“My…heart…my…liver…tell…my family…it was worth it.”

~Consumers of fried alcohol

Ever since Reese’s came up with the groundbreaking decision that sweet things taste good with peanut butter, it’s been a commonly accepted practice in American culture to ignore “common sense” or “that pain in your chest” and combine things that are delicious, logic be damned.  Do you like beer, and meat?  Meatbeer!  Do you like doughnuts, and hamburgers?  Get that man a fucking Luther Burger!  Do you like Taco Bell (read as: are currently drunk and on the way home from the bars) and Doritos?  How the fuck have you not had a Doritos Locos Taco yet, that’s literally the sole reason why Taco Bell is still a viable fast food establishment!  What is wrong with you!?

The point being, when America loves two things, like, say, a Labrador Retriever and a Poodle, we like to force them together through unholy acts and hope that we end up with a pleasing end result, like a Labradoodle.  Well, guess what.  We love fried food.  And we love booze.  We think you can guess where this is going.

We’re going to get a Labradoodle drunk and then feed it a shitload of fried food.

Wait, what’s that?  Oh, no, we’re just going to tell you about people who deep fry alcohol.  Yeah, that sounds pretty good, let’s do that.

7 Boozy Deep-Fried Alcohol Treats

                                                                      (photo courtesy of thrillist)

Back in the halcyon days of 2006, we were presented with Fried Coke, and we recoiled, unsure how the laws of physics could be so readily dismantled in the name of arterial blockage.  “But, Coke is liquid” we said, shaking, tearing at our hair, and ripping at our clothing.  “How can you deep fry a liquid in liquid!”  Once we activated the cheat mode of “soak batter with liquid, and fry the batter” we realized that, sure, Fried Coke is a delicious way to ensure you meet your maker earlier, happier, and plumper than you might otherwise, but as far as liquids you can fry go, it’s pretty tame.

Enter alcohol.

Once we learned that you can deep fry a liquid, it was just a matter of time before alcoholic fried treats began waging a two pronged attack on our long-term health and longevity.  And we’re so happy about it.  Here are some ways that you can nuke your liver while making your stomach sobbingly shout, “Thank you sir, may I have another.”

Deep-Fried Frozen Margarita

We wrote about this particular item in one of our Fried Food articles, but we feel it’s important to re-state this sentiment—holy shit it’s a deep-fried frozen margarita!  The purpose of this drink is probably to make sure that everyone who consumes it immediately falls to their knees chanting, “After me, the deluge,” but for those of you who, like us, don’t feel like you’ve had an accomplished day unless you’ve consumed several dishes or beverages that leave you feeling empty, hollow, and actively ashamed after you’ve finished, this is the perfect breakfast beverage for you.  They start by taking funnel cake batter and mixing in the ingredients of a margarita (including tequila).  Once the batter reaches a flavor profile that encourages the eater to go, “Wooo!  Cinco de Drinko, bitches!” it’s ready to be fried.

At this point you might be thinking, “But America Fun Fact of the Day, I’m here, sitting at a traffic light trying to sneak a pull from my gin flask I never leave home without, and I’m reading your article on my phone.  Anyway, gotta jet, got a damn child custody hearing to get to, but before I go, is there a way to make this alcohol soaked fried monstrosity even more alcoholic?”  Why, you terrifying wreck of a person, we’re so glad you asked in your rambling, already-half-in-the-bag-even-though-Jesus-it’s-only-10-AM kind of way.  You see, just deep frying some tequila and lime isn’t enough for the Desperados restaurant that invented this for the 2010 Texas State Fair.  No, the end result is then put in a glass filled with another margarita, with a dollop of whipped cream to boot because diabetes will go away eventually if you just pray hard enough.

Deep-Fried Beer

Another Texas invention that’s been featured previously in the archives of AFFotD, Fried Beer was the first attempt by our society to let the nonbelievers, the nondreamers, and the teetotalers who “wake up feeling pretty refreshed because they weren’t drinking and crying until 3 in the morning on a work night” (oh how we loathe them) know that alcohol was something you can fry, and frying alcohol is something that is good.  And oh how good it is.  Fried beer is arguably the most liquid of the fried liquids—it’s made by putting some beer inside a ravioli-like pocket of a dough that closely resembles the flavor of a pretzel and then just deep frying the thing for about 20 seconds.  Now, if a 20 second cook time seems like a very specific, brief, and possibly arbitrary number, think again—this was the carefully calculated amount of time you could cook it where it would still contain alcohol, while not tasting like raw dough splashed in Guinness.

The more we think about that, the more we love the logic.  There’s a sort of defiant pointlessness to the whole endeavor, which pretty much is the most American mindset to have when trying to get people fat and drunk.  Just realize, at some point, this conversation happened.

Mark Zable, Inventor Of Fried Beer:  So okay, I spent three years figuring out how, but I’ve finally done it.  I’ve found a way to cook up fried beer so that it still is alcoholic!

Friend of Mark Zable, Inventor Of Fried Beer:  Oh hell yeah man!  That’s awesome!  I’m excited to try one!  So why did it take so long to come up with?

Zable:  Well, you know, I figured out pretty quickly you could just put it in a ravioli pocket of like, pretzel dough, but I kept cooking it so long that the alcohol got cooked out of the beer.

Friend:  Oh, so like, you spent 3 years figuring out how to cook fried beer so that it’ll still have as much alcohol as a sip of like, a Budweiser?

Zable:  Yeah man!  It’s fried food that can get you drunk, this is a game changer!

Friend:  But wouldn’t you need like, thirty of these things to get like, one beer worth of a buzz?

Zable:  One beer is all you need man!

Friend:  No.  No it isn’t.

The taste of Fried Beer is described as “taking a bite out of a pretzel, and immediately following that with a sip of beer” which, even if it can’t get us loaded without sending us to the hospital for a burst stomach, sounds pretty damn appealing if you ask us.

Deep-Fried Jack and Coke

Deep-Fried Jack and Coke is not some sort of fancy State Fair concoction invented to drive sales of defibrillators in Iowa.  No, this is a recipe that serves to prove that, for all the furry porn and twitter hate crimes out there, the internet is inherently a good, wholesome thing.  And so, southernliving.com sat down and asked themselves, “I’ve fried all that there is to fry.  There are no more fried food recipes for me to impart on the world.  What else is there to do?” before looking down at the eight-ball of daddy juice in their hands and going, “Oh hell yeah, let’s deep fry this son of a bitch, who’s letting you down by going to culinary school instead of taking over at the steel mill now, HUH POPS!?”

And thus, deep fried jack and coke, which is essentially a rum ball made with a cola syrup and bourbon, which is then deep fried so that you can feel that every moment in your life has led up to that one specific moment.  You take a bottle of Coke and some sugar, boil and then simmer that down to a reduction, to which you add crushed vanilla wafers, pecans, some powdered sugar and some powdered coca.  Then, when you start to ask yourself why you’ve spent ten minutes cooking without even a hint of booze being involved and, oh never mind that hasn’t been a concern for you, you’ve been swigging from a bottle of Bulleit since you started, good, but anyway, at that point, you add some corn syrup and Jack Daniels, which you roll into 1-inch balls (heh), coat in flour, dip in egg, and coat with crushed vanilla wafers before frying those fuckers.

Some of you might say, “Woah, hey, I came here to listen to dick jokes and whiskey jokes and, if you really cared about your fucking readership, whiskey dick jokes, I didn’t sign up for all this Pinterest shit!  The most complicated thing I know how to cook is an Easy Mac, and I’m too drunk to remember to put water in those half the time!” to which we’d say, woah, we’ve really hit a weird string of sampled representative statements from our readership.  But, to address the gist of your question, yes, it is much easier to put a frozen pizza in the oven and drink jack and cokes until you start feeling like you want to go to a bar that’ll let you throw stuff at people.  But, but, if you’re going to take the time to craft something that’s pretty cool and can get you a bit buzzed?  Well, Fried Jack and Coke is a fun place to start.

Besides, you can just take straight pulls from the bottle while you’re doing your prep work.  That’s the best kind of multi-tasking.

Deep-Fried Wine with a Champagne Batter

Here we have another DIY recipe, only this one from the blog manthatcooks, and it’s ten years old, and we’ve clearly been unfulfilled in the last ten years of our lives to only discover this now.  If you had difficulty wrapping your head around the “add stuff to a pot for a bit, roll it up, and fry it” aspect of Deep-Fried Jack and Coke, Deep-Fried Wine will cause your head to literally explode.  First, the author mixed two cups of red wine with six tablespoons of Agar-Agar, which sounds like the name of a fucking Ent, but apparently is a seaweed that can be used to make jellies and gelatin.  Anyway, this creates a wine jelly, which is wrapped in a batter made of flour, egg, and half a bottle of champagne, and the whole concoction is deep fried, which honestly, if you’re surprised by that last step at this point in the article, you, we mean, come on, man, we’re worried about you.  Come on, man.

The end result of this was described as “disappointing, but promising” which was probably meant to mean “with adjustments in wine styles and ingredients, this could be tasty” but what we interpret to mean as, “Like you really fucking care, who the fuck knows where to buy Agar-Agar, you’re never going to even come close to making this, you’re just glad that it exists, especially if you’re writing an article where you have to find seven different deep-fried booze treats.

Deep-Fried Tequila

This is actually easy as hell to make outside of a State Fair, and also, if you’re the person at the party who has shot glasses filled with Deep-Fried Tequila, that’s just a really easy and convenient way to announce to the party that of everyone there, you’re the one who is by far most worth a damn.  All you have to do is take some Angel Food Cake or Sponge Cake, soak them in tequila (the article we link to says “the more you dip the stronger they will be” which is code for “don’t be a fucking pansy, leave that in until it’s fully saturated with delicious tequila”).  Then, you fry the cake.  That’s it.  Sprinkle it with sugar if you want to enhance the taste, dip it in frosting or some lime zest if you want to pretend your fancy, or sit in your boxers binge-watching Sons of Anarchy on Netflix while you devour dozens at a time from a mixing bowl like it’s goddamn popcorn, there’s really no wrong answer to how to enjoy a dish that is literally “fried booze cake.”

And guess what?  That’s not even the best way to go about this.  Because you can also use this method to make…

Deep-Fried Bourbon

Second verse, same as the first, with a more American booze so you can drink till you feel worse!  Yes that’s right, the Baltimore Post-Examiner recently decided to get in on the fried-shots-of-booze game, and they chose a helluva way to do it.  This particular recipe used Bulleit bourbon, because why use Jim Beam when you can spend three times as much to soak your cake in a superior product, knowing that it’ll taste basically the same as the cheap bourbon version of the product once you stick it in boiling hot oil.

But seriously, use Jim Beam.  You can pour yourself a tall glass of the Bulleit to wash these fried booze cubes down if you must.  Which you should.  Because that sounds like a delicious combination.

Which brings us to our final product…

Assorted Fried Alcohols Made To Order

The final entry of our list isn’t particularly novel, as it also adheres to the “sponge cake soaked in booze” (man, once the first person figured out that trick he found himself with more Copycats than Jack the Ripper) but it does have the distinction of being available for sale (yay!) in England (eww!).  John and Corrine Clarkson own a fish and chips shop in the city of Preston and they thought to themselves, “Well, if we’re stuck serving British food, we might as well allow people to get smashed.”  Now, they don’t have a liquor license, so naturally they decided to urge Brits to bring a booze of their choosing to be dipped in sponge cake and fried in…

Wait.

In their fryers.

Their fish fryers.

Oh no.  Now we’re terrified.

“But, AFFotD, you can get any kind of booze fried there!  Gin, vodka, brandy, you name it!”

Fried in fishy frying oil.

“But…”

Fishy frying oil.

“…Good point.”

The lesson, as always—don’t leave it to an Englishman to do an American’s job.

“Run run run as fast as you can, you can’t catch me because you really don’t care too much, I mean really, I’m not that tasty, compared to other sweets.”

~The Honest Gingerbread Man

We hate to be the bearer of bad news, but summer is over, fall is here, and winter is just around the corner.  We know, we know, it’s a bitter pill to swallow.  But, let’s all take a step back, and think about all the good times, foods, and occasions that fall and winter will afford you.  No, we’re being serious, take a moment and pick your favorite thing about autumn or winter.

Oh, the holiday season, that’s a good one, you over there.

Hmm, bourbon and dark beers, that’s a very solid point, intern whispering in our ear right now.  Now go back to the supply closest and keep on spamming PETA with hate-emails.

Oh, what’s that, distant quiet voice in the back?  Gingerbread gets to come back?  Ugh, fine.  Whatever.  Yes, gingerbread houses and all that shit will be easier to find.  That’s a lame thing to suggest, but not lame enough for us to openly mock you for suggesting it.

Let’s face it, gingerbread is just alright, probably because America didn’t invent it and the most fun you can have with it is putting it into shapes you don’t get to eat until they’ve long since gone stale.  Which is fine—a gingerbread house is a lot of fun, and many precious memories have been made around it, but if we were being honest, a gingerbread house is a great way to have your children or man-child husbands pick at the icing and gumdrops, thinking incorrectly that they’re being sneaky, for a few months until the whole thing turns rock solid and you put it outside for squirrels to eat the shit out of.  That’s pretty much gingerbread’s biggest purpose for American society—it tricks squirrels into thinking we don’t eat anything that tastes better than stale gingerbread, so they by-and-large leave us the hell alone.

Unfortunately, because it’s considered a “seasonal” treat, every goddamn company imaginable decides to release a “limited edition” gingerbread flavored version of their product this time of the year.  Most of them, like gingerbread, are, eh, fine.  But some of them.

Oh, mother of God, some of them.  Are awful.  Terrible.  Sins.

We’re going to tell you about some of them.

The Worst Gingerbread Flavored Products in America

Gingerbread has been around ever since it was brought to Europe in 992 by an Armenian monk who taught a bunch of French people how to make it in Bondaroy for about seven years, which gives us plenty of reasons to hate it.  It’s a fairly basic concept—instead of making sweet bread with sugar, you add ginger, honey, or molasses which, you know, is fine.  Gingerbread is fine.   It comes in many forms, from soft loaf cakes to biscuits, though we most often encounter it in gingerbread man and gingerbread house form, both of which are more fun to actually shape than they are to eat (with the possible exception of gingerbread men, because about 75% of children growing up took a frankly unsettling pleasure in biting apart their gingerbread man, limb-by-limb, often while saying things like, “Noo, please, don’t eat me, oh nooo” to the concern of their school psychiatrists).

To say that the flavor of gingerbread is the reason why it is so universally popular would be unfair.  While some people crave it, and really do enjoy the taste, we find that the majority of people enjoy the taste the same way they enjoy The Tonight Show.  When someone sends them a clip, they find it amusing and enjoyable, but not a lot of us are going out of our way to get it from the source.  The same goes for gingerbread, which most of us will eat when offered, but never find themselves putting forth any effort to procure it for themselves.

That said, gingerbread, much like vanilla ice cream, is a relatively dull flavor that can taste good.  A gingerbread latte from Starbucks is a delicious warm seasonal treat (this sentence was sponsored by Starbucks, fuck your local coffee shop, they’re sooo far away, wouldn’t you rather just get coffee from the place a block from your office?  Starbucks!).  But is gingerbread a universal flavor that tastes good as anything?  Hell no!  Case and point, the following food mistakes.

Gingerbread Jell-O

“J-E-L-L-O, Oh-God-Whyyy-ayy-ayyy.”  Hey Jell-O, we just wrote your theme song for your gingerbread instant Jell-O, so, you know, get in touch with our legal department, we’ll work out a royalties system.  Now, when we saw that Jell-O makes a Gingerbread flavor, we admittedly initially thought it was supposed to be the jiggling, sweet, “there’s always room” actual gelatin, as opposed to an “instant pudding & pie filling,” which, yes, is the lesser of two evils, but keep in mind that, “The lesser of two evils” is what Freemason conspiracy theorists say about elected officials while being asked why they don’t vote.  This was a limited edition snack option, along with the equally reprehensible “Candy Cane” flavor, which just, eww, gross.

We understand why Jell-O would bring this out as a limited edition seasonal item.  There are maybe five people in America who think, “oh, Gingerbread Jell-O pudding, that’ll go perfect with my Candy Cane Jell-O pudding, what a delight!” and there are probably a few hundred people with personal food blogs that think to themselves, “Oh, I can post a taste-test review of this limited edition Jell-O, the internet must know how it tastes!”  And of course, there are thousands of people who will buy stupid and weird limited-time-only foods because, hey, it’s cheap, and maybe it’s alright, and even if it’s bad, it’s something new, so why not give it a shot.  This is the exact logic that was in play when “Cherry Chocolate Diet Dr. Pepper” briefly became a thing you could purchase and drink, as opposed a handful of words haphazardly strung together by a recent stroke patient.

Either way, people purchased Gingerbread Jell-O.  That’s a true statement, and those people can never take back what they did.  They have to live with the fact that they put powder into water to make a mushy pudding that tastes like gingerbread which, we might point out, is something that doesn’t quite entice the taste buds when it’s damp and soaked in water.  So yeah, wet gingerbread pudding.  Good job, Jell-O.

Gingerbread M&Ms

There is a website devoted to selling Gingerbread M&Ms, which is no longer available in stores, straight to your door.  Twelve nine ounce bags cost you one hundred dollars.  They’re “freshest” before September of this year, so some of you might say, “Oh darn, I missed out, I wish I had known” to which we would reply, “Get the fuck off of our website, you damn fool.”  The website in question also tries to sell you a whole bunch of M&M flavors that have appeared on this website before in a rather unflattering light.  That should be your warning.

“These yummy M&Ms are a great treat!” says the website we linked to at the beginning of this section in an attempt to sell you this seasonal candy.  “There are more one star reviews for this craptastic flavor than any other rating” Amazon.com’s users responded.  There’s a reason why you pick the M&Ms off the gingerbread house instead of eating them by the handful along with hunks of gingerbread, and the visceral hatred of these M&Ms by people tricked into spending money on them helps remind you that.  “Yuck…Never again!” says Kyle of Henderson, Nevada.  “I gave them to my neighbor who didn’t like them and said she’d give them to her husband and if he didn’t like them they would make nice dog treats” says Southern Vet from Southaven, Mississippi who should really tell his neighbor that chocolate can poison dogs.    “I love gingerbread I really do.  I do not love these gingerbread M&M’s; they taste like poo,” adds WriteStuff76 who actually stuck with the limerick-poem approach for their entire review.

M&Ms are not a thing that tastes good in gingerbread form.  These are bad, and gross, and wrong.  If you believe otherwise, you can leave a comment below defending your bad tastes in candy, but no one in our staff will be able to read it, on account of our eyes rolling hard enough to temporarily blind us.

Gingerbread Soda

Whenever we need to find a soda that tastes like something that would taste gross in soda form, we know we can always count on Jones Soda Company.  And sure enough, Jones delivered, having released the Jones Soda Ginger Bread Soda on at least two occasions in their holiday pack that only exists as a gag gift that your asshole Secret Santa bought you, cackling maniacally as you look at the flavors and exclaim, “Green Bean Casserole?  What the actual fuck, you guys?”

Granted, as far as novelty sodas go, gingerbread at least deigns to be sweet.  “Sure, we can put some honey or molasses in this, if you insist,” gingerbread drolls, probably in a British accent.  Gingerbread is kind of smarmy.  But we digress.  Despite the fact that a gingerbread soda is probably a better soda idea than, say, goddamn turkey, that still doesn’t make it the ideal sugary beverage delivery vessel.  As a general rule, if you’re going to try to sell us ginger bread in liquid form, we’re going to rebel against it.  And God help you if you use gingerbread to ruin alcohol for us.

Southern Comfort Gingerbread Spice

You goddamn assholes.  You motherless sons of Medea.  Listen, we’re not going to be losing over sleep at the ruination of Southern Comfort.  That’s not the issue here.  Does a gingerbread flavored version of Southern Comfort taste like something we would want to sit down and drink?  No, it probably tastes like a whiskey soaked piece of cardboard sprinkled with brown sugar.  But, is Southern Comfort something we actively seek out to drink?  No, we’d wager that the slight majority of Americans have only bought a bottle of the stuff without using a fake ID.  Southern Comfort is only good in the sense that it’ll get you drunk and that we don’t feel guilty downing it as a chilled shot with lime juice.

But the bastards couldn’t even let us have that.  Because in making their gingerbread spice Southern Comfort, they lowered the alcohol content to 15%, which is basically an uncarbonated gingerbread-flavored Four Loko as far as we’re concerned.  Fuck gingerbread spice Four Loko Southern Comfort so hard.

Gingerbread Keurig K-Cup Coffee

People like Keurig coffee because it’s an astonishingly easy way to prepare a single cup of coffee, and it’s the only instant coffee maker that doesn’t taste like someone took a cup of hot water with some black food coloring and whispered, “you should try to taste like coffee” into it before handing it your way.  That is to say, it’s fine, in the sense that you’d rather have it available in your office, but you’re not going to reach for it if you really want a good cup of Joe.  Hey, we get it, convenience is important, and brewing a pot of coffee is a lot harder than putting a little cup in a machine that pees out morning wake up juice for you.

But the problem with K-cups is that, especially when you want to get other flavors in the mix, you’re more often than not going to end up with something a little more watered-down than you’d truly like.  Sure, your dark roasts will be robust enough to get past that, but we’re going to hesitantly raise our hand to point out that, no matter what your intentions are, if you make a gingerbread coffee K-cup, you are guaranteeing that your coffee with taste distinctly of “watered-down gingerbread, with a smack of coffee.”  So if a watery coffee with a gingerbread aftertaste is your idea of a fun time, we don’t have to finish that sentence because it is explicitly no one’s idea of a good time.  The only nice thing we can say about this is that, if they’re going to use gingerbread to ruin coffee, it’s pretty bad, but unlike Southern Comfort, it at least doesn’t ruin booze as well…

Gingerbread Kalúa

SON OF A BITCH.  This limited-edition holiday offering was released in 2012, possibly in a failed bid to coax the purported Mayan 2012 apocalypse out from its slumber in a rage.  They even suggested a martini recipe for it—the Kalúa Cookie Martini, which takes ½ part Kalúa, 1 and ½ parts Absolut Vodka, and two hours of you slamming your head onto a wooden table saying, “Why do I hurt myself so?  Why do I hurt myself so?”  Make no mistakes, this is an awful idea that the more paranoid among our staff are convinced was intentionally created just to piss us off.  The only way they could be more insulting to the general tenants of this website would be to dip an American Flag in this shit, set the whole thing ablaze, and then tell us that meat is murder.

This isn’t what the holidays are about, folks.  Winter and fall should be about warm fires, and watching large men hurl themselves at other large men for the sole purpose of giving you a socially acceptable excuse to day drink every Sunday.  It shouldn’t be about taking a “meh at best” dessert(ish) item and making good things worse by adding that flavor to it.  If you take Kalúa and mix it with milk and vodka, you get a White Russian, which is delicious, and you probably get a very strong desire to see The Big Lebowski, which is a classic film.  If you take Kalúa and put artificial gingerbread flavor in it, you get a family that doesn’t talk to you anymore.  Don’t drink gingerbread Kalúa.  Stop trying to make everything gingerbread.  You’ll be much happier if you stick with peppermint as your seasonal flavor, and leave it at that.

This has been a public service announcement.  Keep gingerbread in cookies and houses.  Sponsored by the Starbucks Gingerbread Latte, just 320 calories per 16 ounce serving, feel the warmth of the season.

“Space is AWESOME!”

~Every American child

When you were a child, you’d look up at the stars and say, “Space is awesome!”  Now, when you look up at the stars, you’ll either say, “Space is fucking awesome!” or, most likely, “Make everything stop spinning, oh God I’m gonna be sick, I shouldn’t have had that last shot.”  And America, being awesome and having a particular interest in claiming awesome things for themselves, have never been shy about our aspirations to get out into the stars.  Adjusted for inflation, we’ve spent roughly $790 billion since NASA opened up shop in 1958, an amount of money commonly referred to as, “Shut up, stupid, that’s not too much money, space is awesome.”

From Alan Shepard’s first suborbital flight to Sandra Bullock’s conversation with an Inuit, Americans have done more in space than any other nation.  And while experiments, and feats of courage, and lunar travels are all well and good, there’s one thing we’re most concerned about.

What kinds of food have we shot out into space?

Dammit, this is important.  No, we don’t care about your science, we want to know what kind of food people have shot up into space.  This is important.  Shut up, this is important.

