself another bowl, added milk, and prepared for the worst. My main concern was that I would have less control over the cereal once it was sloshing around in a bowl of milk. I wouldn’t be able to pick out the cereal bits very easily, and I knew that I would inevitably miss some. I knew, going into it, that there would be times when I would have to eat spoonfuls that contained both cereal and marshmallow, and although I wasn’t thrilled by the idea, something—some force outside myself—urged me on. It will probably come as no surprise that I liked it. I really liked it. I’m still not sure if I like it more than having it dry, but I do like it. I liked it enough to rush out and buy another box to do the whole thing over again.

Something changed in me that day. It wasn’t life altering, but more like a little sliver of doubt entering my consciousness. I was so sure about Lucky Charms. So sure. I knew how I liked it; I was so certain that it could never be better. I’m not sure that it is better, but I think it’s probably just as good. My approach to food has always been premised on a strict hierarchical system. There is a very small group of food that I like, and within that group, I have always been adamant that there is a singular best way to enjoy that food. Potatoes are best fried; pasta is best with bolognese; broccoli and cauliflower are best with cheese. There are, of course, other ways I will eat these foods. I like potatoes baked in an oven or mashed, and I like pasta with either just cheese or sometimes just butter, and I like broccoli and cauliflower steamed plain or with butter, or sometimes even raw. But there is always, always, a “best” way to enjoy these foods. What’s different about Lucky Charms is that I’m worried that I like them with milk as much as I like them plain.

What does that mean for me and my diet? What if postmodernist theory was right? What if there is no such thing as a singular truth? That it’s all a construction? That there’s more than one approach to something, and that one is not necessarily more valuable than another? It’s an exciting time in my life right now, but also frightening. Does my experience with Lucky Charms gesture towards a flattening out of my diet, a horizontal expansion that knows no bounds? And where will I go from here? How will I ever approach a box of Lucky Charms ever again? How will I know how to eat it? How can I ever be certain of what I want ever again? The future is marred by uncertainty, and I have never been more afraid in my entire life.

Ever since it happened, news has spread like wildfire throughout Toronto.

I've approached my diet with unflinching certainty:

Confidence in my taste is central to my identity.

To experiment with food was an impossibility,

And Lucky Charms with milk was an incomprehensibility.

That I liked it suggests potential dietary malleability,

And more frighteningly yet, that singular truth is a fragility. 

What if trying new things is within my capability?

Does this signal towards a new versatility?

The Pea

Nothing else from my childhood elicited as much excitement and pleasure as the first ripe peas in the garden. My appetite for peas was insatiable. I keenly remember being woken up by my mother, cooing softly that the peas were ready, and then immediately devouring every last one of them. When all the ripe and passably ripe peas had been eaten, I moved on to the totally unripe peas, and sometimes just chewed on the empty pods. My left thumb was green throughout summer, not because I have ever had any inclination towards gardening, but because the process of popping open a shell and scraping out the peas into your open palm will invariably dye your thumb green.

No amount of words will ever be able to communicate just how much I love fresh peas from the garden.  I was tempted to record myself making frustrated grunting noises because I think that sound is probably the only thing that could accurately capture how I feel about peas.  But I don’t know how to do that.  And it also would be really weird if there were just sounds of my grunting floating around on the internet.  In lieu of that, here are some things I want to do with peas:

• Collect a lot of peas—still in their pod—in a bag and sit down with them and eat them.  I want for there to be so many peas that it becomes a mechanized routine: select a pod from the bag; pop open with thumb and index finger; slide out the peas with my thumb and cup them in my hand; put all of them in my mouth at one time; discard the empty pod into the empties pile.

• Shell a bunch of peas and refrain from eating them.  Pool all of the loose peas in a large serving bowl and then slowly submerge my hand into the loose peas and feel them slip through my fingers.  Then select one beautiful pea, and crush it between my teeth.  Then eat all of the peas in handfulls.

• Get a large bowl of loose peas.  Put my lips really close to the surface of the peas and then suck them up like a vacuum cleaner.

• Hold a bunch of peas in the palm of my hand, but keep my palm as flat as would be possible to still hold the peas.  Then eat them out of the palm of my own hand like how a horse eats things out of the palms of hands.

Isn't it crazy to think that I've never had a single lesson on Photoshop?
And that I don't even have Photoshop on my computer? Right?!

