Dear Smokey,

Whether most people remember it today or not, you are one of the greatest songwriters in the history of American music. “Tracks of My Tears”? “Shop Around”? “You’ve Really Got A Hold On Me”?

“Ooh Baby Baby”! “I Second That Emotion”! “Tears of A Clown”! “My Girl”!

I could go on, Smokey, but you see my point. Yes, it’s true that you eventually went on to more or less create the “Quiet Storm” genre, and most people my age or younger only remember you for your 1987 comeback, and its wretched double-barrelled shot of suck, “One Heartbeat” and “Just to See Her.” But nothing can take away from all the great music you made with the Miracles, and all the great songs you wrote for Motown artists. If there’s any justice in this world, Smokey, you’re dirty rotten filthy stinking rich. I mean, I’m talking wiping-your-ass-with-$100-bills rich.

Rich enough to keep from shilling microwave jambalaya and beans & rice:

The soul is:in the bowl?

I can understand why Chubby Checker is selling beef jerky—he only recorded one song anybody ever cared about, and he didn’t even write it. But you, Smokey?

Goddammit.

How’s a kid supposed to eat breakfast with this staring him in the face?

Some time ago, in a fit of starved desperation, I unwrapped a Slim Jimâ„¢ Chili n’ Cheese stick, and could not believe how terrible it was. I had eaten Slim Jims before, so I knew they were bad, but the cheese, man…the cheese. It was oily, brittle, chalky, and tasted nothing like cheese–in short, it showed no signs of actually being what the wrapper said it was.

I resolved to put it through a series of scientific tests to determine: IS IT CHEESE?

Here’s the offending product in its wrapper. Imagine how hungry you’d have to be in order to eat that. I was that hungry when I ate it. Don’t you feel bad for me?

Here’s what happened when I took the first stick of alleged cheese out of the wrapper. This is the first thing I noticed about Slim Jim üncheese–you can’t bend it. Outside of cooked pasta, actual cheese is some of the most pliant food you’re likely to enjoy eating, especially when it’s processed in convenient stick form. So far, the signs point to: NOT CHEESE!

Test One: Grating. Now, I’m not Iron Chef , but it seems to me that you can grate pretty much any cheese there is, so this seemed to be a pretty good way of determining some kind of baseline cheese content. I grated three sticks. Because this crap is so oily and prone to breaking apart, I also grated half of my left thumb, but no sacrifice in the name of science is too great. (Now I know how Jonas Salk must have felt.) As you might be able to see in this picture, the üncheese retained its crayon-like consistency even after grating. Signs still point to: NOT CHEESE!

Note: Performing Test One left my hand covered with Slim Jimâ„¢ Chili n’ Cheese residue. It stinks. Further experiments should not be performed without gloves. And bleach.

Test Two: Melting. Again, Iron Chef might correct me on this, but I’m pretty sure that one ought to be able to make a nice fondue out of whatever cheese one wishes–so I dumped my plate o’ gratings in a saucepan and waited for the magic to happen. Two results took place almost immediately:

1. 1. The üncheese gratings started hissing.
2. 2. A really, really bad smell filled my kitchen.

It was awful. It smelled like a cooler full of old hot dog water that had been left out in the yard for a year. I’m not normally squeamish about smells, but wow. I had to lean back or hold my breath as I stirred the pot, and it became apparent fairly quickly that no matter how long I stirred, I was never going to get rid of all the lumps of solid üncheese. Definitely: NOT CHEESE!

Note: Test Two needs to be performed in an extremely well-ventilated area. Tester should be wearing clothes that do not need to be worn again.

Test Three: Cooling. This really doesn’t have much to do with cheese, really–I just wanted to see what would happen after I let the stuff sit for awhile. I sort of expected it to separate from itself, or eat through the glass, but mostly it just got grosser. It developed a thick, lumpy skin moments after being transferred out of the saucepan. The terrible smell did not go away.

Here’s the üncheese, fully cooled, after being dumped from the glass onto a plate. As you can see, it retained its shape pretty well. This is something ordinary cheese would do. However, I think it would take longer than ten minutes of letting it cool before you could get real cheese to do this.

Note: The terrible smell was still overpowering at this point in the experiment. All doors and windows were open. In the future, testers should be equipped with, at minimum, a paper breathing mask.

Test Four: Mutilating. Our last test was motivated by un-scientific concerns; namely, anger, revulsion, and a desire to inflict harm. The üncheese was pierced and split with a steak knife, then dumped into an outside garbage bin.

