Welcome back to the Great Gross-Off!
Those of you who weren’t loyal Jefitoblog readers may not remember this series — Lord knows I’ve let it lie dormant long enough — but it was a long-running (if totally transparently ripped from Steve at The Sneeze) tradition at the old site. I’ve meant to resume it since Popdose started, but just somehow never…got around to it.
(Apologies to Jason, who I railroaded into eating carbonated yogurt last fall, under the pretense that it would be used for Popdose’s inaugural Gross-Off post — although the pictures from our ordeal remain, my sense memories of the crap we ate do not.)
So, here’s the deal with the Great Gross-Off: Because I have a demented weakness for “limited edition” foodstuffs — particularly those that seem ridiculous or just plain wrong — and also have a wife who frowns on me wasting money and/or stomach lining on said foodstuffs, I have devised an elaborate scheme under which I am able to claim that I’m only buying all this junk food for “research,” or “work,” or whatever I can blurt out with a straight face. I purchase the junk food. I eat the junk food. I regret eating the junk food. I attempt to put my regret into words.
Gross-Off.
Now that we’ve established the ground rules for our little game, please allow me to introduce you to the magical little wonderbar that got this series up and running again. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Limited Edition Indiana Jones Snickers Adventure Bar!
Because really, honest to God, what tastes more like adventure than diabetes-triggering levels of high fructose corn syrup?
As soon as I saw the Limited Edition Indiana Jones Snickers Adventure Bar in the store, I knew I had to have it. Equal parts intriguing and stupid, it is the perfect Gross-Off food. You may have seen this in your local supermarket already — and chances are, you assumed it was a regular old Snickers, with Harrison Ford’s mug pasted on the wrapper. No way, Beavis — the folks at Snickers have gone all out for the fourth Indiana Jones blockbuster (opening tomorrow!). Dig it:
See? You get the “rich chocolate” and “crunchy nuts” you expect from a Snickers bar, but they’re not done — they throw in A CLIFFHANGER KICK OF EXOTIC SPICE AND A HINT OF SWEET COCONUT FLAVOR.
Those Snickers people, man. They just give and give and give.
Now, understandably, I was more than a little skeptical about the wrapper’s claims. For one thing, where I live, “exotic spice” can mean anything from tarragon to kosher salt; it’s just the kind of stupidly ambiguous gobbledygook that food conglomerates love to slap on packaging. And for another, coconut in Snickers? Eww, sign me up.
Anyway, I started off by chopping my Limited Edition Indiana Jones Snickers Adventure Bar in half, to see if I could observe any visual evidence of exotic spices and/or sweet coconut flavor. Behold:
Looks just like a regular Snickers bar, doesn’t it? Those sneaky bitches.
Here’s the thing, though: I’m not sure about “exotic spices,” but the damn thing actually does have an identifiably coco-nutty undertone. It’s subtle, but if you pay attention, you can just catch it wafting around underneath the waxy chocolate buildup, nut remnants, caramel, and sickly sweet off-white caulking. It tastes like adventure — maybe not of the swashbuckling Mayan temple variety, but you’d definitely want something like this on hand if you were planning a daring search for the remote control, or escaping from fat camp. And if the suits at Paramount know their heads from their asses, you’ll be munching on one of these — and washing it down with some Adventure Coke — when you inevitably attend a screening of Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull. Cue the John Williams score!
(Bet you were looking for an mp3 of the Indiana Jones theme song here, weren’t you? Psych! I don’t have it.)
Tags: Indiana Jones, Jeff Giles, Snickers, The Great Gross-Off