Food Items America Has Launched Into Space

When we talk about food in Space, we don’t mean to talk about Space Food.  While we can’t deny the awesomeness of Space Food, as in, food designed specifically for consumption in space, that’s only because it’s made for space.  As a general rule, we’re going to like anything made for space, no matter how stupid it might otherwise be.  That’s why Tang had its moment in the sun (despite being invented about five years before John Glenn brought it up in Friendship 7).  If someone tells you, “This is what astronauts drink!” then you’d drink it, even if you have Buzz Aldrin tell you, in explicit terms, that it sucks.  And despite tasting like powdered mix mixed into Play-Doh, you’d still eat astronaut ice cream because it’s what the astronauts eat (admittedly, it was only used in one mission before everyone realized that it cracked into little bits, and “crumble shards” is the last thing you want from your food in space.)

And yes, the history of making food suitable for space, adapted for the unique difficulties that weightlessness provides is a fascinating and important topic, and we should probably talk about that.  We should mention the processes that go into making actual capital-S-capital-F Space Food, how spicy food is better received than milder fare, and the rigorous testing involved in processing nutritional and palpable food for astronauts.  We should write that article someday.  But not today.  Because today, we are going to tell you about real food that has been brought into space, food that probably shouldn’t go into space, but goddamn it we’re America and we do what we want, and what we want is some junk food.

Hamburgers

This one was specifically made by NASA itself, so it kind of totally goes against everything we said in the past few paragraphs about not including foods that were made for consumption in space, but we feel that this is an important exception.  All you need to know is, right there, we have hamburgers just, floating in space.  We’re sure the process to make a space-appropriate hamburger was arduous (NASA sadly doesn’t provide much detail about the ingredients or makeup of the hamburger, though it’s safe to say that the tomato in this image is primarily made out of, erm, tomato) and that just proves how much America needs its damn burgers.  That’s what we like to call “taking pride in our food.”

And if that’s not enough to warrant the hamburger’s inclusion in this list, here’s a video of a bunch of Harvard students sending a hamburger up into space using weather balloons.  Like we said, Americans are very serious about hamburgers belonging in space.

Beer

Now, we’ve talked about the concept of Space Beer before, in the form of Thirsty Swagman, of Australia, and their quest to sell $95,000 space flight packages that includes drinking the Vostok Space Beer, brewed by 4 Pines Brewing Company specifically to be better consumed in a zero-g environment.  That is still a few years away, meaning that Thirsty Swagman has plenty of time to reach out to America Fun Fact of the Day and offer us a free spaceflight.  You know, for journalistic purposes.  And not so we can smuggle a bottle of bourbon into space and puke it, just, everywhere, all over the instrument panels, dooming us all.

Thankfully, America made sure to win the beer race, and in a big way.  First of all we have the above image, which is taken from this video where a Natty Light was sent 90,000 feet in the air, probably because they figured you’d be better off sending a beer that no one would miss into space before sending a beer people actually want to drink, like how the Soviets would just pick up stray dogs and send them to die in space before putting humans up there.

Even more impressively, our government has actually sanctioned the brewing of beer in space, because an eleven-year-old child told us to.  You needn’t any further explanation of American tenacity than the fact that someone who is ten years away from legally being able to drink asked the government if it would be cool to send up a 6-inch-long tube of hops, water, yeast, and malted barley to see what would happen if we combined all them together and tried to turn it into booze in space.  That’s the greatest thing we can even possibly imagine at this moment, and that’s taking into account that we’re currently painting a picture of a tiger high-fiving Mohammed Ali on a velvet canvas with Prince shredding guitar in the background.

Corned Beef Sandwich

We’re particularly fond of this specific example because, far from simply tying something to a balloon and letting it drift off to the heavens, the first (and probably only) corned beef sandwich to make it to space was contraband.  As in, snuck aboard a spaceflight, resulting in official reprimands of the astronauts involved.  Specifically, during the Gemini 3 flight in 1965, John Young brought a corned beef sandwich with him for his space flight with Gus Grissom.  They each shared a few bites before the sandwich had to be stowed, since it began breaking apart and they didn’t want to risk any crumbs getting free and shorting out the equipment in the capsule.

As far as foods to bring up to space in blatant disregard of direct orders, you can do a lot worse than the corned beef sandwich.  We can only hope that, when confronted by his superiors about his corned beef stunt, Young drunkenly slurred something along the lines of, “I’ll smuggle my corned beef into your space, sir.”

Pizza

When most astronauts are asked what they would like while in space, they might say something corny like, “To be able to achieve wonders of science” or something hopeful like, “I want to see my family again, please don’t let the Space Goblins devour me,” or they might say something true, such as, “I’d really like to have some fucking pizza.”  Naturally, we were on top of that shit.  It started out in 2001, when Pizza Hut became the first corporation to deliver a pizza to space (in this case, to the International Space Station), thus winning an imaginary space race that no other pizza chain was competing in.  They created a special made-for-space six-inch pizza that was covered in salami (pepperoni would spoil too soon) and shot up into space to be eaten by…Russian cosmonaut Yury Usachev?  What the hell, Pizza Hut?  You goddamn traitors!

Usachev gave the pizza a thumbs up, but how can we trust him?  A Russian on Earth would shrug and eat a pie filled with glass shards and say, “Well, at least I didn’t have to drive today.”  A Russian in space would probably eat a sandwich made out of tomato sauce and aluminum foil and declare it the best thing he’s ever eaten since his mother’s wheat fields started growing only rocks and weeds.  Anyway, Pizza Hut at least made Space Pizza, so that’s cool, we guess.

We’ve also had several people do the “put it on a weather balloon and send it to space” thing with their own pizza slices, which isn’t surprising as we’ve established by this point that if you give an American a camera and a weather balloon, they absolutely will stick something unhealthy to the end of that balloon and post the resulting space food video to youtube.  That might sound like an indictment, but really it’s the greatest compliment we can give about the American spirit.

Because more than anyone else, Americans clearly know how to do space right.

“Get.  That.  Healthy.  Shit.  Out. Of.  My.  Goddamn.  House.”

~Americans That Appreciate Thanksgiving

America, tomorrow is Thanksgiving, which means that all of us will be spending some quality time with our families, eating gobs of unhealthy food and washing it down with copious amounts of wine and waiting for that one family member to get a little too tipsy and start talking about “the things wrong with society” with a slightly racist tinge.  Or, if you don’t have a family member who does that, you’re probably that family member, so wait until your fifth glass of wine to talk about how Kim Kardashian was naked in Paper magazine, and how that makes you feel.

Of course, Thanksgiving is a wonderful time of the year.  It’s a day that basically is dedicated to making a bunch of delicious food, drinking with family, and watching football without having to leave the house.  It lacks the gift-giving pressure of Christmas, and the inevitable failure to meet expectations of New Year’s Eve.  Sure, a lot of food has to be made, but that tends to be more of a communal experience than anything else, while your dad gets half-jokingly ribbed for spending all of his time drinking beer on the damn couch watching the Dallas game.

The point being, we love Thanksgiving, and we love that people say it’s the one day a year where they really can “let themselves go” when they mean to say it’s like the 150^th day this year that they’ve said “fuck it” and decided to really “let themselves go.”  That’s a beautiful thing.

And then you get websites that say stupid, bullheaded things like “9 Thankgiving Dishes Made Healthier.”  No.  We do not want our Thanksgiving to be healthier, Mother Nature Network.  We do not want that one bit.  Stop it.  We said stop.

Wherein AFFotD Decries the Fiendish Practices of the Mother Nature Network, Who Have Actively Tried to Ruin Thanksgiving by Making it Healthier, While We Offer Methods to Make Thanksgiving Even More Un-Healthy to Spite These Malcontents

When we saw this article that suggests ways to make Thanksgiving healthier, our first response was to go to Whole Foods, purchase a gross of tofu (we don’t really know what kind of a container or whatever tofu comes in.  We literally just walked in and said “give us a gross of tofu, you hippies” and when they said something like, “tofu doesn’t come in a…” we just started shouting) and set it on fire while chugging a bottle of Maker’s Mark and tearing off our shirts, screaming.  Our second response was to gather our belongings from the ashes of our recently burnt-to-the-ground office, and think long and hard about the pointlessness of a healthy Thanksgiving dinner.  That’s even worse than those assholes who eat carrots for dessert because “they’re sweeter than people give them credit for” and God, just shut up Gladys, you’re the fucking worst.

Thanksgiving is the one time of the year that people are supposed to sit down and say, “Well, I guess I should go to the gym tomorrow” as we all laugh because, ha, remember that time you got a gym membership, man you got roped into a yearly contract and that commitment lasted you all of, what, three weeks?  And even then it was just because Gladys (God, fucking Gladys) was all like, “Hey, you should join me at my spin class, the instructor is really great, anyway I recently started making my own tea and taking it to work instead of drinking the Lipton’s we have here, because I find that…” and God no one fucking cares Gladys we hate you Gladys GOD.

Get that smug look off your fucking face, Gladys, no, shut up, shut the hell up.  God.  You’re the fucking worst, Gladys. 

Anyway, we’re going to show you the list from this Mother Nature Network article about healthy Thanksgiving food, and one by one, we’re going to tell you why that’s a stupid thing to do to your food, and how you can make it unhealthier to show the Gladyses of the world a thing or two.  Ugh.  Gladys.

Now, this is the one menu suggestion we’re not going to start foaming at the mouth over.  Turkey is, you know, fine.  But, considering that it’s the main dish of Thanksgiving, it’s amazing how much it’s overshadowed by just about every single side dish that’s being served alongside it with the possible exception of Brussels sprouts which, like, even when you cook them with bacon, they’re still Brussels sprouts, there’s a reason why that’s one of the default vegetables we make “forcing your kids to eat their greens” jokes about.  Ugh.

But otherwise, when have you ever had a truly transcendent piece of turkey?  It’s, you know, fine.  There’s not a crazy amount of flavor inherently in turkey, and the highest praise Thanksgiving turkey tends to get is, “oh, it’s so moist!”  Like, “congratulations, you didn’t bake all the moisture out of this giant bird that you had to bake for roughly three and a half days to make it salmonella-free.”  Now, some people might say, “But at least you get flavor in the dark meat, this white-meat only bullshit is some malarkey!” and to you we’d say, hey, nice use of “malarkey” there, but also, we can see the benefits of both.  Some people actually prefer white meat, some prefer dark meat, it’s all good to us.

That being said, there are ways to make turkey taste better than nature intended, which generally is like “put some butter under the skin” and “don’t serve your family a skinless turkey tenderloin that you baked with olive oil and reduced-sodium broth, because if you do that, your family will leave you, the Mother Nature Network wants your family to abandon you, do not let them do it, serve the whole turkey, stewing in its juices, laden with butter, like a goddamn American adult.”

Also, did we have a picture of a turkey wrapped in bacon?  Sure, do that too.  Bacon turkey, boom, you’re welcome.

Oh, hell no!  No that’s…Gladys, did you write this fucking article?  Come clean, Gladys, you sneaky fucking monster.  Did you do this Gladys?  Easily the best thing about making turkey, besides the weird satisfaction you get in shoving the stuffing up its ass and…wait or is that just us?  Forget we said anything.  But no, when you bake turkey, and are left with glorious pan fat drippings, and you turn that into this unhealthy magical concoctions that you can slather on everything on your plate, and you’re left with what home tastes like.  Are you trying to take away home, Mother Nature Network?

It is literally irresponsible to post the sentence “old school gravy made with greasy pan drippings and mucho salt has got to go” on the internet because we’re pretty sure it just activated the kill switch of some vegan special agent, and everyone else reading it just felt the world get a little less bright.  When you host Thanksgiving and don’t make gravy, you will be asked, “Hey, where’s the gravy?  Can I get some gravy?” no less than three times from everyone at your table.  It’ll be like, “where’s the gravy?  Can I get some gravy?  What do you mean there’s no gravy?  Is this a joke?  Where’s the gravy?  What do you mean there’s chicken broth, what are you talking about?  Where’s the gravy?  No, I do not want your zingy mango salsa you freak, I can’t believe this is happening to me, this must be a kind of nightmare, where is the gravy dammit did Gladys put you up to this?  I told you you need to stop listening to fucking Gladys she’s the worst!”

There will be no jovial family conversations.  Just the forlorn cry of an entire table, demanding the gravy they deserve.  Instead, why don’t you just make some gravy.  Put some heavy cream in there with the drippings and flour to make it even unhealthier if you want.  Use the bacon grease from your bacon turkey.  Throw darts at that picture of Gladys you have on  your dart board.  But, for the love of God, just make sure there is gravy.

There is a lot for us to hate about this entry.  First of all, stuffing is probably our favorite Thanksgiving dish.  When it’s done right, it’s amazing, heavy, and manages to elevate the general flavor of the turkey it was baked in to new heights.  When done poorly, you have to spend the whole day listening to the person who made the stuffing go, “mew mew mew, I used vegetable broth instead of butter because it’s healthy mew mew mew whole grain bread is healthier than white bread mew mew mew I cooked it outside of the turkey so it’s vegetarian friendly mew mew mew I’ve been doing a lot of crying ever since my husband left mew mew.”  That’s a worst case stuffing situation to such a degree that we wouldn’t fault you for refusing to call Mother Nature Network’s suggestion “stuffing” and instead just calling it “soggy sadness.”

The thing is, they’re halfway to an okay start for a good stuffing.  Bread is at least still the staple (and cornbread could actually work!) as well as celery and mushrooms, all totally fine things to have in a stuffing.  But to cut out butter entirely to replace with a low-sodium veggie broth just seems cruel.  If you’re going to put broth in your stuffing, at least use chicken broth so you can tell yourself “well, I’m putting chicken broth inside a turkey, this is about as close to a turducken as I can get.”  But otherwise, if you really want to amp up the deliciousness and unhealthiness of your stuffing, go nuts with some butter, put some chicken stock in there too just for shits and giggles, and, hell, why not add some white wine and pancetta?  And then take all that and shove it right up inside that turkey, just as God intended.  If you have a vegetarian friend coming over for dinner, you can make a side “not-baked-in-a-turkey-and-ugh-fine-no-chicken-broth-God-Gladys-is-the-worst” stuffing outside of the turkey, but really you should just re-evaluate the process in which you make friends if you’re having to deal with non-meat eaters.  But otherwise, don’t you dare skimp on your stuffing.  Stuffing is the best.  Don’t cut corners with the best.

You shut your damn mouth.  Marshmallows are amazing.  This, no.  Stop it.

Everyone, don’t listen to these people, they’re crazy.  Put marshmallows and brown sugar on your sweet potatoes.  Don’t let anyone tell you to do differently.  No.

The recipe for a mashed potato dish without butter and cream basically involves mashing a root vegetable into an unyielding paste while laughing, “No one will want to eat you now, ha ha haa!”  Like, hey, if you want to put garlic powder and dill in your mashed potatoes, go for it, but if you’re going to try to put “starchy potato boiling water” as a substitute for “cream and butter and things that people actually like” don’t pretend like no one’s going to notice the difference.  They will notice the difference.  They might be polite about it, but you’ll spot little clues that they’re not as good as the mashed potatoes you made last year using actual ingredients other than “water and potatoes.”  There will definitely be fewer utterances of, “Oh my God, these mashed potatoes are so good” and a few more utterances of, “Um, huh, so is this a new recipe or?” and at the end of the meal you’ll look around and see every plate is empty save for a big old wad of mashed potatoes that went practically untouched and now you’re left with all these leftover mashed potatoes, when they used to be the first thing that would run out, and when you tried to throw them away the garbage can actually spit it back at you and said, “Um, hey, thanks, but, you know, I’m just feeling full right now.”

Do not make your garbage can spit leftover mashed potatoes at you.  Cook it with heavy cream and butter and salt and pepper and if you want to put cream cheese in there fuck it, go ahead, we only live once, we might as well be full for it.

Who eats latkes as a Thanksgiving staple?  Is that a thing?  Like, we get that they’re good, and they’re way better than fucking grated beets, zucchini, or celery root, but…do any of you guys consider this an actual Thanksgiving side dish?  We’re not judging if you do, we’d just never heard of this.

And yes, the website lists this as number 8 when it should be number 6.  It’s a typo that they didn’t spot and fix, which sort of says a lot about the amount of thought that went into their article.  Anyway, latkes are good.  You can have those.  But that feels like saying “um, bacon is a Thanksgiving side dish!” in the sense that, it totally can be, but it’s not a common one, and no matter what if you’re offering a side dish of celery root you’re going to be immolated by your guests.

On one hand, this is totally a reasonable suggestion.  They’re not asking you to put anything gross with your cranberries.  Cranberries with apples and pears are all good, tasty things.  But let’s not forget that the reason we douse cranberries in sugar is because those motherfuckers are tart.  Like, not-pleasant-to-eat-on-their-own tart  And let’s not forget that there’s something just classic and American about the canned glob of cranberry sauce that you slice into jiggling discs.  It’s one of those foods that’s not “better” than a healthier alternative, but if you’re going to healthy route and not buying a can of cranberry sauce, well, sorry, you’re doing Thanksgiving wrong.

Oh, very cool, very very cool, we get to go back to righteous anger after a few relatively tame entries.  But yeah, you get your motherfucking hands off our goddamn green bean casserole, Gladys.   They start off by saying, cloyingly, “wait, aren’t green beans already healthy?  Not the way we cook them for Thanksgiving!”  Well that’s the fucking point, vegetables are trash, the only vegetables you should ever eat are the frightening were-veggie variety!  You don’t have to eat green beans raw because you’re an adult and you’re allowed to have your dessert before your dinner if you so want, you paid to put that food on the damn table!  Green bean casseroles are one of the best dishes you can have over Thanksgiving, and that’s precisely because it is covered in enough unhealthy non-vegetable gunk to make it palatable.

If we were ever told, “green bean casserole’s coming up” only to sit down to a bunch of green beans cooked with garlic and Greek yogurt, and we’re not being dramatic here, we’d probably start crying.  “But…why?” we’ll say as we poke and prod at the sad soggy stalks and mildly acidic white paste they’re swimming in.  “Wh…this isn’t cream of mushroom soup,” we’ll offer with a quiver in our voice as the first lackluster scent rises to our nostrils.  “Where are the damn crispy onions?  Where are they you fiend!” we’ll scream, shaking uncontrollably, forsaking our God in that one faith-shattering moment.

Well guess what, congratulations, you’ve ruined Thanksgiving.  The family will never recover from 2014, the Thanksgiving where someone ruined green bean casserole because Mother Nature Network told them too.  Those fucking monsters.  Don’t stand for that.  Make your green bean casserole, and fuck it, add some cheese and bacon to it, just to show those bastards you mean business.

No.

Nonono.

You know what, the first few sentences of this sound reasonable, apart from the obnoxious hand-wringing of “ermagod, pie has so many calories, we don’t get how dessert works.”  Using rice flour or whole wheat for a crust isn’t something that’ll ruin a meal for you, and oil instead of lard could be fine, but probably not (when in doubt, use lard, that’s what we always say).  But then they had to go and tell you to put fucking tofu in your pumpkin pie filling.  TOFU?  That’s the gravest injustice of all!  While we’re somewhat surprised and pleased that the tofurkey hasn’t been mentioned in this article yet (motherfucking tofurkey) we cannot stand this idea.  Apart from sounding just awful, it defeats the entire purpose of pie.  Pie is a luxury, and a Thanksgiving necessity!  Skimping on the unhealthiness of pie is like hiring out a prostitute for three hours where you complain about your wife the whole time while remaining fully clothed.  Skimping on the unhealthiness of pie is like renting a yacht but not paying for gas.  Skimping on the unhealthiness of pie is like having a guys/ladies weekend in Vegas, and spending the whole time in church.  It’s completely contrary to everything that dessert stands for.

Don’t put tofu in your pie.  Don’t take marshmallows off your sweet potatoes.  Don’t listen to Gladys (ugh, Gladys) or the Mother Nature Network or anyone telling you to “go easy” or “we think you’ve had enough beers, Uncle Johnny, don’t you remember what happened last year when you started that fire” or any of that nonsense.  Embrace Thanksgiving, embrace the time with your family and, most importantly, embrace your ever expanding waistlines.  Tomorrow’s the day where you’re well within your rights to get a little gluttonous.  And don’t let anyone convince you otherwise.

“I like my hot dogs like I like my women—concrete physical proof that I lead a shallow, superficial existence.”

~Rich people who spend more than $100 on hot dogs

America, let’s take a moment to talk about hot dogs.  They’re great, right?  Pretty much anywhere you go, you’re going to find a great hot dog with its own unique flavor profile and style that hopefully doesn’t involve ketchup because if your hot dog involves ketchup then everyone involved in its preparation and consumption has the taste buds of a six-year-old, but we digress.

Hot dogs are wonderful.  They’re delicious, gloriously unhealthy, satisfying, and most of all…expensive?

*Record scratch!*

No!  Of course they’re not!  If you’re spending more than five dollars for a hot dog, you’re a chump, and if you’re raising your eyebrows and saying, “Five?  Try two bucks, Rockefeller” in response to that five dollar figure, well, we wouldn’t argue with you on that point, we’d just point out that certain hot dogs of the jumbo and foot long variety at some of the best hot dog stands around can just about get away with charging that much.  But to your larger point, yes, we agree with you.  Hot dogs are supposed to be cheap, and delicious.  Cheap.  And delicious.

Unfortunately, well, you know.  Rich people exist.

Pictured above, a rich person with their pet oil tycoon.

We’re not talking about the standard kind of rich person, who has multiple mansions and cars and personal servants and, like, a McDonald’s in their house like that one scene we all remember from the Richie Rich movie.  No, we’re talking about the kind of rich people who either come from money so old they don’t understand how much things are supposed to actually cost in the real world, or people who are so amazed that they’re rich that they need to do everything in their power to let everyone know, “Hey, look at me, look at how much money I have!” like a seven-year-old boy who just learned how to back-flip into the pool.  “Why aren’t you guys looking I just bought a piece of JFK’s skull!”

We’ve talked about this specific type, and how they’re just, the worst, many times before.  We’ve seen $3.7 million bottles of vodka, whiskeys that cost as much as a house, hell, we’ve even run across all sorts of kinds of food covered in edible gold because fuck it, why not just devour ounce after ounce of pure gold at this point?  At this point we’ve basically accepted that we shouldn’t be surprised when notoriously cheap foods are made expensive for no particular reason.  Just as you’re sure to find someone willing to fork over $12,000 to get a pizza made in your house, you’re going to find thousand dollar hot dogs.

Now, admittedly, there are a lot of hot dogs that cost way more than they should, and a surprising amount of them sold at baseball stadiums.  But we’re not here to shame the people who spend $29 on a hot dog, or $50 on a hot dog.  No, we’re not going getting out of bed to write about any hot dog unless it costs more than $100, because we really want to drive home the absurdity of how much these people are paying for the right to brag about how much they are able to spend on a single goddamn hot dog.

The Most Expensive Hot Dogs in the World

When you see articles purporting to have discovered the most expensive hot dog in the world, they all follow the same general “overdramatic gasp!” approach.  First, they incredulously tell you how much it costs, and then list the “crazy” ingredients that are added to justify the price, totally flabbergasted that something so gourmet and expensive would be added to a food (this usually is because they’ve forgotten how rich people’s brains function).  Then, if they’re working for a real big national publication, they’ll top it all off with a food pun, which totally makes the article complete and is not the laziest form of comedy writing.  So, when everything is strung together, you get something like, “Haute dog!  World’s most expensive frank costs $69:  Foot-long garnished with truffle oil, foie gras, sets record” which, mind you, isn’t even close to being the world’s most expensive hot dog, but never mind that.  We’re not here to judge—we’re basically writing some variation that headline, over and over, for our own article, only we’re not above giggling whenever we see the number “69” in print.  Heh.

The difference between us and Buzzfeed is a following that can bring in millions of dollars in ad revenue a year the fact that when we see someone putting caviar on top of a hot dog, we don’t act like this is some world shattering “holy fuck, LOOK HOW CRAZY THIS IS” event.  We just know it’s another case of someone preparing a stunt dish for free publicity, which we’re more than happy to give them.  We’re just going to insult them, sometimes personally, and sometimes viciously, for that publicity.  Because that’s the American way.

The Dragon Dog:  $100

Dougie Dog, a Vancouver based now-shuttered restaurant that now operates as a food truck whose owner looks Guy Fieri’s uncle, shocked the world (read as:  warranted a Huffington Post article) by releasing a $100 hot dog that must be ordered at least 12 hours in advanced.  The Dragon Dog fries a foot-long Bratwurst in truffle oil, douses it (though we’d guess it’s more of a light sprinkle) with a vintage Louis XIII cognac that costs $2,000 a bottle, and tops it with Kobe beef, lobster meat, and “the restaurant’s signature picante sauce” because clearly, if you’re spending $100 on a hot dog, you don’t want to actually taste the gourmet ingredients.  No, you’d rather just deal with a mouthful of fire dealt to you by some liberally applied, flavor-masking hot sauce some restaurant decided to push your way.  Great, thanks Dougie Dog, good call shelling out for the $2,000 Cognac before dousing it in goddamn Tabasco.