I love cheese–it’s my favorite food group. This stuff, aside from being crappy, is an insult to cheese lovers everywhere. All signs point to: definitely NOT CHEESE! In fact, in all probability, this is NOT FOOD! Don’t let your friends or loved ones eat it!

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a sink full of üncheese-covered dishes that need to be bleached and set on fire…

Every week, it’s something new and exciting at the grocery store. This morning, I spied with my little eye two words I never want to see on a box of unrefrigerated food, ever again:

I’ll admit, back in my bachelor days, I often gazed with envy at boxes of Hamburger Helper-type dishes, with the pasta and the meat and the allegedly savory sauce, feeling lied to somehow. I knew that if I wanted to partake of the goodness within, it wasn’t as simple as the little grinning glove on the box wanted me to believe—I couldn’t just open the box, add water, and have myself a meal. No, I would have to buy some hamburger. And cook it myself. No thanks!

I’m older and wiser now. And very glad that nobody was making these horrifying boxed dinners with beef, chicken, or ham included a few years ago. Though I’m certain I would have tried them before, I don’t care how you preserve it, or how you package it—there is something very wrong with putting meat in a box and leaving it on a shelf.

Except tuna fish. Tuna fish is different. Don’t ask me why, it just is, and you know it.

I have also come to the conclusion that the Star Wars Episode III tie-in bonanza has gotten way out of hand:

Yeah, it’s Darth Chester Cheetah. But that isn’t all. These are SPECIAL Star Warsââ€Â¢ Cheetos. Why are they so special? They turn your tongue “Darth Vaderââ€Â¢ Dark” or “Yodaââ€Â¢ Green”!

Cheetos—corn puffs with cheese-flavored powder sprayed on—are terrible enough anyway. But these are corn puffs with cheese-flavored powder that turns your tongue black and green. That, my friends, is awful, and I want everyone to write George Lucas a letter telling him that he should be ashamed of himself.

My favorite part of the bag is where it tells you how to rid yourself of the lingering effects of Limited Edition Star Warsââ€Â¢ Cheetos:

I know it’s a poem, but you’d think everybody in marketing would know that “don’t worry” is a phrase you never want to put on a package of food you’re trying to sell.

Just like “ham included.”

Okay, so, originally this was going to be another GREAT CEREAL GROSS-OFF! between Malt-O-Meal’s new Blueberry Muffin Tops (”The Taste That’s Tops!”) and Kellogg’s new Limited Edition Star Wars Episode III cereal.

I bought them both. I started with Blueberry Muffin Tops, thinking there was no way I’d be able to choke down an entire bowl:

The thing is, as I quickly discovered, they are delicious. I knew I was in for it as soon as I opened the box and was greeted with a powerful waft of blueberry muffin scent. It smelled like my Aunt Ida was in there, baking up a batch of her county-fair-prize-winning muffins. Actually, I don’t have an Aunt Ida, but if I did, I’m sure this is what her muffins would have smelled like.

Heh. I said “her muffins.”

Anyway, I digress. The point is that I quickly wolfed down the entire box of Blueberry Muffin Tops (”The Taste That’s Tops!”) without taking a picture of the cereal itself. So sue me. You think it’s so easy being Mr. Junk Food Critic all the time, you go do it yourself. I’ll just say that Blueberry Muffin Tops are similar to Cinnamon Toast Crunch in shape, texture, and overwhelming sweetness. In fact, yeah, it’s basically Blueberry Toast Crunch.

I resolved not to make the same mistake with Kellogg’s Limited Edition Star Wars Episode III cereal. Movie tie-in cereals are, as a rule, pretty awful, but the Star Wars ones haven’t been too bad. I have no memory of their actual taste, but I know I had more than my share of C-3PO’s when I was a kid:and the Episode II cereal was as delicious as anyone could expect a $2.50 Lucky Charms rip-off to be. So I was expecting great things from the final Star Wars movie tie-in breakfast.

I got the Darth Vader box, of course. It looks like he’s poured himself a bowl, only to remember at the last minute that his badass helmet doesn’t have a spoon hole, sending him into a bowl-tossing fit of rage:

The first order of business was to verify Kellogg’s claim that this is an oat-based part of your balanced breakfast:

And indeed it is!

I love it when “marshmallow bits” are listed in the ingredients. Sodium hexametaphosphate, on the other hand, well:I don’t want to think about whatever the hell that is. Time to pour myself a bowl!