Recent scholarly pursuits have brought my attention to the play Woyzcek by Büchner. In it, the titular character goes insane and murders the mother of his child, partially because due to a scientific experiment, his diet consisted only of peas. I know that time is not on our side, but Büchner, are you seriously not reading this blog? Don’t you realize that a strict pea diet could only lead to a life of pleasure and unmeasurable happiness? Don’t you understand that to consume a pea is to conjure up all of your loveliest childhood moments and to journey back to a time when your only worry was awaiting the arrival of the next wave of ripened peas?

In part, I suppose, the play speaks to the dehumanizing effects of medical and military apparatuses—but at what cost? What of the harm done to the gentle pea in the process? In calling into question these governing institutions, was it really necessary to strip away the beauty of the pea and to reduce this once noble pearl of the garden to nothing but an irritable grain of sand that claws away at your brain until you inevitably murder your wife with a blade procured from a wily Jew and commit suicide in a swamp? Büchner, you monster: look into your soul. You will find that the problem is not medicine or science or the military; the problem is you.

It’s probably only fair to mention that the peas in Woyzcek were probably canned.  I mean, of course they were canned peas, right?  It’s just that I never even think of canned peas as even existing, because who even eats those? 

It’s also probably worth mentioning that when I talk about eating garden peas, I mean eating them fresh.  I’ve had cooked garden peas before, and they’re good—better than cooked frozen peas—but whenever I eat them I feel this heavy sense of loss.  They’re so much better fresh.

The oyster creates the pearl of the sea
But the pearl of the land is the ripened pea
Both are divine, natural treasures
Both bring to me the purest of pleasures
But the pearl is merely vanity,
And I must listen to my stomach when it instead demands—
The pea! The pea! The pea!

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.

Cartoon Food

The first time that I can remember experiencing an insatiable desire for an item of cartoon food was watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles when I was probably 4 or 5. I felt it again every time I read an Archie comic and saw Jughead wolfing down a platter of (thankfully plain) burgers. Is this what Plato meant by Forms? Ugh! If only I had cultivated an intimate relationship with an Ancient Philosophy scholar! Otherwise my knowledge of Plato’s notion of Forms is limited to the veritable onslaught of vague references that undergraduate English students are bound to make whenever the words “shadow,” “cave,” or “dark” pop up in a text. (If there’s anyone out there interested in getting a BA, but they don’t know what in, I suggest English literature. It is always enough to say that something reminds you of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and go no further.) Regardless of my limited understanding of the term, I will nevertheless go forth and claim that cartoon food functions as an ideal Form of food, and that no doubt Plato had the Ninja Turtles in mind when he developed his theory.

Perhaps it is a bit problematic that cartoon food necessarily followed the material objects of pizza and burgers, but because I came into consciousness after these cartoon forms had already been established, and because I have made no effort to actually understand what Plato’s theory of Forms actually entails, and because I care for no one’s relationship to food but my own, I am going to grant myself some wiggle room here. And if Plato is arguing that we only ever see the shadows on the wall and never the real thing, let me just point out that Plato (probably) did not have access to TV or Archie comics—despite my previous claim that Plato wrote The Republic during the commercial breaks of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

For me, the pizzas of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Jughead’s burgers are not simply representations of pre-existing food that we physically ingest. They are perhaps modeled on those physical foods, but in their production and through cultural dissemination, they have been transformed into the ideal (or idea) of that food, and it is precisely through their artificiality that they become an unattainable promise of reality that we must always strive towards and inevitably fall short of. It is for this reason that pizzas and burgers have never tasted as sweet on my tongue as they do in my head (or my “brain-tongue,” if you want to be scientific).

So you can imagine my delight when a Müller superstore opened up in downtown Budapest with at least a quarter of one floor devoted entirely to German candies, mostly Haribo and its cheaper cousin, Trolli. And what does Trolli make? GUMMY BURGERS THAT LOOK AS IF THEY WERE TAKEN STRAIGHT OUT OF A CARTOON. It was like stumbling out of a dark cave where I had been munching on tasteless chimeras and into a ray of light to become the Philosopher Queen I always knew myself to be.

Although either Hairbo or Trolli also makes gummy pizzas (and gummy eggs, which are somewhat appealing to me), they are too small to actually capture the form of a cartoon pizza. It’s difficult to say what exactly is so great about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ pizza beyond saying that it looks like pizza: it’s sloppy and droopy and looks delicious. The gummy pizzas, on the other hand, are little more than pink, globular, semi-triangles.

It is perhaps easier to explain what I mean through a collection of curated TMNT pictures taken from the original cartoon, the live-action movies, and a toy.