Naturally, as of August of 2014, over 1000 people had ordered the dog, which either is an indictment of society as a whole, or is proof that the jokes we used to make about Canada’s money being worthless in the 1990s are finally starting to be relevant again.  We’ll let you decide.

The  Normal Hot Dog (That Makes You Feel Guilty):  $135

So, okay, not all of these hot dogs are stupid and decadent.  Sometimes they’re just stupid and political.  In this particular case, we can’t make fun of the hot dog in question, or the people that buy it.  You see, back in 2005, the United Nations set up a booth at Sweden’s Norrmalmstorg (which is a central square in Stockholm and not, as one would expect from the name, a average, everyday normal person who suddenly gains incredible strength) where they sold regular hot dogs for 999 kronor, or about $135 in real-people-dollars.  They were doing this to address world poverty, pointing out that for the one billion people that live on less than 200 kronor a month, a normal hot dog would cost them the equivalent of 1,000 kronor.  Sorry, let’s Americanize that and get it right.  For the people in extreme poverty living on less than $27 a month, just getting a hot dog would cost them the equivalent of $135 bucks.

While we’re not sure how they came to that figure (because math is scary and evil) we do know that we can’t make fun of this hot dog, ‘cause it was about starving kids in Third World countries, and all the money they raised went to charity (though we honestly have a hard time assuming they got that many takers).

Anyway, back to stupid rich people stuff.

California Capitol City Dawg:  $145.49

Of course, the 49 cents here is important, because if you’re going to ask someone to spend 145.50 on a hot dog, you’d probably have to justify your purchase.  But, one hundred and forty nine goddamn cents?  Still totally reasonable!  This offering from Sacramento’s now-closed Capitol Dawg was listed as the Guinness World Record for most expensive hot dog, only they’re closed now, which should hopefully be a lesson for all you potential business owners who want to open a hot dog stand and do ridiculous shit to make your hot dog expensive.  This is the third entry on this list, and so far, you’ve had two closed restaurants and one pop-up kiosk that overcharged for normal hot dogs to make you feel bad for owning a TV.  Not a great track record, so far, we’re just saying.

For one hundred and forty five American dollars (and forty-nine cents) you can fancy up your next bowel movement with an 18-inch all-beef hot dog in a pork casing, grilled in bacon fat.  That is lovingly (we assume) placed in a 15-inch custom-made focaccia roll, brushed with truffle butter and toasted.  The dog is topped with strips of maple-marinated, apple-and-cherry-wood-smoked bacon, which as far as bacon being added to a hot dog goes, honestly sounds good, but not more than “a three dollar upcharge” good.  This giant bacon hot dog is then covered with French whole-grain mustard, garlic-herb mayonnaise, caramelized shallots, mixed baby greens, chopped tomato, dried cranberries (ugh, why?), peppercorn, and a balsamic vinaigrette.

If you’re thinking to yourself, “So, it’s a bacon hot dog with some mustard, fancy mayo, and a cranberry salad on top of it, basically, why the fuck would that be $145.49?” we should point out that we left a crucial ingredient.  The final ingredient is globs of moose cheese, which costs upwards of $200 a pound and can only be purchased in-person at a Swedish moose dairy farm, which is a thing you now know exists.  “So, the most expensive ingredient on this hot dog is moose cheese, which might be very expensive but sounds like something that Canadian hicks would make while living off the land?”  Y…well, yes.  Yes that is true.  But hey, it’s not like this hot dog costs a full $145.50.  Then that’d be way too much money for a moose cheese hot dog.  $145.49 is much more reasonable.

Juuni Ban:  $169

We’ve still yet to find an actual functioning brick and mortar restaurant that’s willing to horrendously overcharge you for the novelty of saying you ate a stupid hot dog, since the Juuni Ban comes from Tokyo Dog, a Seattle-based food truck that specializes in “Japanese-style hot dogs” which, in our experience, is a concept that has us incredibly worried.  Thankfully, they go about this fusion through the more appropriate American method of “using decent ingredients used by other cultures, and adding them to something we already like” as opposed to Japan’s method of “burn it, burn it all, burn everything.”  They tend to make more-expensive-than-necessary hot dogs with flavor combinations like “teriyaki sauce on a hot dog” or “plum sauce on a bratwurst” which, you know, doesn’t strike us as the best way to prepare a hot dog, but also doesn’t make us want to punch a wall in sheer anger.

The Juuni Ban technically is a “Japanese/American fusion”, though in reality they pretty much just add Japanese food words to American foods like mayo or beef.  Once you’ve given Tokyo Dog a full two week notice (after which, since it’s a food truck…would they drive it to your house?  Or would you have to go to them, and eat it on a park bench or something, with napkins awkwardly on your lap to protect your khaki pants?) they will whip up a 12 inch bratwurst, which is topped with butter teriyaki (fusion!) grilled onions, maitake (probably Japanese!) mushrooms, Wagyu (kapow!) beef, foie gras, black truffles, caviar, and Japanese (fusion to the max!) mayonnaise.

(For those of you wondering, Japanese mayo is actually a real thing, and not some bullshit “we put wasabi in mayonnaise” fake concoction.  In Japan, they make mayo the same way we do, only they use egg yolks instead of whole eggs, and apple or rice vinegar, rather than regular distilled vinegar, which makes it thicker and sweeter than American mayo.  And now you learned something)

This hot dog does hit the classic “I don’t care how it tastes mushed together between my chompers, I want rich person food, dammit!” hallmarks.  Naturally, your hot dog doesn’t belong being called a rich person hot dog if it doesn’t have any Kobe beef (Wagyu, same diff), which is that “most expensive beef in the world” that you’ve been hearing about for the last 7 years, with the reason for it being considered a delicacy getting more absurd every time you hear it.  “They massage the cows every day!”  “They feed them sake and beer!”  “They walk on milk crates so they never touch the ground their whole lives!”  “They spend their days watching Orange is the New Black on Netflix and eating Chipotle burritos!”  So, cool.  Wagyu beef.

But on top of that, you’ve got fancy-sounding-mushrooms (which, meh, maitake mushrooms are just hen-of-the-woods mushrooms, shrug, big whoop), caviar, foie gras, and black truffles.  It’s like a rich foodie smorgasbord, only, you know, it’s on a damn hot dog (with nothing special done to the bun, by the way.  It’s just a standard brioche bun).  But hey, you got to spend $169 to get something from a goddamn food truck, good for you, that trust fund will never dry up!

Also, heh.  169.  Nailed it.

TheONEdog:  $1,501

Back in May of 2012, Little Rock’s Hot Dog Mike (who also has since gone out of business CURSED THESE HOT DOGS ARE CURSED) made six theONEdogs for a charity to help the homeless.  He charged $1,501 a piece for them, and sold at least four, if not all of them to people who decided that donating to charity isn’t quite as fun if you can’t combine it with eating an over-the-top hot dog, which is fair.

Of the hot dogs on the list, this one definitely has the most inflated price, probably because the profit margins were meant to go to, scoff, the less fortunate.  Using a standard ¼ pound all-beef hot dog on a potato bun, Mike Juliano (who kept one dollar of the purchase price for himself, presumably to buy an eight pack of all-beef hot dogs), smothered everything with lobster tail, saffron aioli, and gold flakes.  As you can see in the picture, it looks kind of messy.  Wait, that looks put together for you?  Let’s try another angle.

Like we said, it looks messy as hell.  Which seems appropriate for an absurdly expensive hot dog.  Everyone else trying to get hundreds or thousands of dollars out of you for a tube of deliciously processed meats has been spending so much effort making their concoctions look so “dainty” and “proper” but a hot dog covered in a bunch of rich people stuff is going to cause a mess the moment you bite into that fucker.  So why not just embrace it?  “Fuck you guys, here’s some saffron fancy mayonnaise with lobster and, fuck it, gold, eat, eat that shit, the aioli’s gonna cake some gold flakes to your upper lip, a bit of lobster is going to fall on the ground, and you’re going to eat all the meat and be left with like a bite-worth of gold-and-saffron-soaked potato bun, wondering to yourself if you should eat it or toss it.

You eat it, though.  Of course you do.  Nothing can stop you.  Enjoy your charitable tax write-off.

The 230 fifth Dog:  $2,300

Naturally, the most expensive hot dog in the world was made by an expensive Manhattan lounge with mediocre reviews.  Surprisingly, however, 230 Fifth still exists, and not just as a food truck, making every other entry on this list to toss their hat to the ground, stomp on it, and shout, “Dammit, when the devil said in order for me to make an obnoxiously priced hot dog, I’d have to choose between losing my business or my first born child, I should have known someone would have taken the child option!  Damn!”

Like the other “Jesus Christ, more than $1000?” entry on this list, a limited number of these were made for charity, and also like the last entry on this list, there were “decadent” toppings added, which is a word we place in sarcastic quotation marks because caviar will taste like a combination of mushed together bread and meat with a hint of fish when you really get down to eating this fucker.

The 12-inch dog, with a sausage made of dry-aged Wagyu beef enriched with truffle oil, knocks elbows with onions carmelized in Dom Perignon and 100-year-old balsamic vinegar which, hey, you guys do you, seems like a lot of work try and probably fail to prod some additional flavor out of a fucking onion.  There’s also champagne-braised sauerkraut (goddamn it, New York, get your mess right), a fuck ton of caviar, because sure, gold leaf, because rich people blah blah that joke we made twenty times already this article, and relish made from $10 pickles (goddamn it New York, GET YOUR MESS RIGHT!).  All of this lies within a white truffle butter coated toasted brioche bun that’s then finished with French mustard that supposedly costs $35 a bottle as well as saffron-infused W Ketchup that…

*second record scratch yes we’re doing this gimmick again*

Hold up.  Hold up one Goddamn second.

Ketchup.

You’re putting fucking ketchup on your fucking billion dollar (citation needed) hot fucking dog?

“This ketchup is fancy!  It costs $9 a bottle!”

You’re putting goddamn motherfucking ketchup on your fucking goddamn Jesus Christ expensive shit hot dog?

“Ketchup is good, I like ketchup on my hot dog, what’s the…”

*gunshot*

*silence*

We’re done here.  May God have mercy on you, 230 Fifth.  May God have mercy on you all.

“Oh no.  Fruit Cake.”

~You, on Christmas

This week, we’re anxiously counting down the days for Christmas, a holiday you either love unconditionally or complain about at every opportunity while getting more and more pissed off each time someone calls you a “Grinch.”  “Shut up, I’m not a Grinch, I just don’t see why we’re making such a big deal about…” you start to say to your coworkers before being interrupted by the spontaneous Christmas caroling that just started because, God people, we know Christmas is almost here, that doesn’t mean you need to sing “Jingle Bells” all fucking day, this is a place of work for fuck’s sake.

However, despite its detractors, most of us love Christmas, a time for family, friends, togetherness, and general Christmas cheer.  Everyone has their traditions, and while some of those traditions are stupid and racist, most are wholesome and do wonders to take your mind off the harsh winter, no seriously this winter’s going to be really bad goddamn it what did we do to deserve this.  And many of these traditions involve delicious sugary treats.

Where Thanksgiving is a holiday centered around savory goodness and no shut up we’re not going to be healthy about it, Christmas is by and large sweets-focused.  It’s assumed that you’ll eat and drink too much during Christmas, but unlike Thanksgiving, there’s a little more leeway for dinner.  Ham?  Fine!  Turkey?   Sounds good!  A roast beef covered in cigarette butts?  Goddamn it, Uncle Bert, we told you no smoking in the house, why the fuck did you think that putting your spent cigs in the oven was the best way to cover your tracks?  But a Christmas without sweet candy treats is hardly a Christmas at all, unless you’re someone who happens to not be Christian, in which case you still celebrate Christmas because let’s be real this shit is pretty damn secular by this point, and you’re getting the day off of work for it, so quit your bellyaching.

While some of these treats are delightful and delicious (stay tuned for our Christmas Eve article) some are…well.  You know.  Bad.

The Worst Holiday Treats of Christmas

For most of us (*glares angrily at California*) Christmastime requires sweets because late December brings with it a particular weather pattern known as, “Fuck this shit.”  When your day-to-day interaction devolves into a series of skirmishes for the most blankets/sweaters/the-best-spot-by-the-electrical-heater, there’s a comforting sweetness to candy, cookies, and pretty much anything that requires a lot of butter and sugar to will itself into existence during the cold dark nights that most of us are forced to endure (*glares angrily at California*).

Sometimes this yields delicious, seasonally appropriate treats.  Sometimes this results in weird, raisin-y blocks that you have to pretend to like because Aunt Martha has always been so nice to you, and she’s been taking it pretty hard ever since Uncle Frank passed on.  If it helps, you can think of Christmas treats like Santa’s List—there’s naughty, and there’s nice.  The following are naughty.  And not in the fun “that sounds sexual and/or kinky” way.  No, these are naughty in the “I tried to put it down the garbage disposal and now my garbage disposal has an eating problem I didn’t even know that was possible, it’s literally a non-sentient bundle of blades that churns organic material at the flip of a switch, but now it just keeps throwing the food back up at us, this is truly awful, we’re worried for it” kind of way.

Happy Birthday, Jesus, we’re sorry for this.

Fruitcake

We’ll start with the Christmas dessert item that everyone loves to hate—the humble fruitcake.  The sight of this almost invariably rock hard bread loaded with candied and dried fruits, nuts, and spices inevitably results in sighs and forced niceties, almost as if by design, as if your grandmother keeps on mailing you fruitcake every year hoping that someday you eventually snap, hurling the fruitcake out into the street and causing a multi-car pile-up when the stale loaf crashes through the windshield of an unsuspecting driver.  You know that something is really bad when the Wikipedia article about it has to actively say, “In the United States, the fruit cake has been a ridiculed dessert.”  Just, ripping the Band-Aid off, telling you point blank that this is not something that people choose to eat.

Johnny Carson used to joke that there was only one fruitcake in the world, passed from family to family, and ever since 1995 the residents of Manitou Springs, Colorado have held a “Great Fruitcake Toss” on the first Saturday of every January in an event that’s opening description simply states, “At last, the answer to that age-old question:  How do I get rid of this *$&*A#! fruitcake?”

Perhaps the most absurd part of the fruitcake’s stubborn insistence in remaining a Christmas staple is the fact that it’s objectively a pain in the ass to make.  This one variation, for example, takes almost 11 hours to finish.  The last time we spent 11 hours to disappoint someone we loved, we watched all of the Lord of the Rings trilogy with our significant other before trying to have sex with them for the first time.  We’re about ten years away from fruitcakes only being purchased as gag gifts to piss people off, and we want to expedite that process by making it illegal to purchase fruitcakes unironically.  Christmas needs this to happen.

Sugar Plums

It’s pretty pointless to try to improve upon the Christmas films and songs that we’ve already got, especially considering that we made the perfect Christmas movie back in the 1980’s.  While a Christmas movie might pop into the conversation every now and then, giving us a Love Actually or Santa’s Slay to renew our love of the holiday season,  the majority of our lore, be it songs or Christmas characters, are timeless and old enough that at least some references don’t make sense anymore.  We don’t need new songs or stories because T’was the Night Before Christmas is the only Christmas Eve story we’ll ever need, and White Christmas will warm even the iciest of hearts.  Also because when we try to make new Christmas songs it invariably turns into pop stars trying to bang Santa.

And while the general themes of Christmas never change (family!  Sitting by a warm fire!  Cooking nuts for some reason!) some of the specifics seem outdated to those of us used to living in a global society where we’re no longer forced to eat whatever counted as “family-friendly” dinner dishes back in the 1950’s.  Children born before 1940 had to grow up in a world were having an orange in the winter counted as a luxury, so we can’t fault them for clamoring for certain holiday treats for no other reason than the high sugar content.  That said, if there’s one thing we can say we’ve learned from all the Christmas songs we’ve heard growing up, it’s that apparently people loved them some sugar plums, which is just the saddest thing.

Kids back in the day would wake up on Christmas with “visions of sugar plums” dancing in their heads, which probably were hallucinations caused by a combination of malnutrition and polio as best as we can tell.  Every kid thinks they want sugar plums because they hear it mentioned in roughly 400 Christmas songs, and it contains a word they really like (“sugar!”) and a word that they moderately tolerate but really are just sort of ‘meh’ about (“eh, plums are alright?”).  That said, most of you likely haven’t encountered sugar plums in real life, and some of you probably have no idea what a sugar plum actually is.

It’s mashed up prunes squished into plum shapes.  That’s it.  That’s so sad.  They’re generally bite sized, and have a hard, sugary-shell, but it’s just made by mashing up prunes and then doing unspeakable things to the goop.  This dessert item came into existence in the 1600s, when they had to go through a process known as sugar panning to get their hard shell.  Nowadays, we can add hard candy shells via an easy mechanized process but back then this had to be done manually, which took goddamn days to finish.  And sure, in the 1600s when the only form of entertainment was “cooking sugar plums” and “trying not to die of dysentery before the sugar plums finish cooking” sugar plums were probably something worth getting excited about.  But we live in the 21^st century, goddamn it.  We have, like, dozens of varieties of Skittles.  Get that sugar plum shit out of our face.

Figgy pudding

Here’s another thing that only exists in modern polite society because we fucking sing about it in Christmas carols, but make no mistake, no one wants your damn figgy pudding.  Look at that fucking picture.  That’s the picture Wikipedia decided to present to us as the most accurate representation of this dish.  That is either a fig based, English pudding dish (so think “Yorkshire pudding” and not “Jello pudding” in this instance) with a flaming brandy or someone set fire to a bag of dog shit and left it on your Christmas table as a prank.

This is gross.  The only reason you should bring anyone figgy pudding is if you want to punish Christmas carolers for making you sit through all three verses of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas.”   “Oh, you won’t go until you get some?  Here, enjoy sadness disguising itself as a holiday treat.”  That’ll teach the bastards.

Mince Pie

If you’re an American who has tried to live a good and wholesome life, you’ve probably been lucky enough to avoid mince pies, which have a long and storied Christmas tradition in England, the country where culinary practices historically go to fester and die.  England tends to get mad whenever people say they don’t know how to cook, since London is a world-class restaurant city, and Gordon Ramsey exists as both an established chef and caricature of a television personality, but considering the last three items on this list have British roots, we’re not sure how much we can trust them.  Hundreds of years ago, when life was basically about trying to fight off death and stave boredom, countries like France decided to make revolutionary and rich sauces and cooking techniques to pass the time, while England turned to their list of potential ingredients, shrugged, and said, “let’s boil it all together and see what happens” like a college frat house without a meal plan.

And so we have the mince pie.  Combining minced meat, suet (raw beef or mutton fat), fruits, spices, and a screaming sound that never leaves your ears no matter how quiet the endless night may seem, it’s traditionally viewed as a traditional Christmas treat for those out there who have committed sins far to grave to ever forgive.  One British bakery chain claims that they sell 7.5 million of these pies each year, and at this point we’re not even mad, we just feel sorry for the poor Brits and the food they have to put up with.  This is just terrifying.  God bless you, America, for not making us eat this each year.

Warm Milk and Stale Cookies for Santa

Santa is completely real so long as you believe hard enough, but come to think of it, when you were a kid Tinkerbell actually died in your Elementary School’s performance of Peter Pan because no one was willing to clap her back to life.  The rest of the show just consisted of the actors stifling sobs throughout the singing of “We Will Never Grow Up.”  So, for you, no, Santa’s not real.  But that won’t stop you from telling your children about his existence until they reach an age where they’ll be made fun of for shouting, “He does too exist” to his high school classmates, because Santa Claus is a very important part of an American childhood.  Believing in Santa Claus during your formative years imparts a sense of wonderment while also teaching your children the important lesson that your parents, the people who care for you and claim to love you more than anyone else on the planet, will straight up lie to your face with very little prompting.  See also: the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, and the importance of the PSAT.

In keeping up this duplicitous façade, you have your child put out milk and cookies for Santa to eat and drink, “because giving gifts to every girl and boy sure makes him hungry.”  It’s a kind gesture on behalf of the child, thanking Santa for bestowing him with presents.  It’s also a damn lie, and honestly not that different than finding out that your donation to the Salvation Army went towards laundry costs.

Listen.  Milk and cookies are delicious.  But milk that was left out at 6:30 at night by your eager son or daughter and stale store-bought cookies sitting just as long on a plate that won’t be eaten until you’re finished putting the last of the presents under the tree, which was probably at around 11:30 because you couldn’t for the life of you get your excitable kid to just go to fucking bed, sounds like a way to test yourself against foodborne illnesses.  You’re scarfing down warm milk and stale cookies to more effectively lie to your kid, and roughly 5% of parents who take part in this actually are excited for the excuse to stuff more cookies than they really wanted in one sitting down their damn throats immediately before going to sleep (because you know your kid is going to wake you up no later than 6 in the morning).

It’s tradition, but it doesn’t mean you have to like it.

Reindeer Poop

This is the stupidest idea for a Christmas treat.  There are different variations of it, and most are homemade, but the general gist is, “look, it’s little nuggets of chocolate covered nuts, lol, it’s sort of like little pebbles of reindeer poop.”  The sad part is, chocolate covered nuts are delicious.  It’s just, if you’re really pushing so hard for something to be Christmasy that you’re line thought goes from “Santa flies reindeer” to “reindeer poop” to “poop is the same color as chocolate” then you just need to shut the hell up and go home.  Just shut it down.  Eat a chocolate Santa or something.  Just, don’t call your food poop, people.

Don’t eat poop for Christmas.  Jesus Christ, we can’t believe we even have to tell you that.

Anyway, it wouldn’t be Christmas with a little optimism.  So come on back in a few days on Christmas Eve, and we’ll let you know about the best holiday treats we can think of.  Because most of the sweets of Christmas are delicious, and we’re not letting British entries worm their way into that one.

“Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!”

~Santa Claus, probably, right?  Maybe?

Today is Christmas Eve, that day where you silently complain about the fact that you had to use a vacation day in order to travel back home for the holidays.  For some, it’s an important part of the Christmas tradition, and for others, it’s a day you anxiously power through waiting expectantly for Christmas to finally show up.  And for most of us, it’s a day where oh shit you totally forgot to wrap your presents didn’t you, okay well you should get that shit down and chuck it under the tree before someone notices.

Now, a few days ago we told you about the worst Christmas treats out there.  There was reindeer poop and fruitcake and oh God figgy pudding why as well as a bunch of other horrific British concoctions and it was pretty much awful.  But hey, Christmas is tomorrow, some of you are working a half day or some nonsense like that, so let’s just talk about some Christmas treats that you’d actually want to eat instead.  Because America does actually know a thing or twelve about making Christmas delicious.

The Best Holiday Treats of Christmas

There are a lot of desserts out there that you might associate with Christmas, but might be more regionally based.  Frango mints were a staple for many Chicago Christmases.  You New Yorkers go crazy for Mallomars.  We really wanted to talk about hot chocolate here, but then we got shouted down because hot chocolate is pretty much a “whenever it’s cold outside” drink, and we’d be doing it a disservice by limiting it to Christmas.  We’ll probably not talk about a very important Christmas treat that you grew up with, and be sure to take to the comments section with that and tell us we’re wrong.  We might even agree with you on some!  That’s right, it’s entirely possible we won’t call you stupid for suggesting items that we missed!  It’s a Christmas miracle!

Anyway, here are some Christmas treats that can brighten even the coldest Christmas morn.

Yule Log

There are two kinds of yule logs out there.  One is a big old wooden long that you set on fire because Christmas or something, and the other is a delicious cake that’s filled with icing and chocolate.  It originated in France, because back in the 1800s when England was busy cramming figs and prunes into everything, France occupied most of their time by learning how to cook things people would want to eat, with the remainder of their free time spent learning to run away from things.

The yule log is simple and everything you’d want from a Christmas treat.  Chocolate and cream and cake, combined into an unhealthy dessert, and given a Christmas-y name.  Cut it in slices, eat it, and be thankful you have one relative who knows what’s up and brought the yule log instead of some damn fruitcake.  Good call, Aunt Sheryl.

Peppermint Bark

Peppermint is a flavor that’s available all year long, but outside of Christmas it finds itself relegated to dinner mint duty.  There’s no particular reason why peppermint gets the short end of the straw the rest of the year, but due to a combination of tradition and, well, the fact that red is one of the colors of Christmas, you’ll probably have more peppermint in December than the rest of the year combined.

We don’t have a problem with that fact, because peppermint is pretty delicious, and it allows us to make peppermint bark, which is crazy delicious.  Combining layers of white chocolate, dark chocolate, and crumbled up peppermint candy pieces (usually from candy canes, which we’ll get to later) putting peppermint bark out at a holiday gathering is a great way to amuse yourself as you watch your guests try to coyly grab a few pieces of the treat, trying to give an air of, “oh, peppermint bark you say?  Sure, I suppose I could have just maybe half a piece” until it starts to run out at which point everyone is fighting each other for the last piece and everything slowly devolves into pure anarchy, bodies flailing at each other trying to get the last crumbs of deliciousness.