The Episode II cereal, if I recall correctly, could have been described as lightly sweetened Kix with marshmallows. Episode III, as you can see, is lightly sweetened Cheerios with marshmallows. And speaking of marshmallows, these ones are pretty lame. Now, I know it can’t be easy to make a tiny, crunchy marshmallow that actually resembles much of anything at all, let alone a Star Wars character, but how hard would it have been for Lucas to loan Kellogg’s a few of the supernerds from Industrial Light & Magic? I mean, “Magic” is right there in the company name. Those guys can do anything. They clearly could have made marshmallows that looked better than these:

From left to right: lightsaber, R2-D2, Yoda, C-3PO, Darth Vader, and lightsaber. (When first examining the “Darth Vader” marshmallow, I had no idea what it was supposed to be. I thought maybe it was a big purple alien heart, or a fat bounty hunter. So it’s upside down in the picture.)

Kellogg’s definitely was not using The Force when they made these marshmallows. They also skimped on them. I, like most children, would ideally like a 50/50 marshmallow-to-cereal ratio, but I’m willing to accept 40/60. Maybe I got a bum box, but this bowl was maybe 30% marshmallows, tops. Extremely disappointing. I think maybe Kellogg’s realized this, because they’ve crammed the outside of the box full of exclusive Limited Edition Star Wars Episode III puzzles and goodies:

The movie is about young Jedi Knightââ€Â¢ Anakin Skywalkerââ€Â¢ turning to the Dark Side!

And kids, don’t forget to complete the Lightsaberââ€Â¢ Labyrinth!

Final verdict on Kellogg’s Limited Edition Star Wars Episode III cereal: It isn’t bad. It’s pretty good, in fact. But not as good as Blueberry Muffin Tops.

So, as some of you may remember, during a recent trip to the grocery store, I discovered a terrible new development in applesauce engineering:

I was too stunned to buy it, and some of you expressed disappointment. Well, if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s disappointing my three readers, so I dutifully went out this weekend and bought a package of Mott’s Magic Mix-Ins.

Magic. Ha! Kids will believe anything! Mott’s knows it, and so do parents. Dig the friendly advice on the back of the box, extolling this garbage as an “easy way to get fruit in your kid’s diet”:

Hey, my parents had an easy way of getting fruit in my diet: They made me eat it. Nobody was sprinkling anything magic in my fruit to make it cooler. And asking for it would have earned me a magic trip to my room without dinner.

You know what else kids believe in? Mystery Fruit. For decades, America’s foodmakers have been obsessed with inventing blue fruit. It used to be called “blue raspberry” (Why raspberry? Why blue?), but now it’s just plain old Mystery Fruit. You’d think they’d come up with something really cool, like Mottsberry, but I guess all the creativity in R&D was spent on coming up with the idea of mixing goddamn Pop Rocks in applesauce.

So here’s the way it works: You take your applesauce, in its traditional plastic cup with the foil lid that never removes without tearing, and your packet of Magic Mix-In, which is fastened to the aforementioned foil lid with a clear, sticky substance that resembles the nasal drip of aliens I used to have nightmares about as a kid.

Here’s what it looks like after you pour the Magic on:

Here’s what it looks like after you stir it in:

And here’s what I looked like while eating it:

Imagine taking a melted generic popsicle and pouring it into a cup of applesauce, and you’ll get an idea of what the Mott’s Mystery Fruit tastes like: Cloyingly, artificially, sphincter-tighteningly sweet. And don’t forget the goddamn Pop Rocks in the applesauce–it just adds to the overwhelming sensation of wrongness. Very bad. Very, very bad. If this is what the youth of our nation needs fruit to taste like before it can be eaten, I say the hell with Social Security, we’ve got bigger fish to fry.

“These are dire times, men,” said the CEO of Sunshine Foods to the members of the board. “Profits are up, sure, but what with all of our bonus packages eating into the margin, something’s got to give. Any ideas?”

“Layoffs!” shouted one boardmember. “Wage cuts!” said another. “Raid the workers’ pension fund!” suggested a third.

“We just had a round of layoffs two weeks ago,” said the CEO sadly. “Can’t do it again for at least another few months. And as far as wage cuts go, 90% of our workforce is employed out of backwater Third World villages, working for a handshake and a pail of donkey meat every two weeks. Oh, and the pension fund was emptied to pay my predecessor’s bonus after he was fired for malfeasance.

“We’re past ordinary measures, men.” The CEO’s voice was trembling. “This is a full-on crisis.” A stunned silence enveloped the boardroom.

“But I need a new jetplane,” one boardmember whined.

“I’ve got four alimonies to pay,” said another. “And $350,000 a month in child support!” He mopped his brow.

“This isn’t fair,” cried a third. “I want to die.” And this went on for some time.

Finally, a voice was heard from the back of the room: “I have an idea.” Everyone’s ears perked up.

“Yes?”

“What is it?”