Here we have an image from the late-80s to mid-90s Turtle era.What is remarkable about this cartoon pizza is 1) its uniformity -- all pizzas in the animated series look more or less like this one; and 2) the lack of detail -- there is no effort to try and portray the different shades of cheese or pepperoni, which we all know to be part & parcel of a real pizza. The nondescript pizza allows enough blank space (this is especially true of the slightly yellow-ish cheese entirely free of shade) for us to project our own desires onto that pizza; the form is open enough to accommodate within itself our own ideal pizza. If this is pizza at its highest point of artificiality, it is also pizza at its highest point of desirability. It perhaps bears mentioning for any turtle fans that Donatello is kindly offering his slice of pizza to the viewer (or at the very least making a cheers gesture), while Michelangelo has already begun to scarf his down.

In this image we begin to see the transition from the cartoon pizza to one that retains its cartoon qualities, but is nevertheless tangible and touchable in real life. While we could no doubt hold this small plastic disc in our hands, we cannot actually eat it,* which is, of course, the main goal. Although these toy pizzas of the TMNT franchise serve as an interesting bridge of the gap between the real and the artificial, they nevertheless remain as elusive and as illusory as the pizzas on the tv screen. If anything, these pizzas might increase our frustration at the impossibility of ever actually reaching the ideal form.

Finally, here is a still from one of the live-action TMNT films and we can see how these ideal pizzas cannot be sustained in physical reality, and ultimately break down. The pizzas in these movies are no more desirable than any pizza we can acquire in real life, and ultimately probably less so since I assume that they had probably entirely cooled off during filming.

In closing, here is a series of images that was once a gif, but I don't know what gifs are, and I certainly don't know how to post them here. I think that a series of stills is actually more useful to our purposes here since we can walk through these images one by one.

In the first three panels, notice Michelangelo's infectious (to the viewer, obviously not to Donatello) joy at the anticipation of consuming this slice of pizza, which surely can only be amplified by the promise of many more (there are three pizzas in front of him).

In the fourth and fifth panels you can see him begin to unhinge his jaw like a snake so as to be able to fit the entire slice in his mouth at one time. His lower jaw juts outwards not only in a snake-like unhinging, but also somewhat like a bib to catch the dripping cheese. The liquid quality of the cheese, especially apparent in the second piece that he holds in his other hand, indicates both that the pizza is obviously still hot and fresh, but also that the cheese is appropriately greasy.

In the final panel we can see Michelangelo's total bliss at having just consumed that piece of pizza, and we are assured that it was just as delicious as he had anticipated it to be in the first panel. Given that he ate it in a single gulp, we can be sure that his ravenous appetite can more than account for the remaining pizza, and based on our knowledge of Michelangelo's character, we can be certain that he will enjoy the remaining slices with the same relish as the first. Unfortunately for the viewer, because we will never be able to eat of this pizza, we will never experience this bliss first hand. Our disappointment is only augmented by it being acted out in front of our very eyes.

* Choking hazard! 

Art, as we know, doesn't represent the real,

But illustrates instead the impossible ideal.

 And our attempts to mimic the Form found in cartoon

Inevitably ends in an embarrassing culinary lampoon. 

Smarties

This post might reflect negatively on my mother’s parenting skills, but no food has proved more formative in my development than Smarties. I was potty trained on Smarties. I sat through hair cuts with the promise of Smarties as a reward. I learned about the subtle nuances of colour because of Smarties (and as a result had the self-satisfaction of informing people that “mauve” was my favourite colour, and not just "purple").

On the left are the Smarties of my childhood. On the right are the Smarties of your child's childhood.

 But in 2009, Nestle, bowing to public pressure (I hate when corporations bow to public pressure)*, removed the artificial colouring agents. The result was devastating. First of all, they look terrible. They look like those cheap, shitty, knock-off Smarties that you would sometimes find in bulk sections of a shabby and run-down store and that your mom would buy for you because she didn’t know any better (I mean, obviously not my mum, but one of those less adept mothers who are always arguing that that the cheaper knock-off versions are the same as the real thing). But more importantly, they also taste terrible, and it turns out that the most delicious part of a Smartie was the artificial colour in the candy shell. By removing the artificial colouring from Smarties, Nestle has managed only to make Smarties taste more artificial--if only because the original Smarties established an expectation of taste which is now inevitably disappointed; they taste artificial not because they once tasted like a "natural" food but because they no longer taste like Smarties, and to continue to taste like Smarties is the only responsibility they have to the consumer. Nestle never made any attempt to sell kids or parents on the health benefits of Smarties, and as far as I know, they have never even succumbed to that pathetic marketing ploy of saying that Smarties are "part of" a balanced diet or that they are a "good source" of calcium. Smarties are, and always have been, a treat, that is to say, a deviation from your normal dietary routine.