All except for Lester, who sits back and watches the chaos.  For half a second you think you see flames flickering in the reflection on the lens of his glasses.  Lester, who never even made a move for the peppermint bark.  As if he knew what would happen.  For a moment, he looks at you and you think you see a small spasm of movement at the corner of his lips, which immediately reverts back to motionlessness.  When finally, the peppermint bark has been devoured, and your guests begrudgingly settle back into their seats and poke and prod at the other, lesser appetizers and treats you’ve left you, still Lester stands, almost as if only you can see him.  Almost as if…he never left.  Wait, can they see him?  How do you even know Lester?  He just appeared, after the accident.  Oh God.  The accident.  You remember it all now.  Your guests, trying to make up for their past near-riot mumble thanks for the snacks, compliments for the peppermint bark, but it sounds like they’re underwater.  The accident.  Lester looks at you.  His eyes are hollow.

He smiles, and you hear screams.

…Um.  What we mean to say is, peppermint bark is really good.  Really good.  Yup.  Great.  If you bring peppermint bark to a holiday party, you’re probably the hero of that party.

Yes.  Hero.  *stares off wistfully into the distance*

Candy Canes

Candy canes have been associated with Christmas for hundreds of years, meaning that generations of children have grown up eating delicious peppermint sticks and making everything they touch sticky afterwards.  Some say that they were created in 1670 in Cologne, Germany, after a choirmaster at the local cathedral asked a candy maker to make sweet sticks in order to quiet the children attending his services.  The stick was then given a crook to help the children remember the shepherds who visited baby Jesus, and the color white was to be incorporated to remind everyone of Jesus’ sinless life, with red representing his blood.  You may have heard this story before, or you may just be reading it now, but you probably were thinking when you first heard it, “Oh, that makes sense.”  Too bad that this is essentially nice-sounding bullshit.

In reality, the first recipe for peppermint candy sticks (without the crook) came out around 1844, was first seen mentioned as a Christmas treat in about 1874, and was first described as being hung on a Christmas tree in 1882.  The striped pattern didn’t become the norm until about 1900.  So, while no one knows why the canes got their trademark hook shape, the most likely reason seems to be…people wanted to hang the candy on their Christmas trees.  The J-shape of the candy cane lends itself perfectly to hanging on a tree, and there probably isn’t much more to it than that.  But we’re not here to talk about people trying to give flashy stories to candies we like, we’re here to talk about the actual treats.  And candy canes are delicious (though, we must say, not as delicious as peppermint bark).

There are two reasons why everyone likes peppermint bark more than candy canes, despite the iconic hooked confectionery stick’s important historic role in the Christmas season.  The first and most obvious benefit of peppermint bark is the addition of chocolate.  Chocolate makes everything better.  It makes marshmallows better!  It makes strawberries better!  It makes grasshoppers kinda less gross to think about eating!  So yes, sprinkling candy cane bits on top of chocolate is going to just make everything even better.  But the other reason why it’s better is utility.

Simply put, eating candy canes are a pain in the ass.  A huge pain in the ass.  It’s impossible to get through a whole candy cane without needing to spend about five minutes washing the liquid sugar stick off your hands.  When you’re a kid, this is fun—you clench your hand together and watch the skin sorta stick together for a second before letting loose and it’s that gross/cool dichotomy that kids love.  When you’re an adult, it’s a pain in the ass, because you have to hunt down a sink and wash your hands before you can check your phone.  If you’re an adult with a kid who just ate a candy cane, candy canes are a punishment sent by Satan specifically to ruin your day, as you’re going to chase around your kid (who now has a sugar high) with a moist toilette before he or she precedes to put her sticky hands on everything within reach, which will almost certainly include the leather seats of your car.  Mother fucker, you just had the upholstery touched up.  Goddamn candy canes.

Terry’s Chocolate Orange

Terry’s Chocolate Orange skirts that line between being a treat you’ve never heard of, or a treat that you absolutely love to get every Christmas.  For those unfamiliar, it’s a sphere of orange-flavored chocolate, shaped as an Orange, split into individual slices and wrapped in foil.  These are all connected together until you take the orange and smash it on a hard service, which jars the slices loose.  It’s delicious, because it’s chocolate mixed with orange, and it’s fun, because you get to break things.

This is almost enough to make up for the rest of the crappy Christmas treats England has tossed our way.  The Terry’s Chocolate Orange has been around since about 1931 (the first version, five years earlier, was a chocolate apple, because England can’t do anything right the first time around as far as food is concerned) and has been delicious ever since.  They focus their advertising of the product around the Christmas season, so while this product is associated with Christmas, it’s mainly because a PR firm thought it would be a good idea.

That said, if you ask anyone who gets a Terry’s Chocolate Orange in their stocking if they’re upset about that, the answer will always be, “Hell no, now give that back to me, I’m gonna get my chocolate on, smashy smashy.”

Gingerbread Men

Now, we’re on record with being pretty ambivalent about gingerbread as a flavor.  It’s just okay.  There’s not much special going on there.  You use it more to make fun shapes than to make something you actually want to eat.  But gingerbread men still represent Christmas, and they are a treat that you’ll even enjoy eating on Christmas (maybe while chomping off one leg at a time while going in a high pitch voice, “oh no, why, oh God, I was an Olympic sprinter, my livelihood is ruined”).  This might be the “worst” of the good holiday treats, but it’s still a good holiday treat.  It’s just sweetened bread.  There’s nothing wrong with that.

Gingerbread houses are some bullshit though.  A gingerbread man, you’ll at least eat right away.  Gingerbread houses are fun to build, and then slowly get stale and harden into a brick that can be used to smash in storefront windows if you were the kind of monster who would smash in a storefront window with a gingerbread house for no reason.

Eggnog

And finally, we come down to the part of Christmas that can get you drunk.  You can drink this mixture of milk, cream, sugar, and whipped eggs, and cinnamon or nutmeg without pouring the requisite brandy, rum, or bourbon in it, but if you’re doing so we’re going to have to assume that you’re 10 years old and your parents aren’t as cool as us.

Some people don’t like eggnog.  They think that it’s too rich, it’s too thick, it has its own unique color that’s somewhere between white and yellow, and that any attempt to turn it into a punch results in a un-mixable sheen of alcohol resting on top of it.  These people might be factually correct about a lot of that, but spiritually, they’re dead wrong.

Eggnog is the perfect Christmas drink because there’s only one or two times a year where you actually would want for it to be made available, otherwise, yes, it’d be a heavy milky mess, we as a nation would weigh about fifty pounds per capita more, and all shirts would have weird stains in the armpit region that won’t come out no matter how much you try to wash them.  If we loved egg nog all year, it’d be disastrous.

But the joy of eggnog is that you have it once or twice a year, so you have plenty of time to misremember how much you actually like it.  That first sip of eggnog is delirious delight.  Where have you been all year?  So rich, so decadent, cinnamon and nutmeg, so delicious, actually let’s put another nip of bourbon in this, oh yes, much better, so rich, so decadent.  Then about five sips in, you think, Oh God, what am I doing?  Why am I still drinking this?  This is so thick, so filling, there’s a table full of hors d’oeuvres, I mean, the American version of that, snacks, right, but God this is too much, I could be drinking beer for fuck’s sake.  And then, finally, at the end, when you’ve finished your drink, with its healthy booze kick, you think, I am drunk that was delicious and never touch the stuff again for another year, at which point the cycle starts all over again.

Eggnog is the perfect Christmas treat, because you only drink it on Christmas if you want to actually like it.  And when you do that, it’s perfect.

So there you have it, America.  There might be other treats that are part of your Christmas tradition that you dearly love, and we’re not here to say that they’re wrong.  All your favorite Christmas treats are perfectly wonderful and valid.

Unless you’re making fruitcake.  Get that shit out of here, come on.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

“I am AMPED I am AMPED woah what if they made an energy called AMP and…wait I think my heart stopped, or…MOUNTAIN DEW WOO!”

~Mountain Dew Drinker (aged 12)

Mountain Dew has one of the more unique rises to popularity of any beverage that can be poured out of a tap without someone checking your ID first.  Originally invented in 1940 in Tennessee with the we’re-honestly-not-kidding-here’s-a-commercial-for-it slogan of “Ya-Hoo!  Mountain Dew.  It’ll tickle yore innards” and advertising itself to Hillbillies, it’s since gone on to be extremely popular among gamers, extreme sports fanatics, and sixth grade kids who view it as a caffeine-rich forbidden fruit, like speed that you can buy at the gas station on the way to tweeking out throughout your school day.

Mountain Dew was first developed by Barney and Ally Hartman, who made it as a mixer and named it after a Scottish and Irish slang for “moonshine.”  It was eventually bought out by PepsiCo in 1964, and the “hillbilly angle” was removed not too long after.  While you know it as a “citrus” flavored soft drink, and it lists concentrated orange juice as one of its flavors, it’s basically just sugar and caffeine with a hint of “dorm cafeteria OJ” flavor to it.

And while “the potent combination of a sugar high with a caffeine buzz” is a good enough combination to help Mountain Dew corner 80% of the citrus-flavored pop market, in our age of American ingenuity and overzealous marketing, a company can only rest comfortably on your laurels for so long selling just one kind of middle-school wake up juice, and ever since the 1980s Mountain Dew has been experimenting with a variety of flavors.  Some of them are good (looking at you, Code Red).  Some of them…well, not so much.

The Worst Mountain Dew Flavors of All Time

One way or another, we all grew up with Mountain Dew probably framing at least one or two bad decisions in our lives.  Whether it was getting amped up on caffeine so much that you said, “Fuck it, I’ll just jump from the top of this tree I just climbed this cocaine, I mean Mountain Dew, is amazing I’m going to live forever!” at the age of 9 or it was that time you decided to go to Taco Bell to get an extra-large Baja Blast half-filled with vodka before your first public intoxication ticket at the age of 14, there are a variety of ways that the super charged energy boost that is Mountain Dew shaped your formative years for better or worse.  Well, definitely for the worst if your mom bought you caffeine free Mountain Dew, which pretty much defeats the entire purpose of the damn stuff.

Mountain Dew is a hard beverage to screw up.  It’s just insane, vision-blurring amounts of sugar with enough caffeine to make you consider making an extremely in-poor-taste Michael J. Fox joke after chugging a can.  So, pretty much, any sweet flavor will work.  Code Red just takes the orange taste of Mountain Dew and replaces it with some approximation of “cherry” or, more accurately, the flavor of “red” and it tastes just fine.  And for those of you who never realized that Mountain Dew was technically orange flavored until this point (seriously, a show of hands, who would have guessed that Mountain Dew was supposed to taste like an orange soda?) well that’s the point, there’s enough sugar to drown out whatever fruit flavor you have, unless you choose a flavor combination that’s mind-numbingly wrong.

These are mind-numbingly wrong.

Supernova:  Strawberry Melon Diet Dew

We might be cheating a bit here, since Supernova came in two varieties—regular, and diet.  We’re going to focus on the diet version, because we can maybe trick ourselves into not hating the normal version (which is bad), but removing all sugar and making it diet would make it taste like a completely different beast (the kind of beast that would kill your family).  Now, for those of you thinking, “Well, strawberry and melon doesn’t sound too bad” you should know that you’re wrong, but you’re even more wrong when dealing with a diet version of that flavor combination.  Just think about Mountain Dew flavored like strawberry (not a very good soda flavor) and melon (see also: strawberry) and combine those flavors (which still sounds kind of gross) with that “diet soda” taste that every diet drink has where your tongue starts spazzing out and going, “Woah, woah, what are you giving me, man?” and you just have to say, “No, it’s cool, tongue, it’s just soda, trust me.”

Mountain Dew Supernova was part of the DEWmocracy campaign (fan-based “choose the flavor” competitions, apparently, are required to have stupid pun names) and it came second place, losing to Voltage (blue raspberry, which is a flavor that makes sense as a Mountain Dew option).  Though, for whatever reason, they still sell Supernova in Finland and Canada.  Oh, and they also put Ginseng in this, because Mountain Dew needs to fuck the right off trying to put some fancy health root in our unhealthy soda.  We won’t stand for that shit.  Gross.

Pitch Black II:  Sour Black Grape

When presented with a soda that has enough sugar to put you in a diabetic coma, if you sip it and the first thing you taste is sour, you’re immediate thought is, “Poison.  This is poison.  I have been poisoned.”  Soda is supposed to be refreshing.  Sour is reserved for, like, Grapefruit juice, which you only drink a thimbleful at a time and which negatively interacts with prescription medication.  So the reckless combination of flavors in this discontinued-since-2005 soda failure is a bit too much.  We can get behind a grape flavored Mountain Dew, because grape soda doesn’t taste like grapes, it tastes like purple, and purple is one of the better tasting colors out there.  Black Grape soda?  We’re wary, but okay.  You’re kind of getting rid of the whole “purple flavor” aspect, but whatever.  But making all that sour?  Giving it the tagline “A blast of grape flavor with a sour bite with other natural flavors”?  No, that is poison.

Do not drink this.

It is poison.

Diet Crave: Green Apple

What the fuck did we just say?  No diet soda, no sour soda, and, Jesus, who really drinks a green apple soda?  This is a terrible idea all around.  Diet Crave was part of 2010’s FanDEWmonium campaign (Jesus fucking Christ, people, chill with the pun-based campaigns, fucking hell) and got 7^th place, not making it to the final round, so at least America knew enough to say, “Eww, gross, green apple, eww, diet, eww, get this shit out of my face.”

Dry Ginger: Mountain Dew Ginger Ale

Mountain Dew released a dry ginger ale in Japan in the 1980s.  If you can’t figure out why that’s a terrifying idea, you’ve probably not visited AFFotD website before.

Sangrita Blast:  “DEW with a Citrus Punch”

Have you ever had non-alcoholic sangria?  Like, you’re in a convenience store, and you see a bottle of something that says “Sangria” and then you get excited, thinking, “Oh I thought this store doesn’t sell booze” and then you take a sip and realize there’s not booze in there, and it tastes like a cheap imitation of fruity wine, which tastes pretty shitty without alcohol to wash it down?  And you’re not even grossed out necessarily, you’re just kind of…disappointed and sad?  Like, it tastes like disappointment and sadness?

Anyway, Mountain Dew decided to tap that particular flavor and make it into a pop.  It’s been available at Taco Bell since December of 2013, which makes sense because “tacos and Sangria are basically from the same country, right?” totally sounds like something an out of touch corporate executive would say, and also because if you’re at Taco Bell, science has determined that you’re already drunk, so they probably get a lot of wasted people ordering this thinking, “Look at me, I’m drinking wine soda, I’m fancy” while being too plastered to know that there’s no alcohol in there.

As for every other idea behind this awful flavor idea?  Horrible.  Sangrita is, by definition, a chaser, and is typically not something that people go out of the way to drink outside of “helping your tequila shot go down smoother so you don’t puke it up and you know come to think of it you’ve probably had enough we should cut you off, naw just kidding, drink your cute little face off you shiny diamond.”  And the slogan?  Doesn’t Mountain Dew…have a citrus punch normally?  Shit’s made with fucking orange juice.

Mountain Dew AM: Orange Juice and Mountain Dew

Jesus Christ, people, when we said this soda was made with orange juice, that didn’t mean we wanted you to mix your Mountain Dew with orange juice like the most depressing alternative to a Screwdriver in existence.  You know, even though Mountain Dew decided to name itself after a slang word for moonshine, that doesn’t mean that it should be used to try to replace alcohol in otherwise alcoholic beverages.  In 2012, around when Taco Bell decided to get in the breakfast game, the food chain apparently decided that people who like caffeine and orange juice in the morning could drink orange juice with a cup of coffee like some sort of loser, or they could be hip and young and well that’s how they sold it, let’s skip ahead, they just poured some Tropicana orange juice into some Mountain Dew and acted like they invented fucking breakfast.

We get the basic concept of “caffeine in your orange juice” but this is a gross idea.  Why is this a gross idea?  We’re a little concerned you even had to ask.  Because when has it ever struck you as a good idea to pour soda into your fucking orange juice?  Jesus Christ, people!  Now, Taco Bell has a lifetime contract with Pepsi, and Pepsi makes Tropicana orange juice, and more importantly, Pepsi makes Mountain Dew, so we get why there’s a sort of symbiotic relationship between Taco Bell and Mountain Dew, but this seems like one of those relationships where, even though they both look happy, everyone knows they have to split the couple up, because they’re just insufferable together, and they keep supporting their own really shitty decisions, and next thing you know they’ve got matching douchey tattoos and dropped out of Law School to “really focus on the relationship” and start pouring orange juice in their soda like fucking lunatics.  We’re happy that you found someone, Mountain Dew, but listen.  Taco Bell just isn’t right for you.  Would you like us to introduce you to Pizza Hut?

Dewitos:  Doritos flavored Mountain Dew  

When people say God is Dead, they’re trying to make a point that they don’t think God exists, or maybe that the concept of God no longer fits in with our society.  But really, it implies that there was an omnipotent being that created us, the universe, and watched over us.  And then died.  Did we kill him?  Did he die out of shame at how we represented His works?  That’s not clear.  But, from a clearly literal standpoint, people are technically saying that God existed, in the past tense, but now, he is dead.  We just want you to know how  we interpret the meaning of that three word inflammatory phrase, because we’re sticklers on things like that.

Anyway, Mountain Dew just started testing a Doritos-flavored Mountain Dew called “Dewitos” because if this article hasn’t done enough to convince you that all of the copywriters that work for PepsiCo are fucking hacks, then nothing will.  It supposedly tastes “like orange, with a cheese aftertaste” which, just, you know what, just fucking great.  You guys keep doing that, we don’t even care anymore.  Oh, what’s that?  There already are Mountain Dew Doritos and this is really just the snake eating itself from both ends?  Well great, fucking great.

Fuck all y’all.  God is dead.

“Chug chug chug chug chew chew chew chew run run run run!”

~Only the Most American of Runners

Americans either love or hate exercising.  Sure, you can find some middle ground of, people that guess they should go for a jog today, but generally speaking, you have two camps of American exercisers—the kind of person that gets really into their workout journal, and the kind of person who actively brags that they go out of the way to limit their day to day physical exertions as much as possible.  The stereotypes are in place—you have the cross-fit trainer on a Paleo diet, or you have the overweight American chugging a beer while eating a ChipoHut Taco (that’s where you take a Chipotle burrito, put it inside a full Pizza Hut pizza, and fold the whole thing into a massive taco).

Naturally, the latter is the more American option.  However, in the past few years, people who “exercise” and “take care of their bodies” and “can go up a flight of stairs without running out of breath” have seemingly taken a hard look at themselves and said, “Yes, I should still exercise, but maybe I can find a way to do it while also being a little unhealthy, which sounds a lot more fun.”

We’ve coined a term for this kind of slightly unhealthy, exponentially more fun exercise—the Jog N’ Vom.  Basically, dozens of races have sprung up across America that don’t want you to just run an arbitrary distance while they time you—they want you to incorporate drinking or eating something super unhealthy into your run, turning your 5K into an eating or drinking competition, which is a wonderful thing.

So, for you health nuts out there that still want to be the best American you can be, we present with you a (fairly) comprehensive list of the races that let you be bad while being good.

Jog N’ Vom:  America’s Official Food and Drink Races

If you look hard enough, you can find plenty of “dine and dash” type races, but it’s important to clarify the difference between races involving food or drink, or races forcing you into the uncomfortable run of someone sprinting with a stomach filled with, say, doughnuts.  Considering how many paid and charity 5Ks, marathons, and every kind of race in between are hosted in America each year, a lot of races try to distinguish themselves from the rest of the fray by offering something fun and silly that’ll make you more likely to fork over dough to run their arbitrarily determined distance.  For example, there’s a pancake race.  Cool!  Eat some pancakes, run and shit!  Except, instead of eating pancakes and running a few miles, they have you…flip a pancake in a pan, and then run around with the pan?  That’s fucking stupid.

Or how about the Bastille Day Baguette Relay Race, where you just run a relay race using French bread because you’re obnoxious and French and don’t understand that Americans want to watch people hurl after exerting themselves as a way to feel good about their decision to stay seated.  Or even the Hot Chocolate 15K, which is an extremely popular race that takes place in over a dozen cities, but only gives you hot chocolate at the end of the race, and not during the race, thus removing the chance that someone can just blindly grab a cup of it and dump it on their face and horribly burn themselves and sue the Hot Chocolate 15k for everything they have and okay once we say it out loud it starts to make a bit more sense to us, that’s fair.

The point being, the following runs are actual races you can sign up for that demand you chug or eat something at some point during the running process.  We’ve been training for all of them, minus the running part, all year long.

Beer Mile

This is the most American thing that’s ever been officially invented in Canada, so we’re just going to take credit for it ourselves.  Beer miles have been in the news a decent amount this year, from the 44 year old woman who set the women’s record, drinking four beers and running a mile in less than six and a half minutes to Lance Armstrong dropping out after one lap, the Beer Mile has evolved from a random thing drunk track athletes would do for fun to having an actual World Championship debuting last year.

The rules of the Beer Mile are simple, with a bunch of nuances that people care too much about when they start getting way too competitive over something that’s intended to just get you drinking, which makes it a lot like Beer Pong the more we think about it.  On a standard track, you run four laps (which equals a mile), chugging a whole beer at the start of each one.  The current record is just a shade under five minutes for the whole mile, which is frankly astonishing if you ask us.  That’s awesome.  We’re in awe.

There are additional rules in place—for example, if you hurl (which is pretty easy considering the fact that you’re running with four beers sloshing around in your belly) you have to run an extra penalty lap after you finish (we don’t think they require you to chug a fifth beer, but oh man, how great would it be if they did?).  While there have been variations of “drink the beer, run a mile” since the late 1980’s, the rules that are followed in official Beer Mile races (which is a thing, which is great) evolved over time from a group of Canadian students who held the race annually at Queen’s College, which honestly is the only disappointing thing about this race.  Why couldn’t America have come up with this first?  Damn.  Onto the next race.

San Diego Burrito Run

Over the past few years, people seem to have lost their shit over tacos.  For whatever reason, gourmet taco shops became a standard thing, everything was taco this and taco that.  Tacos are delicious, sure, but outside of an appropriately healthy infatuation with Chipotle, the lonely burrito hasn’t been getting the love it deserves.  But Burritos are American as hell (shut up, before you even start to correct that sentence, shut up).  They’re meat and cheese packed wrapped bricks of deliciousness that give you enough food for three full meals but fuck that you’re hungry now oink oink eat up little piggy soo-wee soo-WEE.

The point being, a burrito is a food that is only described in strictly cannibalistic terms.  “This burrito is the size of a baby.”  “This burrito is the size of my head.”  “This burrito is the size of Jenkin’s spleen, oh God, we tore into him, like animals, we might have been rescued from the mountain after that plane crash but none of us really truly survived.”  So, the Burrito Run, a San Diego yearly event that benefits various charities, decided to take these giant trunk suitcases of meat and use them to make people cramp up while they run and we laugh.

To run the Burrito Run, you simply jog along two miles to the midpoint.  That’s when you have to scarf down a whole burrito, and run another two while going, “Oh God, I’m filled with meat and cheese, oh why did I do this to myself.”  This is not nearly as competitive minded as the Beer Run, so there’s no penalty for puking.  Which is a good thing, since if we had to guess, everyone who has ever run this race in the history of its existence has probably puked.  That’s just speculation, of course.

NYC Pizza Run

If New York was going to get in on the Jog N’ Vom bandwagon, it was practically a foregone conclusion that the stomach clogger of choice would be their pizza.  Enter the NYC Pizza Run, which has been doing its best to encourage New Yorkers to run with full stomachs since 2010.  The race itself is 2 miles in length, with three checkpoints where you have to eat a slice of pizza.  In addition to the free pizza, and prize money to the fastest pizza-eaters-slash-runners, registration includes a T-shirt, goodie bag and a free drink at the race’s after party.  Proceeds go towards the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, probably to make up for their contribution to the disease with the other race the organizers set up in New York…

NYC Cupcake Run

If you went to the website of the NYC Pizza Run and thought something like, “I don’t like pizza, because I’m a garbage monster of a human being, but I want to go running in New York while filling my stomach with someone unhealthy because I have one single redeeming quality and it is that” then you might have noticed the click-through banner on the side for the NYC Cupcake Race, which is set up by the same company.  The Cupcake Run, which took place on October 18^th this year in Astoria Park, is a longer race, demanding 5 kilometers (or 3.1 miles for those of us who are brave enough not to bow to the tyranny of the Metric System) of frosting-fueled jogging through Queens.  Like the Pizza Run, there are three checkpoints where you eat a cupcake and probably try to throw the wrapper on the ground in such a spot that runners behind you step and slip on it while you play a slide whistle effect.