“Well, just the other day, I cut through the processing plant on my way back from eighteen holes at the country club with a guy from Hormel, and I noticed something:”

“Tell us!”

“There were crumbs everywhere. On the conveyor belts, on the floor:”

The CEO squinted at the back of the room, exasperated. “So what?”

“So I was just thinking: What if we sold them? The crumbs, I mean. You know, we’ll mush them together into really tiny crackers and cookies, put them in bags, and give them a funny name.”

And that’s the story of how these damn things made it to market:

At least, that’s how I imagine it.

It’s called B(e), pronounced “B-to-the-E,” and it’s Budweiser’s latest innovation in their quest to make terrible beer. “Hey, people like Red Bull in their vodka,” say the Bud geniuses. “Why not add it to our sort-of-beer-like beverage?”

Four ten-ounce bottles will cost you $8. In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, and because I had my last final tonight, and on account of how I love you all so much, I ponied up the dough. Then I endured five minutes of embarrassment while every employee on shift at BevMo tried to find the SKU for this shit. I would rather have been waiting for a price check on tampons, let me tell you.

Now, I’ve never had a Red Bull, and I’ve never had Bud, except for once at a hockey game when I didn’t know what was in the cup, so I don’t have a great frame of reference here. But I do know beer. I figure I can reliably judge B(e) on taste merits. I took my good frosted mug out of the freezer and poured away:

First thing you notice is that it smells funny. Not beer-y. It smells weak and sickly sweet. Not a good sign, but actually a pretty fair summation of the way it goes down. I could try to put the experience into words, but I think Leah’s photo essay says it all:

fear

tastes…like…*glorpf* *ackkkk*

get off my taste buds

No. No. No.

After that last picture was taken, I actually spit in the glass. It really is that awful. I hear Rainier Beer is pretty crummy, but this has got to be the Worst Beer Ever.

At the grocery store last weekend, I noticed a pair of new, horrible-looking food products, so naturally, I had to buy them. I thought it would probably be awhile before I got around to sampling them, but when I got home from class today I had no idea what to eat. So my lunch became a two-course feast made up of the following:

Nissen Chow Mein Original Style Chicken Flavor

Rice-A-Roni “Asian Fried” Heat & Serve Rice

Both of these creations are meant for microwave cookin’. Of the two, the Rice-A-Roni is more clearly meant for lazy Americans. I mean, yeah, microwave chow mein is pretty bad, but this Rice-A-Roni stuff is worse. You’re supposed to cook it in the bag, first of all. Without adding any water.

Let us consider rice for a moment. What could be simpler to cook? You take a pot, pour some water, add rice, and wait a few minutes (unless you’ve decided you’re too busy and want to make “minute” rice). Is it really necessary to dumb down the process even further?

I don’t know what it says about us as a country when a company can make money selling rice that you microwave in a bag. I don’t want to know. What I do know is that this stuff smells awful.

Really, really awful. It smells neither “Asian” nor “fried.” If “death” was an element on the periodic table, and some company managed to create a synthetic, crappier version of that element, I think the result would smell similar to Rice-A-Roni “Asian Fried” Heat & Serve Rice. I ate three forkfuls, all of which have no doubt already fastened themselves to my DNA. Don’t buy this stuff. Don’t even look at it when you walk past it at the store.

By the time I made the Nissen Chow Mein Original Style Chicken Flavor, all I was hoping for was something that would cleanse my palate — if the chow mein hadn’t been handy, I might have settled for hot sauce or dirt. And that’s sort of what I thought I’d be getting when I opened the package:

There are three ingredients here, which Nissen refers to as the “Noodle Cake,” the “Vegetable Packet,” and — gulp — “Liquid Seasoning.” You are supposed to pour the “Vegetable Packet” in the space between the “Noodle Cake” and the container, add a cup of water, and microwave it for six minutes. Six minutes! I really didn’t think there was anything you could microwave for six minutes without completely destroying it. I kept expecting it to blow up while it was cooking, but no — six minutes works just fine. What the fuck this stuff is made out of, I have no idea. I’m actually getting a little queasy thinking about it.

Then there’s the “Liquid Seasoning,” which looks every bit as foul as it sounds. It’s blacker than squid ink. I think it’s (please God let it be) soy sauce — especially since I’ve probably had about a liter and a half of water to drink since eating Nissen Chow Mein Original Style Chicken Flavor, and I’m still thirsty.