Smarties were important to me not just because they were my favourite candy or because I was rewarded with them and through them learned to perform certain tasks or to behave in a certain way; they were important to me because they were this material item that, at the time, seemed more anchored in reality than I did. I grasped at Smarties as a means by which I might build on or understand my own identity through something tangible and stable. It wasn’t important to me whether or not other people recognized me as that kid who really liked Smarties, but it was absolutely crucial to me that I be able to recognize myself as that kid who loved Smarties more than any other kid in the entire world. They also served to imbue me with a sense of national identity because, at the time, the only identifiable difference to me between Canadians and Americans was that there were Smarties in Canada but not in the States.

The most recent Smartie advertisement I’ve seen was one in which teens showed off their talent--like playing guitar or rollerblading--and the catchphrase at the end was “show your true colours.” But the old ads with the tagline, "When I eat my Smarties, I eat the red ones last" were so much better. I loved these ads, in part because I could see myself as a deviation from what Nestle had established as the norm: I obsessively made sure that I never ate the red ones last. I was terrified that if I did eat the red ones last, I would just be like every other fool who ate the red ones last only because they had tricked themselves into thinking that this was something they truly desired or that truly defined them as a Smartie-eater. But on the other hand, this kind of ad also granted access into a community of those who did eat the red ones last. Instead of trying to celebrate a sense of belonging (and, as a result, setting up a structure of community that one could define themselves against), Smarties is now trying to insist on a sense of celebrating difference and individuality--“our colours”--which is kind of ironic given that every Smartie in the box looks is a nearly identical greyish-brown colour. Although I don't like the connection Nestle is trying to make between "true" and "natural," this advertising scheme certainly makes more sense that sticking with the old "eat the red ones last" campaign since there no long are any red ones to eat last.

I remember trying to figure out whether or not different colours of Smarties corresponded to different flavours. I knew, even at such a young age, that of course they didn't. But being able to argue that purple is the best "flavour" is a great synesthetic experience in and of itself. So many of my vivid childhood memories are tied to Smarties, and it's as if I have lost the opportunity to ever experience those memories in a sensual** way again. Up until 2009, eating Smarties always made me recall what it was I thought about and how I felt when I was little and eating Smarties. Perhaps it’s worth noting here that the definition of nostalgia isn’t just a longing for the past, but that there is pain built into that process: it’s like going home only to realise that your home is a different colour than when you left it.

*I understand that a corporation like Nestle is only concerned with selling its product. But it's the responsibility of a corporation (especially a corporation like Nestle that makes products that are not necessary) not to cater its products to the public, but to create a need or desire where one doesn't actually exist. And this is something that Nestle in the past (albeit with disastrous results) proven itself to be particularly masterful at.
**Not that I have the desire to experience toilet training specifically in a sensual way, but I am referring more to the sense of accomplishment and how that accomplishment was rewarded.

To eat Smarties was once my favourite activity


But ruining things is, for concerned parents, a natural proclivity
And now something that was one part delicious and one part aesthetic


Was said to be carcinogenic and made their children frenetic


And other arguments that were similarly pathetic.


So in a move that was justified as health sensitivity
And marketed by Smarties as snack progressivity 


(but in reality is just deplorable corporate reactivity),
They switched to the “natural” instead of the synthetic.
And although I would like to try and be apathetic,
It’s hard when Nestle isn’t even remotely apologetic.

Potato Update

The other day I bought a bag of frozen hash browns and consumed it in an embarrassingly short period of time. I took several pictures to commemorate the occasion, but I am only posting a few because I worry that the only thing more embarrassing than eating that many frozen hash browns that quickly is taking 15 pictures of myself doing so and posting them on the internet.

This is the first picture I took. I look pretty at peace with the situation. I now
regret that I didn't take a series of pictures of myself struggling under the
burden of shame that was the inevitable result of this potato feast.

And then I found out that you can take a series of four pictures in sequence,
so of course I took 13 more.

I meant for this post to be a warning to anyone who has ever idealized a certain food from their past, as I have with McCain's frozen hash browns. I was going to write about how sometimes you remember something being so delicious, but when you revisit it, you're kind of disappointed. I was going to write about how it's easy to conflate these foods with past emotional states, and why it's wrong to think that eating a food from your childhood--a time in your life that you typically associate with happiness--will ever be able to fill that void that has been steadily growing since those first tinges of adulthood. But now that I am looking at this mound of hash browns, I kind of just want to go out and do the whole thing over again.