The perks are the same as the Pizza Race as well, with the distinction of your free drinking coming with a free lunch as well.  2014 marked the second annual running of this race, with 200 slots offered up at $55 apiece, which is a lot of money to pay someone to make you run, but which is also a very modest price for three cupcakes, lunch, and a drink in New York City.

Donut Dash for CASA/ Krispy Kreme Challenge

In 2004, a group of college students at North Carolina State University decided to try a five mile race that involved eating a dozen Krispy Kreme doughnuts at the halfway marker.  The rules stipulated that they had to run the distance and eat the doughnuts in less than an hour, and the first race was won with a time of 34 minutes and 27 seconds.  When word spread through campus that “eating a shitload of doughnuts and then racing” was a thing, they decided to make the race an official event, benefiting the North Carolina Children’s Hospital.   The Krispy Kreme Challenge was born, with the 11^th annual race taking place February 14^th, 2015 in Raleigh, North Carolina.  Registration is open now, if you want to join in with the 8,000 eaters and runners that ran the race last year.

The best part about the challenge is that they actively advertise how many calories you’re consuming for the race (2,400) which of course renders the 500-to-700-or-so calories you burn during your run completely redundant, which is wonderful.  Naturally, this idea needed to be replicated, because imitation is the sincerest form of fattery.  Wait, we meant flattery.  Little Freudian slip there.  Anyway, the Donut Dash for CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocates for children) in Lincoln, Nebraska kept the “dozen doughnuts at the halfway marker” part, but decided that five miles is a lot of running, and running makes us tired, so, fuck it, why don’t you just run two kilometers each way instead, which means it is almost exactly half the distance you’d have to run for the Krispy Kreme version.

There’s something beautifully American about this.  Not only have we devised a race that forces you to eat more than your daily value of calories during it, but we’ve found a way to make you eat those doughnuts while doing even less exercise to justify it.  We think that’s neat.  Good job, America.

Durham Doughman Relay

As Forrest Gump once said in the sense that we took a Forrest Gump quotation and changed it because we thought it would be funny, “Life is like a team relay race involving food—you never know what you’re going to eat.”  That didn’t land nearly as well as we hoped it would.  Anyway, moving on—the Durham North Carolina’s Doughman Relay, which unfortunately took a year off last year,

A team event that changes food every year, the Doughman Relay involves eating food from a local restaurant, followed by one leg of a triathlon (last year’s race had a 1.6 mile swim after an omnivorous dish, a 9.61 mile bike ride after a vegetarian dish, a 2.1 mile omnivorous “short run” and a long run of unspecified distance).  The race is finished with the whole team partaking in a short sprint and a dessert dish.

The race supports different charities each year, with no hints on what food you’ll be forced to scarf down before running or, probably most uncomfortably, swimming for a long chunk of time.  Seriously, the person who has to eat a meal and then swim 1.6 miles definitely is the person on your team that you dislike the most.  “Ugh, John’s running this race with us?  Let’s make him swim less than 20 minutes after eating, that asshole.”

To be fair, John is kind of an asshole though.

April Fool’s Twinkie Race

First of all, yes, this is an April Fool’s race, but it’s not an April Fool’s prank, it’s a real race that occurs in Ann Arbor to benefit ALS charities.  It’s a (surprisingly cheap, to the tune of $15 or so) 5k race that doesn’t smash your face into a pile of Twinkies while shouting, “Eat up, fatty, eat up, EAT UP FATTY” or anything.  In fact, the Twinkie aspect is optional, which feels like a bit of a cop out.  The race is run as two laps around a pond, and at the beginning of each lap, the runner is given the option of eating a Twinkie to have a minute taken off their final time.

The race is for a good cause and everything, but, honestly, we don’t see why they don’t just man up and make the Twinkie eating mandatory.  Serious racers are going to probably want to lower their time, and Twinkies probably aren’t too hard to run on, and if you’re a casual racer, you definitely would want a Twinkie.  We’re going to go out and say it—if you ran this race, and didn’t eat the Twinkies, we don’t really like you as people.  There.

They also serve grilled Twinkies to finishers after the race, which is a brilliant thing we totally are kicking ourselves for never trying until now.

Corndog Classic

The Corndog Classic is a 5K run held in September at the Tulsa State Fair.  While you are within your rights to do a fun run one mile, non-Jog-N’-Vom track, the Corndog Challenge is by far the only option you should be considering.  As you can tell from the name (duh) there are checkpoints where you eat food, including a corndog.  But wait, there’s more!  Now, originally, they had you eat a corndog, a thing of cotton candy, and a glass of lemonade throughout the course of the race.  Which is fine and sounds delicious and we fully endorse that.

Except this past year, they amped things up a notch by getting rid of the cotton candy and replacing it with a “delicious but you totally will forget how sticky it’ll get your hands until you finish it and are like, oh shit, my hands are super sticky” caramel apple, as well as replacing the lemonade (for those over 21) with a nice cool beer.  We completely support this change.  It looks like Tulsa’s really got there shit together.  Good job.

Now, all of these races are great ways to pump your legs to freedom while keeping your beer belly safely intact.  And while we’re sad to see there isn’t a “chug a bottle of whiskey and run until the demons are gone” race out there yet, we’re just going to assume that’s a year or two away.

“This is by far the worst idea you’ve had, and you used to put cocaine in your drink and try to sell it to kids.”

~Coca-Cola Product Consultants Shortly Before Being Shouted Down

Coca-Cola holds an important place in America’s heart, and its economy.  Ever since their humble beginnings as a non-alcoholic version of the poorly named John Pemberton’s French Wine Cola nerve tonic in Atlanta in 1886, originally-addictive-as-shit and still-technically-addictive beverage has grown to become the most valuable brand in the world, raking in over 45 billion dollars a year, with the power to do anything they want, from brushing aside antitrust legislation proposed by Pepsi to allegedly getting Colombian union leaders assassinated.  The point being, Coca-Cola is an ingrained cultural and economic powerhouse, with dozens, if not hundreds, of brands and varieties across America and the globe.

Naturally, a very large part of Coca-Cola’s whole “made enough money in 2014 to surpass the GDP of 83 different countries” popularity comes from the fact that they make a delicious, American product.  Coca-Cola is wonderful, and anyone who says otherwise is a Pepsi executive who contractually has to say that he hates Coke, even though we all know that Coke and Pepsi are the most interchangeable beverages imaginable.  The taste preference in Cola brands generally falls between “the sweet one” and “the slightly sweeter one” with a handful of outliers saying, “I prefer the organic cola from Whole Foods because ouch stop that why are you flicking my ear that’s extremely annoying okay you know what you clearly don’t want a dialogue so I’ll just leave, you assholes.”  But, Coke came first, and Coke is the world leader, and even if we might prefer the slightly sweeter one, Coca-Cola can do no wrong.

Well, okay that’s not true.  They can do a lot of wrong.  The following is wrong.

The Worst Coca-Cola Products in the World

Normally with lists like this, we focus either solely on the American versions or international iterations of a drink.  It’s “The worst Mountain Dew Flavors in America” or it’s “The Strangest Pizza Hut Menu Items in the World” but we pick a side.  The problem with Coca-Cola is, they’ve got a lot of “what are you doing” products out there, but only a thankfully small amount of them make it to America.  Those drinks, however, are so ridiculous that they’re just begging for us to write about them, so here we are.

First, we need to get one thing clear.  New Coke is not going to make this list.  Whenever someone talks about bad products made by Coca-Cola, they include New Coke, because they are lazy lemmings who just titter buzzpoints and we hate them because they get more page hits than us.  Wait, ignore that second part.  But the point remains that as dumb as New Coke was, it wasn’t bad.  They just took Coke and made it sweeter.  Their logic was, “people took the Pepsi challenge in that ad campaign, and thought Pepsi was better in the first sip, so let’s try to make Coke taste more like Pepsi” because this was 1985 and no one was really thinking rationally with all the coke out there.  No, not, well, we meant cocaine, you got that right?  We can understand the confusion.  Next time we make a cocaine joke, we’ll just distinguish that kind of coke from Coca-Cola by linking it to the scene where Bob Morton does a bunch of blow off two women’s boobs in Robocop.

Anyway, the point stands, they tried to make coke taste like Pepsi, the competition that was far less popular, probably because of how much coke everyone was on, and people either say it was the biggest marketing disaster of all time, or the best marketing coup ever (considering how sales skyrocketed when they went back to the original formula).  That doesn’t mean New Coke was gross, it just means that New Coke was different, and we hate and fear change, as evident by how much everyone freaks the fuck out every time Facebook slightly alters how your newsfeed looks.

New Coke tasted fine.  Get over it.  The following beverages cannot be judged so politely, however.

Honorable Mention:  Fairlife

Okay, so this isn’t actually a “gross” product.  Coca-Cola has recently started offering a “premium” milk under the branding of Fairlife (as of the writing of this of this article, it’s only available in Denver, the Minneapolis area, and Chicago).  There is nothing inherently bad about this product—it’s just milk that’s twice as expensive as the milk you get at a grocery store.  They claim that it has 50% more natural protein and calcium than the competition while being better for you, overall.  That’s fine—we could argue that spending twice as much for a gallon of milk seems like a waste of money to us, but we know that there are Millennials becoming first time parents every day, and this is totally the kind of shit they could get suckered into buying.  We’re not here to judge.  Coca-Cola thinks they can make some money in this milk company that they own, so good for them.

However, we can’t write this article without mentioning this product, because look at that fucking ad for it.  That’s, and we’re not shitting you here, an official advertisement for this.  The first ad campaign roll out just takes sexy women and gives them clothes made out of milk.  Which means at various points, no less than a dozen people who make more money than you sat down, looked at a picture of a woman standing on a scale, slightly hunched over, hands on her hips and a confused and borderline mortifyingly embarrassed look on her face, with massive amounts of white liquid shooting out of her ass, and every one of the people involved in this thought, “Yup, this works.  Makes milk sexy again.”

Just look at that picture, really hard, and think about that.  Hopefully this’ll put you in the right mindset, because it’s going to get pretty bad from here on out.

Coca-Cola Vio

Now, the Coca-Cola company making milk is not something we find particularly objectionable.  That leniency goes the fuck away when we start dealing with “fruit-flavored carbonated milk drinks” which is a combination of words that should only exist in an Aphasia treatment center, or maybe the area of hell reserved for asshole dairy farmers.  We’ve actually talked about this particular beverage before when trying to point out the grossest sodas we could find in America, but this monstrosity given to us by the suits at Coke warrants further discussion.

Introduced in 2009 (yes, to Americans) and, as far as we can tell, still available in certain markets (*cue screeching violins from Psycho*), Vio is, and we’re quoting Wikipedia here so you don’t think we’re trying to be hyperbolic, “milk with carbonated water.  The available flavors are Citrus Burst, Peach Mango, Very Berry, Your Mother Knew The First Time You Masturbated and She Knows Every Time that You Lie, and Tropical Colada.”  Okay, fine, we made up one of those.  We’re pretty sure they don’t have a Peach Mango variety.  Oh shit, they do?

Naturally, we don’t need to tell you why all of this is awful, because you have a human body, a human head, human taste buds and, potentially, a human soul.  So you, you sweet, gentle, caring person, you know that milk should not be carbonated and then artificially flavored to mimic the taste of two or more varieties of fruit smashed together.  You know this, deep down.  You know this, and we love you for it.  Coca-Cola, listen to our pleas.  End this horror show.

#BanVio #SaveAmerica

Beverly

This thankfully was never sold in America, so we’ll understand if you have no idea what you should be looking at based on the 1960’s-looking newspaper ad scribbled in Gibberish (or Italian, whatever, learn English or merh merh).  But let’s put it this way—the above image is from a blog article on Coca-Cola’s own website entitled, “Beverly – Love It or Hate It?”  When your own company is like, “Hey guys, listen, a lot of people think this sucks rancid ass” (they might have prettied up the language a tad in the article, but whatever) you should probably be worried.

Beverly, made for the Italian market and discontinued in 2009, was a non-alcoholic apéritif, which is one word we hate and one word we only pretend to know when people serve us fancy-handled shot glasses of booze and are like, “Drink this weird-tasting thing before you eat your meal, don’t worry there’s booze in there.”  Apéritifs tend to be bitter, which Beverly absolutely is, so buying a bottle of it means you’re paying for a bitter, probably herbal tasting soda that, again, does not have any alcohol in it.  This is a tactic known as “taking away the one good thing about a weird thing, leaving you with a weird bad thing.”  The kind of person who would actively want to drink a non-alcoholic aperitif is we don’t have a way to finish this sentence because we’ve had thousands of volunteers searching the mountainsides of rural Italy, and we’ve yet to find a goddamn person who meets that criteria.  They might as well market a soft drink for fucking Big Foot.  “This tastes like grass and leaves, and is perfect for Big Foots who don’t like to drink.”  This is a fucking travesty of an idea.

Of the international items on this list, Beverly is one that you might have had before if you were part of the kind of family that would go to the World of Coca-Cola museums in Atlanta, Las Vegas, or Epcot, since this was offered at the Coca-Cola tasting stations.  And if you were part of one of those families, we’d first ask, did it taste as bad as we imagine?  And secondly, we’d ask, did you ever forgive your parents for taking you on such bad vacations?  “Welcome to Epcot, Disneyworld is just across the fucking street, let’s drink non-alcoholic aperitif at fucking Epcot.”  Only your family probably didn’t say “fucking” because we’re guessing you also had that family that locked up the one TV in the house as you were growing up.  Anyway, what we’re trying to say is, we’re sorry about your childhood, and we’re here for you now.  Stay strong.

Coca-Cola BlāK

2006 was such an optimistic time.  The economy was booming.  We finally had a James Bond movie that was strictly badass and not at all campy.  We were excited, blissfully oblivious to what was just around the corner.  This was not a time for tightening your belt, or bailing out Wall Street, this was a time for adventure!  This was a time for mixing things that have never been mixed before!  Let’s go crazy, the world is beautiful!

That was our mindset back when Coca-Cola BlāK was launched on April 3^rd, 2006.  Coca-Cola BlāK was a combination of Coca-Cola…and coffee.  It was a “coffee-flavored soft drink” that was artificially sweetened, so if you ever were like “Man, I wish that Coke would make a super sweet coffee, and then carbonate it, and also make it taste a little like Coke, and also error error human interaction interface malfunctioning return to factorrrrrr….” well then you were in luck, you Godless Russian communist spy robot commissioned in the 80s.

It was a “mid-calorie” beverage option, meaning it had twice the caffeine of Coke and half the calories.  We’d say it was ahead of its time, but the opposite was true.  It was a horrible idea that could only have existed in 2006, back when a company could sink millions of dollars into trying, and ultimately, failing to trick the world that they want to drink something that doesn’t taste all that great.  They tried so hard, you guys.  They would go around giving free bottles of the stuff to people, hoping they’d become “hooked” to this Coca-Cola alternative with a weirdly spelled name.

They didn’t.  No one liked it.  And then 2006 ended.  And its brief time was done.  Coca-Cola BlāK was discontinued in 2008, and no one noticed.

Mare Rosso

Coca-Cola’s relationship with Pepsi is a lot like Johnny’s relationship with Daniel-san in The Karate Kid.  Johnny was far superior, but Daniel-san was newer to town, so Johnny got way too competitive with the new kid, eventually pushing him to compete against him and, in the process, shooting himself in the foot (or sweeping the leg, whatever).  New Coke was Coca-Cola’s “SWEEP THE LEG MOMENT.”  Johnny knew he could beat Daniel-san on his own, but he bowed to pressure, and knocked himself out of the game.

Most of Pepsi’s strategy seems to be to come off as edgy and cool, form partnerships with Taco Bell, and then sit back and watch Coke freak the fuck out every time they think they’re being challenged by their lesser rivals.  So, when Pepsi released a Spanish brand called “Kas” they went ahead and made some normal flavors for it.  Grapefruit, orange, lemon, and…as we hesitantly pause ‘cause it’s not normal but whatever, apple.  Randomly included in this list of “sweet tasting pops” that “are sweet and taste like soda should” they put out a “bitter” flavor, and flavored it after herbal extracts.  This, as we’ve exhaustively pointed out, is a very gross thing to do.  And we see through it.  They put out normal flavors that people would buy, then were like, “Oh, and some really nasty bitter shit that no one will like.  Your move, Coca-Cola.”

And Coca-Cola, for whatever reason, decided that instead of responding with a hearty laugh and a “alright, Pepsi, you do you”, that their best course of action would be to make Mare Rosso, their own bitter herb-flavored soft drink that they likely proceeded to market the fuck out of in Spain, spending way more money than needed to promote an awful, bitter soda.  Just, herbal and, yeah.

As a general rule, when we drink soda, the last thing we want to drink is a bright neon-red fizzy drink that tastes like gnawing on a ginseng root, so, you know, good job, Coca-Cola company, you let Pepsi punk you into making a pointless beverage.  Congrats.

Nativa

The above glass bottle, etched with leaves and displaying a color that hovers somewhere between “iced tea” and “you know, like, when you leave a bottle of water out in the rain, and some mud gets in there, and you leave it out for a week?  You know the weird kinda brown color that eventually takes on?  Yeah, it’s like that” was an Argentinian sports drink that was available from 2003 until it was discontinued a year later.  Described by Wikipedia as an “odd choice of flavor”, it was made to taste like Yerba mate which, as best as we can tell, is a plant that’s mashed into a tea-like drink that’s popular in Argentina.  It generally tastes a lot like a bitter green tea, has a lot of caffeine, and is served non-carbonated.  We stress this, because naturally Nativa was carbonated, and in general we have a hard time supporting non-sweet non-carbonated beverages being sweetened and carbonated because, by this point, we pretty much know what we like in the “Sweet, carbonated” category of things.

To summarize, Coca-Cola looked at Argentina and were like, “Huh, they this like, tea-like sorta bitter herbal drink down there, do they?  And they drink it on their own, prepared freshly by culturally entrenched means?  Let’s bust in there and make it into a soda and jam it down their throats” and were surprised when, a year later, shit didn’t pan out.  Of course it didn’t pan out, Coca-Cola.  This was a bad idea.  Stop it, you’re embarrassing yourself.

Kvass

Kvass is alcoholic.  We point that out to really knock home how terrifying of a concoction this is.  It’s alcoholic and it still makes the list.  It’s alcoholic and a version of a traditional Russian beverage that tends to have less than 1.2% alcohol, which makes its inclusion a lot less surprising, but let’s not downplay the alcoholic aspect to this drink.  Because, oh God, why does Russia drink this, and why does Coca-Cola need to try to corner that market?

Kvass has been around Easter Europe since the middle Ages, and is often referred to as “bread drink” or “bread cider.”  It’s fermented rye bread, basically.  Like, when you have a beer at a restaurant and you say, “No, I won’t be ordering food, this is my bread, ha ha” and your coworkers say, “Jesus, you’re an alcoholic, this is a work lunch, order some food, you’re on your sixth beer, we’re worried about you” that’s basically what Kvass is, but it’s actually your bread.  They take rye bread, mush it up, let it become about 1% alcoholic (which, and this is a direct quote, makes it “classified as a non-alcoholic drink by Russian and Ukrainian standards” which is the most representative statement about Eastern Europe we could ever ask for) and then flavor it with strawberries, raisins, or mint, because if mushed up bread left out to ferment didn’t sound gross to you, why not mash some jam in there as well?

Listen, just look at it this way.  Here’s what a jar of kvass looks like as it’s fermenting.  Here’s a bag of prison wine being fermented.  We’re just saying.

Not only is this terrifying, the fact that Coca-Cola is trying so hard to get in on that sweet sweet Kvass action is actively distressing.  It’s like Rocky Balboa opening up a meat packing plant with Ivan Drago as a silent partner.  It just feels wrong.

Listen, Coca-Cola, you’re rich and successful just the way you are.  You don’t have to take so many swings and misses when you’ve got the most consumed soft drink int eh world.  Just stick with what you know.  And please, stay off the coke.

Make it alcoholic!  No wait, make it milk for school lunches!  Fuck it, we’re drunk, do whatever.”

~Coca-Cola Executives

We recently waxed the-opposite-of-poetic about Coca-Cola produced beverages that we found, to put it politely, shitty as shit.  In doing our research for that article, we stumbled across a single product, available from 2003 to 2005, that we felt belonged on our list, until a quick look at its history let us know that, no, this drink is wonderful, and the most American thing we can think of, and we wish we had it today.

That drink is Swerve.

Swerve is a milk drink, but it’s so much more.  It’s a microcosm of the product development process of modern day American consumerism.  It’s an opportunistic combination of bad ideas and impractical dreams.  It’s beautiful and it’s ugly and it’s everything about America, all mixed together into a sweetened milk drink.

Let’s talk about Swerve.

Swerve:  Coca-Cola’s Almost Alcoholic Milk Product For School Lunches

We’ll get to what Swerve ended up shortly, but to start with, we’re going to tell you what Swerve could have been.  Swerve was originally developed under the formula “Original Yogurt Blast Swerve” which, and we’re quoting Wikipedia here, “contained all the great taste of plain yogurt with the alcoholic kick of a high gravity lager.”  Make no mistake, this is a wretchedly disgusting, bad idea.

It’s also brilliant.  No, not the kind of brilliant where it’s actually “smart.”  But it’s the most American idea we can think of.  It’s not afraid of taking risks.  It’s stupid, but it’s also unique, because we can safely say, as drunk as we’ve ever been and as desperate to find new ways to imbibe alcohol as we always are, we’ve never once thought, “you know what, let’s combine Sparks with fucking Chobani.”   When you try to get in on the alcopop market, you can just make more of the same or you can make, and again this is a quote here, something “not unlike a homemade alcoholic Go-Gurt.”  It came in 12 ounce, 16 ounce, and quart-sized bottles, had an 8.5% abv. And contained L. acidophilus cultures, which we’re pretty sure is a bacteria, and if we had to take a blind guess, we’d guess it’s the bacteria that helps you poop.

(Okay, so it would appear that it actually is just a standard yogurt bacteria, but, again, we’re going to choose to believe the poop thing).

This never made it to production because, again, alcoholic yogurt drink.  That’s the stupidest idea, but we’re so glad to live in a world where at least someone has thought of it.

Sort of like the guy who decided to grow pumpkins in a shape of Frankenstein’s head, only completely not at all and this was obviously just an excuse for us to post this picture.

When Coke’s attempts to make alcoholic yogurt failed because of course it did, they didn’t abandon the project all together.  Instead, they regrouped, shrugged their shoulders, and said, “eh, let’s make a sweetened milk drink for kids and make it out of like 51% milk if we’re going to have all this dairy lying around.”  And that’s exactly what they fucking did.

They eventually unveiled Swerve as a vitamin-fortified dairy drink only available to students aged 13-18 through their school lunches, which is the funniest fucking end result for an alcoholic milk drink brainstorm session.  The flavors available where chocolate (makes sense), vanana, a mix of vanilla and banana (careful now) and Blooo, a mixture of blueberry and strawberry flavors (get right the fuck out of here Coca-Cola, what the hell are you huffing, and may we have some?).

Yes, you read that right.  Blooo, with three fucking o’s.  We know, we’re scared too, we’ll walk through this together.  So, it’s a blueberry and strawberry milk beverage that’s 51% skim milk and made to taste like a combination of blueberries and strawberries.  That’s pretty terrifying to start, but let’s move past that, and just focus on that name.  Blooo.  Yes, it’s a pun name, and yes, it’s because cows go “moo” and yes we’re feeling that migraine pain as well, it’s very awful, and you want to jam an ice pick up your nose to make it stop, but trust us, hold off, it’ll go away on its own we swear.  It’s a cow pun, because there’s blueberries, and cows go moo, and fuck strawberries they don’t get to be involved in the pun and ouch ouch okay there comes the migraine again just ride it through we’re here for you try to avoid looking into bright lights if you can.

Alright, Google Image Search, you’re just being an asshole now

Now, you might be wondering to yourself, “So if 51% of this shit was milk, what was the other 49%, and was that question sincere sounding enough that you can let my family go now?”  To that we’d say, you fucking asshole we told you not to try any funny shit, goddamn it, put him back in the basement.  And also, the rest was basically flavoring (fucking Blooo), sugar, and water.  So while an 11-ounce can (yes, it was a milk drink that came in cans) had 30% of your daily value of calcium, vitamin D, vitamin A, and vitamin C, while claiming to be lower in fat, calories, and sugars than most leading milk brands, we have to wonder…what the fuck are they putting in other milk brands?  This shit had more calories than a can of coke, for fuck’s sake!