But it isn’t so bad. On a camping trip, or during a nuclear holocaust, it’ll do in a pinch. As I said to Leah, “it tastes like sodium.” I had a small nostalgic flashback to the earliest days of my adult bachelorhood, when I had Top Ramen for dinner a minimum of two nights a week. I finished it all, meaning that in the Asian Edition of GROSS-OFF, Rice-A-Roni beats the ever-loving hell out of Nissen.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go eat an apple or a bottle of vitamins or something.

Ladies and gentlemen, in the BLUE corner, hailing from POST and loaded with TEN ESSENTIAL VITAMINS & MINERALS (including IRON AND ZINC FOR GROWTH), we have MARSHMALLOW MANIA PEBBLES:

And in the BROWN corner, all the way from GENERAL MILLS and weighing in at 120 CALORIES OF WHOLE GRAIN GOODNESS PER SERVING, give a warm welcome to CHOCOLATE LUCKY CHARMS:

Yes, it’s round one of the GREAT CEREAL GROSS-OFF, wherein we objectively and scientifically test the merits of the new and exciting products offered by the breakfast cereal industry by letting them duke it out side-by-side and bowl-by-bowl!

I have to say that going in, I fully expected Chocolate Lucky Charms to be the grosser of the two. I mean, both of them definitely looked like something you wouldn’t want your children or loved ones eating, but I could at least sort of understand the motivation behind adding marshmallows to Pebbles. And they aren’t Marshmallow Fruity Pebbles—that would be too much. Post knows its limits. Yeah, the “Mania” part of the name smacks of hyperbole, but that’s probably the Great Gazoo’s fault—anyone who can shoot word balloons out of his fingers is probably given to wild overexaggeration. Chocolate Lucky Charms, on the other hand? I have to think that drugs were involved in the boardroom meeting that produced this idea. It’s like, I don’t know, Marshmallow Cocoa Puffs—General Mills might as well come to your house with a shotgun loaded with sugar pellets, stick it in your mouth, and pull the trigger.

My expectations were reinforced after pouring a bowl of each cereal and sitting them next to one another:

Marshmallow Mania Pebbles look like marginally healthy cereal with marshmallows added for a little extra pep. Like the kind of cereal you could maybe con your mom into buying if you nagged her enough. You know, old-school fake healthy cereal—like original Lucky Charms. Chocolate Lucky Charms, by comparison, look creepy. That is not the color of chocolate.

Close-ups:

Upon closer inspection, we see that Marshmallow Mania Pebbles actually do have something called “marshmallow-flavored sprinkles” (what the hell?) baked on:

Post tells us that this is so we get “double the marshmallow fun”:

In my opinion, however, it’s just overkill. It reminds me of those really gross-looking McGriddle sandwiches at McDonald’s—the ones that boast “the great taste of syrup baked in” or whatever. I submit that these people are testing the limits of science in all the wrong directions—we should not be trying to figure out just how much marshmallow we can pack into a piece of cereal. The cereal marshmallow (or “marshmallow crouton” as I like to call it) is supposed to be an occasional burst of flavor. It isn’t supposed to be the cereal. This is why today’s kids don’t know the value of a dollar or an honest day’s work: they don’t have to earn their marshmallows.

I ate the Chocolate Lucky Charms first. Regular Lucky Charms look (and, I imagine, sort of taste) like frosted cat food and stale marshmallows. As a kid, I tended to stuff each spoonful with marshmallows to mask the taste of the cereal itself. As I dove into Chocolate Lucky Charms, I realized the genius of the concept—General Mills is taking the part of Lucky Charms that nobody likes and injecting it with chocolatey goodness. It works, too—I mean, it still looks like cat food, but tastes vaguely enough like chocolate to keep me from leaving Lucky detritus in the bowl:

(Notice the color of the milk, which turned brown less than one minute after it was poured. The speed with which the color changed scared me a little, but I feel fine now.)

VERDICT: Magically delicious!

Marshmallow Mania Pebbles, on the other hand, are simply awful. They aren’t Pebbles, first of all. If you’ve ever eaten Fruity or Cocoa Pebbles, you know that Post achieves Pebbledom by taking grain, mashing the holy bejeezus out of it, and frosting it to death. These new Pebbles are not like the others, and I don’t know how to describe them other than to say that if there are children in Hell, this is what they’re being made to eat every morning. They don’t crunch, exactly. They sort of break, then spread their foul essence around your mouth, leaving a thick coating of something that tastes like shame and requires repeated brushing to remove. The marshmallows don’t help. I couldn’t finish the bowl. Well, maybe I shouldn’t say couldn’t, because I didn’t really try that hard.

VERDICT: Grosstastic!

So there you have it: in round one of the GREAT CEREAL GROSS-OFF, Marshmallow Mania Pebbles defeats Chocolate Lucky Charms with a TKO!