It carried the “Heart Smart” seal from the American Heart Association, because apparently you can get a Heart Smart seal for anything if you’re willing to pay the right people.  According to the press release we linked to earlier, “The packaging feature[d] a stylized logo with the Swerve name and an offbeat cow character sporting black sunglasses.”  That’s probably our favorite part of this product—they put sunglasses on a cow and were like, “it’ll appeal to the youth of today!” which you might recall was the exact same tactic used by Itchy and Scratchy when they brought in Poochie.

RIP Poochie

Predictably, a can of sweet milk water with a cow who had half of his face paralyzed during a stroke as a mascot never really caught on with “the youths” as at least one person involved on this project would probably call them, and it quietly wound down its production.  By the end, the only variety you could find in the handful of schools still offering Swerve was chocolate, which is the least “bad idea disguising itself as hip” flavor of the three.  But at the end of the day, we were left with something much greater than a shitty milk drink that no one wanted to drink.  We were left with a story about American ingenuity and pride.  About a multinational corporation daring to get us drunk on yogurt before saying, “Fuck it, let’s milk the school system for some dough.”  A sea of unique but bad ideas all to make one drink that has faded into obscurity.  We salute you, Swerve.

Well, except for Blooo.  Blooo can go right to hell.

Fucking Blooo.

“No, dammit, I said weird things we’d WANT to eat.  Yes, we’re going positive this time round.  No, I’m not drunker than normal.  Just get it done.”

~AFFotD Editor-in-Chief Johnny Roosevelt

When we talk about food here, outside of the general “fried?  Gimmegimmegimme” context, we have a tendency to focus on strange flavors or, God forbid, Japan.  That also applies to our discussion of potato chip flavors—generally, when we take the time to describe potato chips to you, the reader, we talk about flavors that other countries like to use, and why those countries are wrong and bad.  We mention potato chips that you haven’t heard of because you live a good life and avoid bad things, and most other countries like to hawk terrible potato chip flavors, and they can go to hell and take their ketchup flavored potato shavings with them, those sons of a bitches.

But we’ve decided that today, just this once, we should try to be positive with our guidance.  So we’re not going to talk about awful potato chip flavors you didn’t know existed.  Instead, we will discuss underrepresented potato chip flavors out there, and let you know what you’re missing.

No, we’re not being sarcastic, why do you keep assuming we’re being sarcastic when we try to say nice things?

The Best Potato Chip Flavors You’ve Probably Never Tasted

This is not on the list.

Like most savory and fried treats, creating a proper flavor blend for potato chips requires not much more than common sense and a willingness to salt the shit out of everything.  Sour cream and onion are amazing on potato chips because if you ate a baked potato with sour cream and onion you’d recognize that flavor combination as “oh God just so good, oh no I ate the potato before letting it cool and burned my mouth, everything will taste like chalk for a week.”  Barbeque works because barbeque makes everything taste better, and let’s not kid ourselves, potato chip barbeque is a flavor that only exists on potato chips, and has about as much in common with the taste of barbeque ribs as a container of Tang that was left out in the rain.

While there are a lot of mistakes along the way in the road of making new but still good flavors of potato chips (we’re looking at you, Lay’s) it’s important to highlight the daring attempts to enhance our saturated fat potato whispers with flavors that might not be as popular as your cheddar and sour cream ruffles, but which still are delicious and worth celebrating.

Let’s get started with the potato chip that clearly was made just so we’d write nice things about it.

Burts Guinness Potato Chips

We know what you’re thinking.  “Eww, wait, you actually like this?  How are you not imagining potato chips soaked in Guinness to the point of getting soggy?” to which we’d respond, you say that like it’s a bad thing, and you clearly haven’t found a good dive bar that gives out free potato chips.  Now, these chips are only made to taste like Guinness, and as far as we can tell don’t have alcohol, which knocks them down a peg, but we’d still eat a nice, Guinness-accentuated bag of thick cut potato chips any day.  Apparently, they’re pretty good, and are actually seasoned with roasted barley and hops, which means it’s probably more beer-like than a Budweiser at least.  While they’re sold in grocery stores in the United Kingdom, you could get them shipped to America for the low price of…

Jesus Christ, $50 for 20 bags?  Hell no, these are just potato chips, not a damn textbook.  Okay, welp, looks like we’re not going to get a chance to see if this one is as good as people are saying, because that’s absurd.

Ruffles Deep Ridged Classic Hot Wings Potato Chips

Philosophically, many of you might have an issue with meat-flavored-not-meat-things.  We can understand the consternation.  Everyone who eats meat finds it delicious, and everyone who does not eat meat can get the hell off of our site and out of our lives ya damn hippies.  If you asked us, “What’s the best part of meat” we’d probably respond “the fact that it is made out of meat.”  That means that making a meatless food to taste like meat through a combination of seasoning, chemicals and, presumably, ancient voodoo rituals might serve as a fool’s errand.  The hubris of Icarus, whose wax wings melted when he flew too close to the grill.

But, just like barbeque as a potato flavor exists in a different realm than barbequed meat as a flavor we know in the real world, so too do meat-flavored potato chips escape our ire, because we know, deep down, that a hot wing flavored potato chip will not taste like an actual hot wing, it will taste like “um…spicy sauce and umami?  MSG and salted potatoes?  Really good after a few beers?”  All of these are good things!  As an added bonus—apparently these chips contain chicken fat, chicken broth and “chicken powder” which is probably ground-up bones mixed up with one of those ramen seasoning packets, but hey, that’s enough to make this one of the rare non-vegetarian-friendly chips out there, which we find almost as hilarious as the fact that “enough chicken to disqualify this as a vegetarian food” is lower on the ingredient list than “yeast extract” and “monosodium glutamate.”

Oh, shut up, potato chips are delicious and if you thought they were just made out of potatoes, oil, salt, and the labor of a satisfied and fairly-paid workforce, you’ve got to learn to accept that you’re in the real world and just be thankful we’ve not started putting spiders or something in there as a filler yet.  Anyway, meat potato chips.  Get on board.

Herr’s Kansas City Prime Steak Flavor Potato Chips

The marketplace has seen various potato chips flavored like steak in the past few years, ranging from a limited edition Ruffles that was probably-if-we’re-being-honest-better-than-the-Herr’s-brand to a Dutch Crunch chip that could only be found in about five states, but we’ve been left with Herr’s Kansas City Steak potato chips as our sole representative of the steak-as-potato-chips movement, and dammit, we want to talk about the steak-as-potato-chip movement.  Steak flavored chips need to exist more often.  For those of you poopooing the idea, remember, these don’t taste like steak.  They taste like somewhat meaty salt crunches.  If that flavor doesn’t appeal to you, then we highly doubt that you’d like most potato chips.  These chips don’t even try to put steak in there, they just list “natural flavors” and, presumably, “lies” on their ingredient list to account for the vaguely meaty taste the chips acquire.

The only downside we can find about this chip?  That each limited edition steak chip apparently tasted better.  And we’re not going to spend $35 to get a dozen 7.5 ounce bags of chips unless they’re filled with diamond dust.  So, you know, Ruffles?  Feel free to bring back your steak chips.  We’d buy them.

Cape Cod Roasted Garlic and Red Pepper Potato Chips

Oh wait what the actual fuck.  Yes, roasted garlic and red pepper potato chips sound like they’d be delicious.  And not even the regular “I know this is awful for me but goddamn it my body craves a salty snack” kind of delicious that potato chips strive for, these look actively fancy-delicious.  But $160 bucks for twelve small bags?  And shipping isn’t even including?   Amazon can fuck right the hell off.

Who’s Your Daddy Bacon Potato Chips

Here we have a non-mass-produced potato chip that was sold for $5 a bag back in 2010.  We don’t think that it exists anymore, which might be the saddest thing we’ve had to write all week.  Damn.  Come back, Who’s Your Daddy.  If you look closely enough you can see there are actual bacon bits on some of the chips.  We’d easily pay five bucks for that, we’d not even question it.  “Here’s a $20, gimme gimme gimme” we’d say, and then we’d wake up with swollen bellies and grease-stained shirts.  But some dreams are too beautiful for this world.

As it stands, the closest flavor we have to this majesty exists in the form of Kettle Brand’s Maple Bacon, which we guess we’d try, though we’re not at all thrilled about the sweetness of maple being added to a savory potato chip.   But, Kettle at least knows how to make things up to us by providing us with this final gem.

Kettle Brand Cheddar Beer Potato Chips

Cheddar beer Kettle Chips thankfully do not cost a car insurance payment to procure.  Would we spend $30 for fifteen bags of potato chips?  Eh, that’s a bit steep…but when that chip tastes like beer and cheese, then get the fuck out of our way, internet, we’re going to buy all of it all of it.  Even outside of the general fact that anything involving cheddar and beer automatically gets a rave review from AFFotD staffers, potato chip logic dictates that, for whatever reason, thick and savory soup flavors and potato chip flavors go together surprisingly well.  Chili cheese?  Yes please.  Loaded baked potato?  Shut up, we know that loaded baked potatoes exist outside of soup, but it’s a great soup flavor too.  Broccoli cheddar?  Okay, well that doesn’t exist, but it totally should, we don’t care what you say.

But really, why are we still justifying this flavor?  We made our point very succinctly when we typed out those bold words that said “cheddar beer potato chips” and then you all ran out to the streets to buy out every store that stocks this brand, and burn the ones that don’t to the ground.  We know that’s what most of our staff is doing right the hell now.  There’s no time to pay!  It’s not looting if it’s about something delicious!  Get out there, America!  Do it!

“Nope nope nope nope nope nope.”

~AFFotD Food Critic, John Goodman

Depending on what non-affotd corners of the internet you choose to spend your free time perusing, you might have heard recently about Burger King ramping up the gross factor on their food by offering a black bun, black cheese burger called the Kuro, or Black burger.  This burger re-issue (yes, they tried it before, more on that later) used squid ink and bamboo charcoal to create an all-black burger.  Black cheese, black ketchup, black soul are combined for fast food connoisseurs in Japan (because of course this is happening in Japan), leading to a whole slew of internet chatter of “lol, Japan is crazy” (which, duh) and “ew, this looks gross so I tried it oh by the way I’m also a white 24-year-old living in Japan currently while maintaining a blog about my travels.”

What we find most surprising about this burger has nothing to do with its mere existence.  When talking about Japan, nothing surprises us anymore.  No, upon doing some digging, we discovered that Japan’s Burger King does not have a monopoly on this particular brand of culinary insanity.  So, get ready to see a lot of unappetizing pictures of a type of food you once loved, because we’re going to delve into…

The (Terrifying) Black-Bun Burgers of the World

Listen, objectively we know that making the bun of a burger black isn’t necessarily something that will create a gross product.  Off the top of our heads, we could imagine someone trying something interesting with rye or pumpernickel bread (spoilers: no one in this article came up with that same epiphany) and sure, we might trust an artisanal approach to this weird-looking burger.  But let’s face it, black burgers look gross, they look weird and artificial and the fact that they’re only made by fast food joints operating outside of the United States doesn’t exactly leave us anticipating a revolution in how we look at hamburgers.

And, so far as we can tell, these burgers are gross.  They look gross, they taste weird, and they serve as reminders that America should be the only ones trusted to make hamburgers, because everyone else just ends up fucking everything up.  Don’t believe us?  Look below.  And weep.

Burger King’s Kuro Burger

Aghhh oh God kill it kill it with fire!  As mentioned in the intro, the Kuro Burger in Japanese Burger King locations is the reason why there’s been so much chatter on the “eww gross food” sectors of the internet about black burger buns lately.  They’re not the first to do it, or even the most recent (that one goes to McDonald’s) but they did manage to milk some publicity out of it when they re-released this terrifying burger at the end of last year.

In 2012, Burger King released the Kuro Premium Burger, which used bamboo charcoal to blacken the bun while addressing that one nightmare you keep having a bit too specifically by slathering it in jet black “ketchup” that’s colored with squid ink.  The burger was “premium” because it still came with all the standard toppings you’d expect on a burger (lettuce, mayo, tomato, onion, pickle, sadness, a stain on your shirt when it drips while you eat it crying alone in your car), which really goes to show that we need to stop being so flippant with our use of the word “premium.”  It sold for 450 Y-with-two-lines-through-it, or about $5.75 in real-money, with a $10.10 price tag if you wanted to make it a meal.

The Kuro Burger was available for a limited time to celebrate the 5-year anniversary of Burger King re-opening in Japan (they operated in Japan from 1982 until 2001, only to re-open in 2007 with a new business model of “fuck it, you want crazy, Japan?  We’ll give you crazy), but it was so popular they brought it back as a yearly thing, sort of like the McRib only the McRib is a nightmare concoction that actually tastes good.  For the 2014 version, Burger King added black charcoal cheese to the mix, and offered two versions of the nightmare burger.  The Kuro Pearl gives you a bare-bones option, with just the patty, cheese, and black ketchup, while the Kuro Diamond gives you “toppings” (listed above as the “premium” ingredients of the 2012 edition).

As for the taste of this marketing gimmick?  The most accurate and comprehensive review we’ve seen sums it up nicely.  “It’s a burger, but grosser.”  Because goddamn it, Japan, you’re doing it wrong.

McDonald’s Ikasumi Burger

The suits at Japanese McDonald’s heard about Burger King getting all this press with a black burger, and so they took a long line of cocaine, shouted, “Two can play at that game!” and released the Ikasuma (which means “squid ink”) burger as a Halloween gimmick, though they thankfully had the wherewithal to limit this burger’s release to just three Tokyo-based locations.  The burger comes with two patties, yellow cheese, a squid ink sauce as well as a chipotle sauce, and fried onions, and apparently costs less and tastes better than the Burger King variation.  That’s our polite way of saying “at least it’s cheap but it still tastes like hot trash.”

Honestly, one of the things that this burger has going for it resides in the actual color on the burger.  There’s yellow cheese!  There’s neon-orange chipotle sauce we’d rather not think about the origins of!  There’s fried onions that look good in promo shots but look like this in real life!  The problem with black burgers, especially all-black burgers, is that appearance is kind of important to us.  It’s why you might like mashed potatoes, but you kind of have to eat it on a plate with other, colorful things.  This is just how the mind works.

But ultimately, just remember.  This burger is fucking gross.  All of these are fucking gross.  Do not defend them, it’s not worth your time.

Humbah’s Hakooka Burger

You probably haven’t heard of Humbah, and if you have, holy shit, really?  You went to Kuwait and decided to track down a fast food burger joint there?  Wow, you’re either the people that wrote the website where we yanked this photo from, or you have a very specific interest in foreign culture fast food.  But, for the rest of you, Humbah bills itself as “Kuwait’s favorite burger joint.”  As far as we can tell, there’s one location, though their twitter feed as of writing this has been inactive for about five months so we can’t say for sure if it’s still alive and kicking, ready to give us super strange black-bunned burgers.  According to this commercial, the black bun here was inspired by The Dark Knight, but also according to this commercial, it was either made by a high school student trying to artificially make his voice deep on a Macbook Pro, or Humbah really doesn’t have a lot of money set aside for marketing costs.

It’s frustratingly hard to find reviews of this burger, and while it basically seems to comprise of cheese, lettuce, tomato, and the standard burger toppings, we’ve seen multiple “iffy English” reviews that say it comes with a “crunchy sauce” that we saw described (again, iffy English) as “the hard part of rice thats [sic] on the bottom of the pot when you cook it.”  Okay!  Sure!  Crunchy rice on a burger sounds strange, sure, and we’re a bit worried that we can’t find anyone to answer the question of “how did they make the bun black?” but the handful of people who have reviewed it seem to like it.  It’s entirely possible that they’ve never eaten a hamburger before, sure, but at least the Hakooka burger presents itself as “not depressing wilted trash.”  Hell, this cross section of it looks downright not-vomit-inducing.  We trust this might be the only entry on the list that can make that claim.

Quick’s Dark Vador Burger

We wrote about this burger (kind of favorably!) three years ago where we somewhat incorrectly attributed the burger to France (it was available in France, but not based out of there.  Sorry Gizmodo, that’s 100% your fault) and we actually did geek out about the black bun aspect of things.  Upon time and reflection, we’ve realize we were wrong, and also probably drunk, so consider this our mea culpa.  Black buns on burgers are stupid and gimmicky and normally gross.  This entry to the genre, made by the popular Belgium restaurant chain Quick, came about because of the re-release of The Phantom Menace, which you might recognize as “a thing that does not warrant celebration.”  Four burgers (types, not total patties) were made—the boring Jedi burger, the oddly-appealing Darth Maul burger, and the Dark “we don’t know how to spell” Vador burger, which you see above.

We’ll admit, this one looks like it could have potential.  Ignoring the black bun (which always looks very disconcerting once you’ve taken a bite into it and exposed the lava-cake-looking horrors inside) it seems to be a spicy, jalapeno-laden burger, which, sure.  Sure we’d eat that.  It just doesn’t need to be a gimmick.  Give us a spicy burger at a fast food restaurant, and call it the “tasty spicy burger” (we’re not the best at names) but you don’t have to slap a black bun on it and misspell a Star Wars villain to make us want it.  Have some faith in your tasty spicy burger product, Quick.  Otherwise, you’re just trying too hard.

McDonald’s Black and White Burgers

photo credit to  Rocketnews24 for actually daring to eat these nightmares.

We felt compelled to include both the distressingly artificial looking black burger as well as the equally worrisome white burger that Chinese McDonald’s forced upon the world’s most populous nation back in 2012, partly because the burgers came together as a package deal, and also, Jesus Christ, look at that white burger, look at all of that, we’re so very frightened.

These burgers don’t have the decency to die quietly involve beef, which leaves you with a chicken sandwich for the “white burger” and a pork patty for the black one.  The black bun is covered in sesame seeds so that you can see some specks of light in the darkness of your soul, which is then covered with chopped onions and a black pepper sauce, and some sort of additional light-colored special sauce.  It looks like this on the inside (cue screams).  The chicken slider (don’t call it a burger, be honest with yourselves, McDondald’s) has black sesame seeds on the bun because #marketing.

Evidently, the concept of the black and white burger comes as a play on a Chinese phrase “heibai liangdao tongchi” which either is the result of us mashing our head on the keyboard, or an adage to describe people who are well-connected with both the government (the white) and organized crime (the black).  So basically, it’s a burger dedicated to Illinois politicians.

The Black Bun Frog Burger at the Orbi Yokohama Museum

No.  No way.  Jesus Christ, Japan.  This fried-frog-legs “burger” can be found for a limited time at the café of the Orbi Yokohama museum (listed as the 110^th best thing to do in Yokohama by tripadvisor!) to promote their Deadly Poison Exhibition, and also to ensure that you never sleep soundly again.  This burger has the added benefit of being weird, gross looking, and also wildly impractical to eat.  This actually came out after we had initially finished writing this article, as if Japan sensed that we had written a 3,000 word article about how bad black bun burgers are and decided to say, “Not so fast, AFFotD, you haven’t even see us begin to get weird with this.”

Just look at that.  The dangly legs…do they want you to eat the bones?  They want you to eat the bones, don’t they?

This burger costs the equivalent of about $6.50, by the way.  Japan is very weird and might want to consider changing up their medication, ‘cause it’s clearly not working as well anymore.

Burger King’s Kuro Ninja Burger

This might seem like the same burger as the Kuro, and in some ways it is—it’s a Burger king black burger.  This 2013 incarnation, however, differs from the 2012 and 2014 releases of this burger in that it’s a black ninja burger, which, if we go off what their promo images seem to state, earned that name because ninjas like to eat burgers with a massive, unwieldy, distressingly-human-tongue-looking strip of bacon just hanging out of it.  Jesus Christ, look at that nightmare.  We’d say “Goddamn it, Japan, you’re doing it wrong” but we’re honestly too afraid—we’ve seen enough Japanese horror films to know that there is a 90% chance that the burger in this picture gains sentience at some point and just begins murdering 19-year-old schoolgirls.

Make no mistake, this sandwich is actively evil.  Not “ha ha, we’re making a joke” we’re being deathly serious.  This was created out of pure malice to cause discomfort and sadness.  This tries to ruin lives for no other reason than its own morbid amusement.  This also includes hash browns as a topping.

Take solace, America.  You live free of this black hamburger bun tyranny.  A land of freedom, whiskey, and pretzel rolls.  That is why we must rise up, in unison, and decry these hamburger travesties.  Because the moment we become complacent in our culinary vigilance, our favorite foods become infested with “well, it worked in Japan, why not here.”  Don’t let that happen.  Don’t let hamburgers follow in the footsteps of pizza.  Fight back.

Say no to charcoal black buns.  For America.

“Oh, this is so good.  Wait, what’s that?  Twenty three dollars?  Son of a bitch…eh, still worth it.”

~Lobster Roll Purchaser

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again—few creatures of the sea are more American than lobsters.  They’re ageless monsters that turn red when we boil them alive, at which point we pay inordinate amounts of money to dunk them in melted butter while wearing a bib at a fancy dinner.  The fact that lobsters used to be considered peasant food, to the point that 17^th century indentured servants insisted that it was inhumane to be fed lobster more than twice a week, only make its current decadent reputation more American.

Admittedly, much of the reason why the first Americans to encounter the lobster assumed it was only fit for bait and fertilizer stems from its “oh my God, it’s a monster, KILL IT WITH FIRE” appearance, as well as the fact that we used to primarily canned lobster meat to preserve it because we sometimes cannot be trusted with nice things.  Now, by the 20^th century we realized lobster actually “tastes delicious” and “should probably cost more money” so it began to be treated as such, with “ordering a lobster in order to get the most expensive thing on the menu” being a worn out entertainment trope for quite some time by now.

Now, since we live in America, we naturally have to take expensive and gaudy ingredients and transform them into dishes that are typically served on paper plates with plastic utensils, and that’s exactly what we’ve done with lobster.  While we have plenty of “cheap foods made expensive by adding lobster meat” dishes, from lobster mac and cheese to lobster bisque, one of the most iconic, and most satisfying, American preparation of lobster can be summed up in two simple words.

Lobster.  Roll.

Lobster meat in a hot dog bun that costs way more money than you feel comfortable shelling out for a lunch item that’ll inevitably have half the meat fall out as you eat it, but manages to be delicious enough that you’ll still pay for it, yes,  lobster rolls are an American delicacy, despite every outward appearance trying to tell you otherwise.  Lobster rolls are sneakily classy, just like America.  Lobster rolls are America.  And that’s why we’re devoting this fun fact to…

Lobster Rolls: America’s Most Expensive Sandwich That’s Worth Every Penny

Regionally, lobster rolls are associated with the East Coast, and while they’ve pretty much permeated the rest of the country, it’s the East Coast that still insists on treating the roll like it’s some casual dining feature, which is one of the best parts of the lobster roll (besides the lobster, and the butter, and the *eyes roll into back of head*).  Sure, you can get great lobster rolls in the Midwest, you just  to expect to find it with some gaudy presentation because lobster is a delicacy, and being able to eat a bunch of it on a roll is a novelty best reserved for high end restaurants with cloth napkins and three dollar signs listed on their yelp pages.

Not that there’s anything wrong with a gussied up lobster roll.  Unlike other expensive food stuffs we’ve written about, a lobster roll is, by definition, a pretty luxurious meal, but we can’t help but respect the East Coast approach of, “Here’s your damn lobster roll, eat it on a wooden picnic table outside our shack, that’ll be twenty five dollars please” that represents the true soul of this glorious American item.

The East Coast does the lobster roll with their own flare because they were by all rights the inventors of the dish.  The first lobster roll originated at Perry’s in Milford, Connecticut around the year 1929, and it knocked out the basic recipe of buttered lobster meat served warm in a hot dog bun or similar roll that is sliced on the top, as opposed to the side.  Since New England doesn’t give a shit about your pretension, restaurants serve the rolls with fries or potato chips.  Not “truffle fries” or, uh, “gold” potato chips, just regular fast food shit.  Honestly, if your lobster roll comes with a wedge of lemon and someone halfheartedly tossing you a recently expired bag of Lay’s, that’s pretty much a guarantee that it’ll be incredible.

However, if you ask for a lobster roll, and get this bag of chips, get the fuck out of there immediately.

With the lobster roll came regional variations.  In Connecticut, a lobster roll is served warm, consisting of just lobster and butter on a roll, while any cold variation (which is popular throughout the rest of New England) is called a “lobster salad roll”, though these tend to be filled with celery and lettuce to earn the salad moniker.  Elsewhere in New England, 1965 saw The Lobster Roll, located on Long Island in Amagansett, selling a “classic” cold roll alongside sandwiches with hot lobster meat, while Red’s Eats in Maine started selling their own Lobster rolls in 1970.

Now, we tend to associate lobster rolls with Maine, largely because of Maine lobsters, but Maine lobster rolls differ themselves from Connecticut and the rest of the East Coast in several ways.  Instead of using a hot dog bun, they bake a “New England” or “Frankfurter” roll that is flat on the sides so they can be buttered on the outside and lightly grilled or toasted.  The lobster meat is cooked warm in butter, but is served cold, and light amounts of mayonnaise are usually spread inside the bun or tossed with the meat, bringing truth to the old adage of “if there’s a meal, there’s an American who can find a way to slather that meal with mayonnaise.”

Other variations exist, of course.  A lobster roll can have lettuce, celery, scallion, lemon juice, salt, and black pepper added to it without anyone really losing their shit about the situation.  There’s even a McDonald’s version available in select New England markets called the McLobster, though the $6.50 sandwich also goes by the name “repent sinners for the end is nigh.”

At this point, it’s our journalistic duty to point out that the fountain drink and two things of ketchup kind of look like a dick and balls here.

Many enjoy lobster rolls as a summer meal, especially considering that many of the best lobster rolls on the East Coast are provided by take-out restaurants with outdoor seating, but as more reputable restaurants provide the roll (probably because when they realized how much money they could make while spending very little on the non-lobster ingredients) you can pretty easily find one year-round whenever you’re craving lobster, but don’t want to deal with lacerating your hands as you strain and twist lobster corpses to rid the meat from its stubborn shell as lobster juice drips down your hands and ruins the cuffs of your shirt and dammit, you just bought that shirt too, you put the bib on and everything, and it still wasn’t enough.

And hey, if you want a winter lobster roll?  Go for it!  Lobster rolls are democratic, they’re for the people (who want to spend a shitload on a sandwich).  Born in America, best enjoyed by Americans (no, shut up Canadians, you don’t get to take this as a piece of your national identity, we claimed it first) and, well, really expensive in America.  But worth it!

So here’s to you, lobster roll.  Like, we’re not going to buy you right now ‘cause, you know, credit card debt, but we’ll be here, staring hungrily at everyone else eating and enjoying your buttered goodness.  Mmmm…

“*begins seizing from sugar overdose*”

~AFFotD’s official product taste tester

America loves candy so much that we wrote a kind of annoying song about how much we want it back in 1965, and we’ve not shut up about it since.  There’s something comforting about mainlining sugar into your veins, no matter how often Japan tries to ruin the concept.  And, in the gluttonous nature of American know-how that we like to champion, America also loves giant food that doesn’t need to be quite so giant.  Naturally, these two schools of thought have collided on many occasions, because a giant candy bar is much cooler than a giant stalk of celery, mom.

In this enterprising spirit, we’re here to salute America’s giant candy confections, but we’re not going to simply stick with some Guinness book of world records bullshit.  Sure, we could spend a few thousand words telling you about the 12,000 pound chocolate bar made by Chicago’s World Finest Chocolates, or the 7,000 pound lollipop made by See’s Candies out in Burlingame, California, but what good does that do you, the reader?  It might impress you, but does it give you the opportunity to go out, find something horribly unhealthy, and devour it in one sitting in what will probably prove to be the last and greatest mistake you ever made in your sugar-shortened life?  Hell no!  So we’re going to stick with the world’s largest candy items that you, yes you, irresponsible you, can purchase this very moment.  After all, you’re an adult, you can and have eaten cake for breakfast because you make your own rules and, hey, we’re all going to die someday, and overdosing on sucrose doesn’t sound much worse than drowning.

The World’s Largest Candy (That You Can Buy Right Now)

Candy, in the very vague definition of “sweet, edible treat with sugar as the main ingredient” has existed for thousands of years, first as honey-based varieties, and then later by the Persians and Greeks using actual sugar after the discovery of sugar cane in India.  While the vast history of candy can best be illustrated through a series of wood etchings that just show people from various historic eras shouting, “Sugar sugar sugar, gimme gimme gimme!” the past few hundred years have seen remarkable breakthroughs in candy science (shut up it’s a thing probably) and this lucky generation has literally thousands of different ways to satisfy their sweet tooth.  But there’s one type of candy that is the great equalizer.  Death.  Wait, we meant to say, “Big ass candy bars.”  Like the following.  Which you can, and totally should buy and eat in one sitting.*

*AFFotD is not responsible for any readers who fall into a diabetic coma after taking our advice, because we don’t even know what a diabetic coma is.

So prepare whatever part of your body is supposed to siphon off excess sugar (is the endocrine system a thing?) and get ready to accidentally drunkenly purchase at least one of the following.

World’s Largest York Peppermint Patties (2 half-pound patties, $20)

While a half pound candy falls in the category of “a bit much, but nothing absolutely insane by America’s gluttonous standards” we felt we had to include the world’s largest peppermint patties because, well, just imagining eating that much peppermint gives us a stomach ache.  Like, we’d google “can you overdose and die from eating too much peppermint” but we don’t want to fuck with the google image results there.  The point being, for twenty American dollars, you can possess enough peppermint to probably (?) kill an adult human.  Either way, you’re dealing with a mass-produced chocolate covered peppermint disc that’s roughly the size of a Frisbee and, coming in at $10 per Pattie, about as expensive as an okay one.

Admittedly, we’d have to imagine there’d be something supremely satisfying about snapping one of these suckers in half, and by the time you’re finished with it you’ll never feel the urge to buy a York Pattie at the movie theater concession stand ever again, but as ridiculous as this item is, we’re only just getting started.  Because if mint isn’t your thing, you can drop twenty bucks to get yourself…

World’s Largest Snickers Bar (10 inches long, 1 pound, $20)

The package says “Slice n’ Share” but don’t listen to them, you’re going to want to eat this all by yourself, all in one sitting.  Sure, it’s 2,000 calories, and about as heavy as six king-sized Snickers bars mashed into an unholy concoction, but if anything we just gave you two more reasons why you should be eating this mess of chocolate, nougat, caramel, and peanuts at this very moment, snarling at everyone who comes by your desk saying, “Wow!  That’s a huge Snickers, can you cut me off a piece?”  No, Marge, this is our Snickers, buy your own fucking Snickers, arf arf arf DO NOT FUCK WITH US WE ARE AMPED UP ON SUGAR AND BOURBON MARGE.

Sorry about that.

Snickers is your second favorite candy bar, behind that other one that no one agrees with.  It’s universally described as, “Oh, I love Snickers, but my favorite candy bar has to be…” and is a member of the “can be tossed in a public pool as a practical joke” family of treats.  At ten inches of chocolaty goodness, this is the first Snickers bar that can be used in a penis joke without coming off as an insult, which has nothing to do with this article, we just are contractually obligated to make a penis joke whenever praising something that uses “ten inches” as a descriptive trait.

Speaking of penises.

World’s Largest Gummy Worm (26 inches long, 3 pounds, $248.91 for 10)

This is a monster.  Yes, you can buy this two-foot-and-change, 4,000 calorie gummy worm individually, but the fact that someone’s selling them in packs of ten amuses us to no end.  There’s something wonderfully American about the someone making an impossibly giant gummy worm and then thinking to themselves, “Shit, they’ll probably want to be able to buy this in bulk, right?”  We’ll just assume that the price doesn’t factor in the shipping costs for sending 30 pounds of semi-solid colored sugar through the mail, though honestly, for $250, shipping should be included.

You might find yourself surprised to hear that the Gummi worm has only been around since 1981 when Trolli released them to celebrate the 60^th anniversary of the release of gummi bears.  In the 34 years or so since their release, however, gummi/gummy worms have become dependable and delicious filling-removing and braces-ruining staples in the American confectionery diet.  Of course, part of the appeal of gummy worms is the ability to eat them by the handful, which is what makes this gargantuan product even more impressive.  Apparently, this is the equivalent of about 126 regular gummy worms, which feels kind of low to us, so we’ll just say it’s about a million gummy worms worth of gummy.

Now’s the part where we show how, when the worm is shown as a single color being held straight up and down, it totally looks like a double-sided dildo.

What? Is it wrong to point out that a giant candy clearly looks like a sex toy?  Does that offend your sensibilities?

Anyway, next candy.

World’s Largest HERSHEY’S Bar (20x2x12 inches, 5 pounds, $45)

If you can’t justify spending $45 on five pounds of chocolate, you clearly put too much value on the nonessentials of life, like “rent” or “nutritious food” or “your insulin.”  Here we have a Hershey’s bar roughly the size of a human torso that’s so massive it has to be reinforced with a cardboard frame to make sure it doesn’t snap under its own weight.  Just look upon it.  Look upon it and weep, for there are no more battles left to fight.  We’ve got our giant chocolate people.  We can all go home now.

World’s Largest Lollipop (approx. 10 Pounds, $90)

This item doesn’t claim to be the largest lollipop, sure, but if you can find a lollipop that’s bigger than 10 pounds with a fifteen inch circumference we’ll eat our shoes (which are also made of candy) (we might have a bit of a problem).  This lollipop, called “Gigantic Kaleidoscope Lollipop” goes by several names, including “upholstery ruiner” and “oh God it’s been just two days since we started this and it’s covered in ants, and they’ve formed a complex colony, and when I tried to throw it away they ate our dog the ants ATE our fucking DOG.”  Giant lollipops have long been standby comedic props because of the absurdity of the very premise.  Real lollipops are sucked on or licked (listen, we know, tee-hee and all that, let’s just be adult about this and continue on with the sentence without drawing more attention to it) until you get bored, and bite the whole thing in a giant crunch.  Giant lollipops are basically an exercise in frustration.  Unlike everything else on this list, it’s not really made for sharing, and it’s supposed to be eaten in one sitting, so you’re making a helluva commitment when you drop ninety dollars on ten pounds of hardened sugar and corn syrup mounted on a stick.

World’s Largest Gummy Bear (26 pounds, $150)

What you see above contains the equivalent of 1,400 gummy bears, making this the official gummy bear of diabetics who are looking to have a sugar-fueled Leaving Las Vegas reenactment.  At 32,000 calories, we have to assume that this was created in response to candy maker’s 5-year-old son asking, “Dad, is it possible to eat so much candy at once you die?”  Look at that unholy gummy bear.  That costs one hundred and fifty American dollars and contains a two weeks’ worth of your caloric intake.

By the way, here’s the video they made to promote it.

We’re sorry we did that to you.

Here’s a video of a group of kids eating it.

We’re also sorry we did that to you.  If it’s any consolation, assuming that they ate that in one sitting, they’re dead now.  Does that make you feel better?  It does?  Good.

Alright, well that was a harrowing experience, America.  Let’s cleanse the palate with a video of someone shooting the 5 pound version of the gummy bear a bunch of times.

Ah yes.

Much better.

Well done, America.  Well done.

“Listen, kids will drink anything if you just fill it up with sugar.  So, can we just do that?”

~Milk Executives

Americans consume an impressive amount of milk on average—over 20 gallons per person, and that includes vegans who live life incorrectly.  The dairy industry is one of the largest agricultural groups in the nation, and most Americans grew up having milk crammed down their throats through school lunches and parents telling them to “drink your milk so you can grow up big and strong” or, in the case of AFFotD’s staff, “drink your milk so you can have a good base coat before you switch to whiskey.”  And while milk is delicious, many people view it as a healthy beverage, and the average American child would rather chew off his own arm than purposely consume something healthy.  And because this is America, and our government is secretly run by sugar lobbyists (don’t believe us?  Ask a European if they think our bread tastes sweet) we’ve naturally decided that there is only one way to make sure that kids drink enough milk for their bones to become calcified adamantium.

Apparently we couldn’t really justify just adding a bunch of sugar to regular milk, so that added hyperactivity had to be introduced through various flavors, with varying success.  Now, we can all support chocolate milk, and while the taste/potential abject horror of strawberry and banana flavored milk can be easily questioned, they’ve unfortunately been around long enough to be merely “gross” and not “oh my God, what have we done” to the modern American consumer.  That doesn’t really forgive us for the sins that we’ve otherwise committed on dairy in our quest to turn milk from “a kind of thick white liquid we squirt from the bottom of a cow” to “candy!” in the minds of America’s youth.

Take solace, Lactose Intolerance sufferers of America.  You might miss out on cheese, and yogurt, and pizza, oh God now that we start listing things you can’t have we suddenly feel so bad for you, but you at least don’t have to deal with these.

America’s Worst Flavored Milk

Now, we’re sure Japan has done some horrific things to milk, but unfortunately this is an area of culinary wrongdoing that we’re able to find pretty easily within our own borders.  America, thankfully, doesn’t really have a claim on flavored milk—it’s apparently most popular in Australia, and if you live in a country where the sole purpose of your natural surroundings is to kill you in the most inventive and horrific ways possible, you can do whatever the fuck you want to your milk, with our full blessing.  But that doesn’t mean that America doesn’t get involved.

Now, outside of “taking a glass of milk and putting chocolate syrup in it” just about every type of flavored milk you encounter has a longer shelf-life than plain milk, which is both economical and mildly upsetting the more you think about it.  Advocates of flavored milk (sadly, probably correctly) say that kids will avoid the nutrition of milk unless it’s made to taste like licking the bottom of a bag of Halloween candy, tossing aside health concerns by saying, “What’s a little sugar between friends if it’ll get kids filled with protein and calcium?”  For those of you keeping score at home, yes, the flavored milk industry’s official policy on putting sweetened milk products mirrors Mary Poppins’ official “Just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down” stance.

These are products that try to help the medicine go down, and oh Lord, how they fail.

Swerve

Listen, we know we said that we loved this in our article about it, but we merely loved its existence in a “look how fucking insane we can be” way.  Coca-Cola’s strange school-lunch-only milk product might be hilarious, but it also sounds horrendous.  This sugar beverage calls itself a milk product because it’s 51% skim milk, which you might recognize as the same tactic business men take in movies when they walk into an opponent’s board room meeting, are told, “You can’t be here, this is my company” and respond with, “Not anymore.  I just made an interesting purchase of stock…you would not believe who is the new majority shareholder” before an evil laugh sets up an eventual Act 3 redemption.

They have a chocolate drink, which isn’t chocolate milk because chocolate milk generally is a simple combination of “lots of milk” and “enough chocolate to make it not taste like milk” and we’re just going to assume (and honestly, pray) that the other 49% of the drink isn’t just chocolate.  It also has a blueberry and strawberry mix called “Blooo” that schoolgirls could give to boys as a polite way to say, “Don’t ask me out, I’ll say no” and a Vanilla/Banana mixture whose mere existence is enough to make all of the milk in your fridge instantly spoil the moment you hear about it.

Swerve thankfully no longer exists, but it’s just a matter of time before Coca-Cola tries to make alcoholic yogurt again (not a joke, that was the original product that eventually turned into Swerve) and tries this again.  And they must be stopped.

Marshmallow Peeps Flavored Milk

Oh God. No, this is real, and we’re sorry.  Just this year, Prairie Farms decided to take marshmallow peeps, a product that somehow manages to taste as if it is made of 115% sugar, and turn it into three different fucking milk flavors.  You can get your instant diabetes diagnosis in either Marshmallow Milk, Chocolate Marshmallow Milk, and Easter Egg Nog, all of which sound abjectly horrifying.  Trying to flavor milk like fruit is weird, sure, but trying to say “we took a candy, and jammed it in milk for you” is something aliens do when they misunderstand how our taste buds work.  “You hu-mans enjoy marshmallows, and sugar, why do you not like marshmallow sugar sludge flavored dairy products?”

A lot of people don’t even like Marshmallow Peeps, because they basically taste like sticking your face in a bag of confectioner’s sugar, and though Peeps are sold year-round, with some almost depressing failed attempts to associate Peeps with holidays that don’t rhyme with “schmeaster”, there’s a reason why only really see people eating them in March and April.  Not that we’d think this idea of flavor was any better if Peeps were a year-round treat, we’re just saying that as far as semi-annually-popular flavors go, Peeps-flavored milk is only a slightly better idea than trying to make it taste like a fucking McRib.  Do not drink this.

Girl Scouts Cookie Flavored Milk

Because people like Girl Scouts cookies, and cookies are something you dip into milk, we can kind of understand the logic in place that would lead to Nesquik making Girl Scouts cookie flavored milk.  We can even tentatively get behind the thin mints flavor.  But look at that up there.  Caramel coconut.  Listen, we get it, Samoas are delicious so long as they’re not being ignorantly confused with a Polynesian ethnic group.  But caramel and coconut, as much as they go on a cookie, do not belong in milk.  Look at that glass up there, for God’s sake.  That’s not a healthy color for milk.  That’s like diluted chocolate milk that has a secret.  No one wants that.  Get that shit out of our faces, Nesquik.

Cotton Candy Flavored Milk

The above image has two bottles that say “yummy!” and “tasty!” and are a color of milk that made the more nerdy among you geek out just a little bit.  But this is not yummy, nor is it tasty.  It is wrong.  This is the first of two entries taken up by the Shatto Milk Company, who have literally put the word “shat” in their fucking name.  They’re a small, family owned dairy farm from the Kansas City area, and unfortunate family name aside, they probably make very good milk.  They make very fresh, hormone-free milk, and if we were talking about their standard milk options, we’d be all for them.  But, apparently, they felt they had to gimmick things up just a bit to help them stand out in the crowded milk marketplace, so…well, so they give us cotton candy milk.  That is bright blue.  If you got this as a five year old child, you would be absolutely fucking delighted, but anyone older than that would be grossed out and, frankly, worried they might catch something.  This is literally the only milk label in the world that should have an “only appropriate for ages 0-5” label on it.   

Root Beer Flavored milk

Shatto is back with this root beer flavor, which only makes sense if you think about root beer floats, and somehow find yourself equating vanilla flavored ice cream with milk flavored milk.  It makes absolutely no sense to the rest of us who have drank root beer in our lives, of whom roughly zero have responded by saying, “Hmm, this root beer is tasty, but if I poured some milk in this I think that’d take it to the next level.”  And you know what’s easily the worst part about this product?  It looks to the naked eye like it would be chocolate milk, and it says the flavor roughly zero places on the bottle.  Can you imagine being a child, coming home from school to see your mom or dad had picked up a quart of chocolate milk while you were gone, excitedly pouring yourself a glass, and freaking the fuck out when the chocolate milk tastes like root beer, which is a flavor and texture combination you’ve never encountered?  We’ve literally had that exact nightmare before.  This should come with a label demanding that parents are responsible for shouting, “JOHNNY JUST SO YOU KNOW THE MILK IS FLAVORED LIKE ROOT BEER THIS IS ROOT BEER MILK NOT CHOCOLATE MILK WHICH IS OF COURSE A NORMAL FLAVOR OF MILK” every time their child goes near the fridge for at least the first week after purchasing this.

This is a terrible idea.  This is borderline criminal.  Leave your milk alone, America.  If you’ve got to put anything in it, just stick with vodka and Kahlua and leave it at that, alright?

“Take me out to the barf game, take me out to the puke!”

~Your obnoxious seven-year-old nephew who, you have to admit, probably has a bright parody career ahead of him

America invented most of the world’s best sports.  Football?  That was us.  Basketball?  Sure, it was by a Canadian, but only because he was being paid by the Springfield, Massachusetts YMCA when he came up with it, because Canadian dollars were still printed on tree bark at the time, and we were responsible for all the changes that make it recognizable as a sport today.  Soccer?  Nice try, not a real sport, next question.

But of all the excuses for young men (and women!) to vent out the aggression of youth in a competitive and potentially humiliating environment that has been birthed within these borders, only one sport is iconic enough to be known as our national pastime.  No, not Mixed Martial Arts, that’s a terrible guess, are you high right now?  We’re talking about baseball of course.

You might view baseball as a relic of a simpler age, when men were men, owners were horrific bigots, and amphetamines were just, everywhere, all the time, which would explain why the sport struggles in some markets to maintain its relevancy.  It’s a slow-moving game trying to make its way in a fast-paced world, and say what you will about heart palpitations but taking the majority of the workforce off of Speed in the 80’s didn’t really do much for the pace of the game.  Major League Baseball teams try to combat the issues implicit with asking some 40,000 Americans to sit very still for three or four hours by making a day at the ball game a full entertainment and gastronomical experience.  This involves a gallons of watered down beer and, more recently, absurd, amazing American culinary disasterpieces for us to shove in our faces and slink into our chairs to ride out our food coma contently watching yet another 1-2-3 inning.

Sure, we could go on about crazy nachos served in miniature baseball hats, or giant cups of frozen sugar (okay, so maybe malt cups aren’t exactly a new development) but let’s be real here.  This is America’s sport, we’re going to need to talk about America’s food.  America’s best, most absurdly adaptable, most occasionally unnecessarily expensive food.  Let’s get to it.

The Craziest Hot Dogs in Professional Baseball (Major League Edition)

For a sport whose biggest advancements in terms of on-field play consisted of a brief period where home run totals skyrocketed because everyone and their mother (especially their mother) was taking steroids, the culinary experience of the ballpark has drastically changed in the past decade after over a century of relative stagnation.  Everyone’s dad used to be able to go to the ball game for a dollar, day of, and spend ten cents to get a hot dog, and might later splurge on a soda or a box of cracker jack, but they weren’t exactly there to have a fine dining experience.  They would go because it was summer break, bleacher seats were cheap, and cheap hot dogs are necessary for survival (a little known fact- if an American doesn’t eat at least 50 hot dogs by their 18^th birthday, they’re not allowed back into America if they ever go on a trip that takes them out of the country).

Even sports fans in their 20s and 30s remember the ball park as a place to get delicious, but cheap (in quality, not in price, obviously) junk food.  You could snag a hot dog, nachos, maybe a slice of pizza, and your parents almost always bought that bag of peanuts outside the stadium which was like three dollars cheaper and which you were inexplicably allowed to take in.

That’s all changed in the past ten years.  Yes, you can still get the same low-quality-high-flavor heart-attack-helpers from your youth, but now you can get gourmet foods, with high-end ingredients and higher-end prices.  This could have taken a turn for the pretentious, but in true solidarity with baseball’s inherent American nature, they decided to go with decadently gluttonous instead.  Which brings us to these beauties.

Honorable Mention:  The Arizona Diamondbacks’ D-Bat Dog

We can’t in good consciousness call a corn dog the same thing as a hot dog.  As we clearly stated in our four-article series mapping out the regional hot dogs of America, a corn dog is a sausage on a stick surrounded in fried batter- that’s not the same as the only-slightly-less-convenient-to-eat sausage in a bun.  That being said look at this motherfucker.  The unfortunately named D-Bat Dog was released last year at Chase Field, to give Diamondbacks fans yet another way to ensure they never have to pay attention to a baseball game.  It’s 18 inches long (ladies) and is stuffed with cheddar, jalapenos, and bacon before being crammed into a box filled with fries and served with not nearly enough mustard and ketchup if the promo picture is of any indication.  It costs $25, which might seem like a lot, but really, it’s a small price to pay compared to your dignity, which is also included in the price because there is absolutely no way you can pick that up by the stick and eat it without looking completely and utterly ridiculous.  As in, we’re pretty sure that, though it might not be the main reason why Physics as a field was invented, a really big reason was to explain exactly how goofy you will look trying to guide 18 inches of stuffed meat skewered by an improbably long stick safely to your mouth.

Yeah, okay, so we just re-read the last half of that sentence, so we’ll just pause for a moment to let you fill in your own dick joke.  Okay, done yet?  Ha ha, that was a good one, man, really on point.  Let’s go on to the actual hot dogs now.

The Los Angeles Dodgers:  Playoff Dog

The Los Angeles Dodgers made the playoffs in 2014, and in 2013, and again in 2009 and again in 2008, which was the last time the Chicago Cubs made the playoffs.  We just are contractually forced to rub salt into that wound for any Cubs fans reading this because we once lost a bet with a Cardinals fan, and if we ever mentioned baseball without rubbing the Cubs’ futility in their own faces, our articles would be flooded by a bunch of people from St. Louis talking about how they play baseball “the right way”  which is just the fucking worst.

Anyway, the Dodgers made the playoffs in 2014, and to celebrate this feat, they released a special hot dog, called the Playoff Dog, and it sounds amazing.  They took a hot dog, put it in a pretzel bun, and topped the whole thing with pastrami, mustard, and a thick pickle wedge.  This might be the most sensible on the list, but we just wanted to slowly ease you into the “meat on top of different meat” direction that these hot dogs can take before we really hit you with the good stuff.  For example-

The Pittsburgh Pirates:  Polish Hill Dog

Foot-long hot dogs have existed for a while, but only lately have we started using them to their full potential.  Time was, a.k.a. the 1990’s, you’d go to a Minor League park (they used to be almost only at Minor League Baseball games, but also at every Minor League Baseball stadium) and get a comically elongated tube of nitrates on either a regular or slightly bigger bun, laugh at how much of the hot dog hangs out of the bun, or laugh because of the existence of male genitalia (depending on if you had hit puberty yet) and would eat it with regular toppings.  Now that they’re starting to make the jump to the big leagues, foot-longs are less of a novelty and more of a vessel to create an even crazier novelty (that you’ll spend like, 20 bucks on).

Which, in Pittsburgh’s case, presents itself with the Polish Hill Dog, or the “wait, and onion rings?” dog as we prefer to call it.  Taking a foot long on a specialty bun (read as: a normal bun, but one that fits the whole sausage) the hot dog is topped with coleslaw and pulled pork doused in Kansas City barbecue sauce.  While a pulled-pork-cole-slaw-foot-long would be enough for most mortals, the Pirates ratcheted things up by adding onion rings and pierogis because, eh, Western Pennsylvania, shrug.

The Pittsburgh Pirates have made the playoffs the last two years, while playing in the same division as the Chicago Cubs who have not (goddamn it, Craig, please let us stop doing that), but it’s important to note that this hot dog was released back in 2012, the last year that they didn’t make the playoffs.  Are we saying that this glorious concoction is largely responsible for the Pirates winning ways?  No, quite the opposite, we’re saying it only exists because they went twenty years without once reaching a .500 record, and they had to placate their fans somehow.

The Milwaukee Brewers:  The Beast

“Oh wow, wait, Milwaukee makes a crazy unhealthy food that has bratwurst in it, and sells it to people who go to a sporting event where alcohol is consumed?  This is a very surprising fact,” you might say if you’ve never heard of the state of Wisconsin or if maybe you had a really unfortunate accident with a nail gun that took out a very specific section of your memory.  For the rest of you, us saying “Yeah, the Brewers sell ‘The Beast’ which is a bacon-wrapped hot dog/bratwurst combination” is greeted with a chorus of “yeah that makes sense” or maybe “huh, but no cheese though?”

The Brewers announced this sausage’s release over twitter, which we can only surmise is because any true Wisconsin resident within a forty-mile radius of the stadium knew of its existence the moment it was placed on its warm pretzel-roll bun.  It comes with a pickle to be fancy, and chips because calories are a myth invented by gyms and fitness trainers and *has a minor heart attack* *pounds chest*

Anyway, this looks pretty damn tasty.  Another job well done, Wisconsin.

The Baltimore Orioles:  The Walk Off

The Baltimore Orioles have an executive chef.  Well, admittedly, by this point, a lot of baseball teams have executive chefs, but John Distenfeld at Camden Yards is the kind of baseball chef who also appears on the show Chopped.  Chopped, if you’re not familiar, is a show where top chefs are given strange, random mystery ingredients, and are given a time limit to combine them into a whole, delicious dish.  It’s pretty much like every time you try to cook for your kids when your wife leaves town, only with a lot less crying and we’re pretty sure it’s against the rules to say, “Fuck this” and call Pizza Hut for delivery at the end of it.

Needless to say, Distenfeld has made a name for himself making insane hot dogs for casual sporting event consumption.  Now, we could have included the crab-and-mac-and-cheese dog that they serve over at Camden, but we decided to go with the Walk Off, which is pretty much a giant, fancy version of that, and it has an actual name, and also shut up we shouldn’t have to justify to you why this hunk of majesty made this list over a completely different but worthwhile contender.  This giant Old Bay Roma sausage is placed in a pretzel roll and topped with old bay crab dip, because Baltimore is crazy about crabs, and in about five years they’ll even learn to finally embrace the STD jokes they hear every time they state that fact.

Now would be the time that we’d say something snarky about how “it defeats the purpose of having a hot dog if you have to cut it with a damn knife to even eat it” but look at that knife, it’s so shiny.  So shiny.

Sorry.  Got distracted.  But that leads us to our final dog of the day (don’t worry, we’ll get into the Minor Leagues later this week)…

The Texas Rangers:  Boomstick

We understand why foreigners like to make fat American jokes.  They’re lazy and tired, but we get it, because we’re kind of lazy and tired as a nation too.  Wait, now, it’s because we spend a lot of our time writing about things like the Boomstick up there with a combination of childish glee and a haunting knowledge that we know that the words “cardiac arrest” will appear somewhere on our death certificates.  That being said…look at the Boomstick!  That looks so great we could die eating it and be like, eh, we had a good run!  The Boomstick runs you back $26, which, considering that the all-beef hot dog is 2-feet long, runs you exactly one dollar per inch of hot dog.

We’re not great at math.

Anyway, the Boomstick is smothered in chili, macho cheese, caramelized onions, and jalapenos and placed on a sturdy potato bun, weighing about three pounds in total.  It makes sense that this would exist in America, and it makes a lot of sense that Texas would be the state to come up with the idea, and it makes so much sense we’re thinking our work here is done, and America is about as American as it can get when we’re told that in 2012 (the first year the Boomstick was put on the menu) over 20,000 were sold, netting in about half a million dollars in sales.

That’s right.  Either we’re so desperate to eat ridiculous foods, or baseball is so boring (probably both) that over half a million dollars has been spent on giant, novelty hot dogs that, when stood up vertically on the ground (OH GOD ALL THE CHILI AND TOPPINGS ARE SLIDING TO THE GROUND THIS IS A MESS WHY DID WE THINK THIS WOULD BE A GOOD IDEA) from end to end, it would be taller than the world’s smallest man.  We don’t know about you, but that makes us proud.  God bless baseball.  God bless America.

“You can’t get butts in the seat without a gimmick!”

~Bill Veeck

As covered a few days ago, baseball and insane hot dogs go together like serial killers and women who send love letters to various prisons who have a lot of issues they need to work out.  We should tease out that comparison a little bit more, but we’re not going to.  Anyway, the point we think we’re trying to make is that, stadiums like to ply baseball fans with booze and food because while baseball can be boring, if you’re drunk and full, you won’t really mind.  This has led to a recent explosion in creative, intense, and, well, insane hot dogs throughout the baseball world.  And while we’ve talked about hot dogs in Major League Baseball stadiums already, that was really us going easy on the rest of you.  Because Minor League Baseball only sustains itself through the unfulfillable dreams of thousands of minimum wage athletes, and ridiculous ballpark gimmicks.  If you think of it, Minor League baseball has probably done it!  Smash a printer like in the movie Office Space!?  Sure!  Dress a dog as the bat boy?  Why not!  Live amputation on the field?  Jesus Christ, no, what the living hell is wrong with you!?

Anyway, if you thought that the last article we had about crazy hot dogs, well…no that was pretty crazy.  But check this shit out too!

The Craziest Hot Dogs in Professional Baseball (Minor League Edition)

As boring as people might find baseball to be, it’s got nothing on Minor League Baseball.  You’re basically paying to watch auditions, and in-her-prime Susan Sarandon usually isn’t even there.  So naturally, they’ve got to step up their hot dog game to get you interested.  That level of desperation and ingenuity leads to such things as…

The Rochester Red Wings (Minnesota Twins Triple-A Affiliate):  Tony Soprano Dog

Minor League stadium food is so prolific that in 2013 they started a “Food Fight” where each team could submit an entry and let you(!) the voter decide what is best photographed.  This wasn’t limited to just hot dogs—everything was included, which is why you have to scroll down 2014’s entries a bit until you get this pizza hot dog inexplicably named after an Italian gangster ohhhhh okay, we get it now.  The ingredients are listed as a hot dog, marinara sauce, mozzarella, and pepperoni, which honestly is a good enough idea for a hot dog that we’re surprised we don’t see it more often.

How is it?  Well it’s surprisingly hard to find a lot about “crazy but not totally insane” concessions at Minor League sporting events.  That’s the sad truth—Minor League stadium food is basically a never-ending orgy of insane food ideas, and anything that isn’t insane and reckless enough that they force you to sign a waiver before eating it basically just registers as white noise.  That said, Facebook user and probably-hasn’t-tinkered-with-his-privacy-settings-in-a-while champion Matt Wildey is on record as saying that it is “probably the best concession stand food at any sporting event ever.. just sayin’”.

Having not tried it, we’re definitely not going to disagree.  It’s a pizza hot dog, people.  Good call, Rochester.

The Corpus Christi Hooks (Houston Astros Double-A Affiliate):  The Babe                  

Corpus Christi, home to the X-League’s Fury, clearly is worried that they’ll have a hard time getting butts in the seats for the Hooks, the local Double-A team, because they decided to go full hog with this insane wrapped/stuffed/whatevered hot dog.  We’re not even sure if that last bit about going full hog is a pun, because there’s so much going on here we are having a hard time focusing on what type of meat we should be devoting our attention to.  This beast, named after either Babe Ruth or the poor animal that was slaughtered to create it, was introduced to Whataburger Field (yes, the Hooks’ stadium is called Whateburger Field) having been “inspired” by the MiLB Food Fight inaugural contest the previous year.

The hot dog itself is simple, in the same way a homemade turducken is simple, by which we mean to say that this contains all the meat to ever exist and actually is not that simple at all.  Specifically, they take a cheddarwurst (so basically a cheese filled hot dog which is a thing that exists and oh no you’ve just bolted out the door to buy all of the cheddarwurst at your local butcher, yeah, that’s an understandable response), wrap it in a hamburger, and then wrap that with bacon.  It’s put on a sturdy roll, and in the eyes of the law, eating a full Babe in one sitting serves as a legally binding DNR order.

This is wonderful, and whenever someone tries to Leaving Las Vegas themselves with food instead of booze, we’d have to imagine this is a good place to start.  If you were to ask a Hooks official how many calories are in this hot dog, they would probably respond, “Everyone dies eventually, some sooner than others.”  Warning, despite all outward appearances, this dish is not Kosher.

The El Paso Chihuahuas (San Diego Padres Triple-A Affiliate): Memphis Meets Mexico Juarez Dog

Here we have another entry in 2014’s Food Fight competition, a fourth-place finisher made by Ovation Food Services as the first ever hot dog specifically designed to make sure you have to take a nap as soon as you finish it.  It’s an American twist to the Juarez street food of a bacon-wrapped hot dog, which to be fair we’d be quicker to associate as an American thing, but whatever.  This quarter-pound hot dog is wrapped in bacon before being topped with pulled pork, coleslaw, dill pickles, and, fuck it, candied bacon to boot.  Oh, then they add a whole mess of chicharrones (fried pork skin) before liberally adding barbeque sauce.  Your arteries know what they did and it’s time for them to take their punishment.

This hot dog no doubt tastes wonderful, though asking people to eat this while sitting at a ballpark basically demands that you bring multiple changes of shirts before even dreaming of taking a bite of it.  Just imagine trying to hold this over your lap, bring it to your mouth, tilt your head sideways to take that first bite, and then just, have a tsunami of barbeque sauce and coleslaw land directly on your shirt, with chicharrones just cemented to the newly soiled segments.  We’re not saying it’s not worth it, we’re just saying be prepared, or maybe just wear a shirt you normally wear when you have to paint a room.

The Eugene Emeralds (Chicago Cubs Short-Season A Affiliate): VooDoo Doughnut Bacon Maple Brat

So far, we’ve been dealing with a lot of “ha those toppings are crazy!” or “there’s how much meat!?” kind of hot dogs.  The buns have been very utilitarian, serving a purpose but otherwise huddling quietly in the background.  This is where that ends, however, because did you know that anything can be a hot dog bun if you believe hard enough?  So long as you put a hot dog on it and eat it, you could call a shoe a hot dog bun [editor’s note: please do not try to put a hot dog in a shoe and eat it].  In this case, the Eugene Emerald’s entrance to 2013’s Food Fight did away with the bun, replacing it with a VooDoo bacon maple doughnut.  They just jam a bratwurst in there before topping everything off with a slice of bacon and a maple glazing, bringing the final calorie count to 1,034.

The most impressive thing about this doughnut bratwurst is not its mere existence, but rather that this isn’t even the craziest doughnut hot dog available in minor league baseball.  That awesome distinction belongs to…                                                        

The Wilmington Blue Rocks (Kansas City Royals Advanced-A Affiliate):  The Sweenie Donut Dog

Ha ha, holy shit.  Look at that monster up there.  This hot dog, which literally crams a sausage into a Krispy Kreme doughnut and covers it in raspberry jam and crumbled bacon, was originally announced without a name.  They let you, the morbidly curious, suggest a name, eventually settling on the finalists of Inside The Porker, Frawley Frank, Don’t Go Bacon My Heart, Glazed and Confused, The Sweenie, and Grand Slam With Jam.  Naturally, we were strongly pulling for a pun, and the fact that they ended up going with The Sweenie is an immense disappointment to us.  Seriously, America?  You had to go with the most boring name available to you?  Ugh, this is why democracy doesn’t work.

The name is less important than the audacity of this hot dog’s existence.  This couldn’t be any less subtle if they called it “You’re Going to Get Fat” and each order of it came with an obscene and violently sexual letter being sent to your cardiologist.  We want one so bad.

So keep on keeping on, Minor League Baseball.  We’re eagerly looking forward to 2015’s Food Fight competition, and if you’re looking for some judges, we happen to know an American website that would be glad to gorge on your behalf.

“No, you see, they’re called S’Mores because you always WANT Some…”

~No, we get it, you don’t have to finish

Camping is as American of a tradition as you can find among middle class people who take delight in purposely leaving the comforts of world behind so they can sleep under a pitched piece of fabric and try to stave off their urge to use the bathroom until the weekend is over, taking advantage of our nation’s surplus of forested wilderness instead of burning it to the ground to put up the Walmart that, let’s be real, will work around zoning regulations eventually.  And when we go camping, we’re almost guaranteed to run into two American activities—having outdoor intercourse interrupted by murdering monsters, and sticking a marshmallow into fire and smudging it on some chocolate between two graham crackers.

Today we’re going to tell you the history of the most American camping activity of the two.  No, it’s not the slasher film thing.  Let’s take a moment to nurse the soon-to-be-burned roof of our mouths as we talk about…

S’mores: Giving America Yet Another Reason To Love Fire

Considering how universally delicious s’mores are, we find it surprising that other nations haven’t tried to lay claim, or even partake in its gooey goodness.  Not only is this views as a traditional campfire treat in America (and America’s little brother that’s trying and failing to maintain his autonomy [sup Canada]), the s’more was created in America and is primarily only appreciated by Americans.  In fact, Americans who find themselves in another country for reasons we have to assume have to do with fleeing a warrant, but who want to go camping can’t even find the appropriate ingredients for s’mores half the time, further proof that America is the only beacon of the good and just left on this sinful planet.

While that means that many non-Americans have yet to discover the joys of sticking a marshmallow on a stick, hovering it over a fire to ever so carefully get that perfect golden crispy outside before accidentally getting to close, setting the thing on fire, and saying, “eh, fuck it” as you blow out the flame and jam it onto your cracker, it also means we can take full responsibility for this awesomeness, instead of just piggybacking off of German food ideas and calling them our own.

Meanwhile, a google image search of “German s’mores” just leaves us with more questions than answers.  Though thankfully, fewer scatological porn sites than expected

The first recipe for s’mores appeared in 1927 in a Girl Scout Handbook, which means we owe the Girl Scouts even more than we originally thought for their contributions to America’s cookie and dessert legacy.  Merriam-Webster likes to say that the first use of the word appeared in 1974, but we’re not going to listen to a bunch of nerds when the internet tells us other things, so we’re going to stick with the 1927 birthdate for this particular treat.

So, the history of the s’more is strictly American.  Some girl scouts thought it up, the rest of the country said, “That’s a great idea, Girl Scouts, also I’ll take a few boxes of Thin Mints please” and they named it by smushing together two words which if you don’t know, you aren’t going to get the satisfaction of finding out here, because you should feel bad for not knowing that basic simple fact.

You probably know the ingredients for a s’more (and if you don’t, you should send an angry email to your parents who refused to raise you correctly) but there is a specific American-bend to the ones we use.  While marshmallows have been around for millennia, we had only just begun the mass produce them effectively when the s’mores recipe came about, and even then they had to rely on square, roughly cut mallows—it wasn’t until 1948 when Alex Doumak (don’t worry, despite the last name, he was American) developed a process that could make marshmallows in the shape and consistency that we know today.  This uniform shape, by the way, makes it much easier to roast them over an open fire, even though you’re almost guaranteed to get impatient and just scorch the thing to speed things up midway through the cooking process.

Good enough.

While chocolate is an essential part of the s’more, and you’d think that using a higher quality chocolate would yield a better s’more, there’s something about how Hershey’s, and Hershey’s in particular, is made to allow the appropriate level of melty, gooey chocolate to take charge when the heat of a previously burnt to shit marshmallow is introduced to the works.  While Hershey’s chocolate was never made with “adding roasted marshmallows to it” on their mind, it happens to work perfectly, because America can do no wrong, and don’t you dare google anything about the Middle East to try to say otherwise.

Finally, the last ingredient that brings the s’more together also owes its very existence to America (in fact, a lot of countries don’t even have it, because, well, it’s only okay on its own if we’re being perfectly honest).  The graham cracker was invented in 1829 in New Jersey by a Presbyterian minister named Sylvester Graham, which just blew your mind considering you’d spent your life assuming that “graham” was some sort of ingredient that gave it its unique flavor, like corn bread, or ginger snaps.  But really, a graham cracker was created as a health food as part of a Graham Diet which, we’re not making this up, was supposed to stop you from feeling the urge to masturbate.  They’re made with Graham flour (motherfucker liked to name a lot of things after himself) which uses a high protein wheat, though it tends to be sweetened with sugar and honey.  The flour and sweetening agent is then baked into a sturdy, hard cookie that, again, don’t really taste good unless you put shit on it, like cinnamon, or whatever you’d call the other two-thirds of a s’more (ore?  S’mo?).

We’re not saying that the only reason why graham crackers exist as a thing in America, and are hard to find in Europe and elsewhere, is that it is perfectly suited to serve as a campfire treat, we’re just saying that most of you are having a hard time thinking about the last time you brought a package of graham crackers that didn’t also occur in conjunction with a run to get chocolate and marshmallows.

Pictured: Sylvester Graham, who, to be fair, looks like he is using the majority of his willpower suppressing masturbatory urges here.

Together, these ingredients make the mighty s’more, which can be consumed wherever there is a campfire, a fire pit, or a gas stove in a house filled with sad, so sad children.  They remind us of summer and fall, and if we’re being brutally honest they’re probably responsible for at least one devastating forest fire.  We’ve turned them into a Hershey’s candy bar that no one really buys, as well as a Pop Tart flavor which is better than you’re giving it credit for, shut up.  It defines our childhood, as well as the camping experience for those of you who are weirdly into pretending like roofs don’t exist.  It is, in a word, a perfect American outdoor snack.

We know that’s more than one word, so is “some more” we’re not exactly about following the rules of the English language to a T in these parts.  Just shut up and eat your s’mores and get melted marshmallow just everywhere.  It’ll take your mind off things.

“Pop Tarts: The Perfect Breakfast For A Broken Home!”

~Rejected Pop Tarts slogan

Parenting is not easy, which is why American corporations have entire divisions dedicated to giving parents as many moments of unencumbered sanity as humanly possible.  Sure, we made Sesame Street as a fun way to entertain kids while educating them, but we also want to give parents thirty minutes of peace where they could plop the kids in front of the TV and talk about maybe getting a fast quickie done in the laundry room before ultimately deciding that they’d both rather just take a 10 minute nap.  It’s the same reason why the iPad went from a frankly unnecessary gadget to a must-have child distraction device for new parents, and it’s also why Uncrustables exist as an easy way to tell your child you don’t really love them that much.

But of all the areas where American corporations try to make life easier for the struggling parent, there is one breakfast treat that’s been jazzing kids and adults up on unnecessarily high amounts of sugar morning in and morning out in a quest to make at least the beginning of the day a shade easier while you try to hide the fact that you’re a bit hungover to your kids who just won’t stop asking why you’re holding your head in those shrill monster little voices of theirs.

That product, of course, is the Pop-Tart.  More American than the apple pie, because we invented it, and we use it to cut corners.

The American History of the Pop-Tart

The Kellogg Company first released the Pop-Tart in 1964.  For those of you wondering what parenting looked like before you could toss a pastry in a toaster for three minutes and send your kids off to school with a sugar rush, well, we’d say you should just watch the early seasons of Mad Men.  It wasn’t pretty.  Pop-Tarts changed American parenting for the better!  Probably.  Probably not.  But they did make breakfast easier and better, and have been doing so ever since with no sign of slowing down—in fact, sales for Pop-Tarts have been increasing every year for the past 32 years as of 2014.  Pretty much the only other product with that kind of success record is pornography and maybe butter.

Kellogg’s competitor, Post, was the first to try to get in on the toaster-prepared breakfast market.  They realized that their method for enclosing food in foil to keep it fresh (which they first used to make dog food, because progress often takes the road less traveled) could be used to make this a reality, so they announced their plans to make “Country Squares” in 1963, before they had a product to sell.  The folks at Kellogg, being savvy businessmen, which is another word for “technically in the clear, but still kind of dickish,” jumped in on this action, developing their own version in just six months.  Thus, in 1964, the first non-frosted Pop-Tart hit the market, where it was so popular Kellogg initially had difficulty producing enough to meet demand.

All this despite the fact that their original mascot was Milton, the bashful monster.

By 1967, they realized that they could put hard frosting on there that wouldn’t melt in the heat of the toaster, which got us real Pop-Tarts.  Originally coming out in four different flavors (blueberry, strawberry, brown sugar cinnamon, and apple currant) Pop-Tarts now boast over 25 flavors, not including the various “limited edition” flavors that are released each year.  And no, none of the flavors around are called apple currant anymore, because that’s a dumb flavor for a Pop-Tart.  The Pop-Tart itself is brilliant in its simplicity, as well as it’s deliciousness.  It doesn’t need to be frozen or refrigerated, tastes pretty good on its own, but when heated in a toaster for about three minutes becomes a wonderful piping-hot way to burn your mouth but not really mind at the end of the day.

America makes over a billion Pop-Tarts every year, making it the most popular product Kellogg sells, making it, by our calculations, more widely consumed than actual cereal.  In 2001, the US military airdropped 2.4 million Pop-Tarts into Afghanistan during our initial invasion, which is a sentence we didn’t feel like giving a proper transition because honestly we just wanted to point that fact out, and it could go anywhere in this article.  The frosted treat is engrained in our cultural DNA, and we can guarantee that almost everyone reading this article who hasn’t had a Pop-Tart within the past four years just got a sudden urge to get buy a box of strawberry Pop-Tarts, opening up one of the two-per-foil offerings, and eating one cold and one warm.  We’ve been there.  Every American has been there.

Give in.

The main competition to the Pop-Tart is the Toaster Strudel, which was launched in 1985, and will forever be the fancier, more dignified breakfast pastry that will never be as popular.  Sort of like the Niles Crane of the toaster pastry world.  Toaster Strudels are good, sure, but they can’t hold a candle to Pop-Tarts—they’re a different texture, you have to manually apply the frosting yourself, like some sort of peasant, and they have to be refrigerated, which immediately disqualifies them as post-nuclear-war treats.  When’s the last time you’ve ever heard someone ask if their Pop-Tart was safe to eat because they left it out for an hour and a half?  Well, okay, there was that one time, but Uncle John was just having a mild stroke, he also said ostrich eggs are made of vulva and that Portuguese women eat the most ham.  It was pure nonsense, and next time you should take him to the hospital the moment he says that your Pop-Tart smells like buttered toast, because that is not how Pop-Tarts smell, goddamn it.

Um.  Anyway.

Yes, the reason why Pop-Tarts are an ingrained part of our culture, and Toaster Strudels’ only day in the sun came from the fact that Gretchen Weiner’s father invented them in Mean Girls, stems from Pop-Tarts versatility as well as its deliciousness.  We can’t discount the deliciousness—originally the filling was Smuckers jam, and they’ve still kept the general jam-like quality of the inside, while maintaining a proper pastry-to-sugary-gel ratio to be delicious for kids and adults alike.  And the frosting is so good that if you told us it was made out of cocaine and ground up spiders, we would just shrug our shoulders and say, “Whelp, I guess I really like cocaine and ground up spiders, then.”  But deliciousness aside, the fact that these can be left out for extended periods of time and still consumed years later is nothing short of magic, and the fact that most Americans have an actually informed opinion on if it tastes better raw or cooked without having encountered any sort of bread parasites is a testament to America’s dedication to lazy food preparation techniques.

This is, of course, the land that invented the Showtime Rotisserie & BBQ

Next time you sit down for a breakfast only to realize, oh shit, you were supposed to be at work thirty minutes ago, you’ve really got to stop going so hard on a Monday night this was cute a few years ago but now it’s becoming actively difficult to maintain, and you glance over to your pantry to see your carbohydrate laden savior in the form of an on-the-go Pop-Tart, take a moment to thank America for looking out for you in your breakfast time of need.  Or thank the Kellogg’s product development team that worked overtime to kick Post Country Squares right in the balls and steal their thunder.  Either way, you’ve got a delicious meal that only exists because of the U. S. of A.