LUDIC LOG

What better way, dear readers, to close out the Ludic Log's second anniversary week than by celebrating the 2004 Crappys? Longtime readers of the site will know that once a year, we review the worst and most accursed of grocery items available for purchase in these great United States and award the best of them the coveted Golden Crap Shack Award for Moronic Food Product of the Year. But this time around, we got to thinking: why only American food? Isn't that a pretty chauvinistic attitude? Surely other countries are capable of producing food just as unhealthful, pointless, bizarre and foul-tasting as we can make here in the States.

So this year, I set out for Bobak's Polish Supermarket -- accompanied by my able and eager taste-testers, the delightful Claire Zulkey and the devilish Steve Delahoyde -- to see what 'tarded taste treats Eastern Europe has to offer. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you, the first to ever feature photos...the first to ever feature a panel of judges...the first to ever feature food from the darkest reaches of Poland...the 2004 Crappys.

POLSKI SMAK BRAND "NEPTUN" FISH SALAD. The first item on our menu of terrifying Euro-snacks was this seven-ounce tin of bright red bream. At first, it had a number of things going against it: it wasn't nutritonally lethal (a mere 90 calories per serving, 11% RDA sodium, and an Atkins-friendly two grams of carbs); it had an attractive nautical-green label featuring mighty Neptune trolling for seafood; and it was small. Upon tasting, though, its qualifications for the Crappys became eminently clear. Featuring an unappetizing ingredient mix of pulverized bream and pulverized vegetables, suspiciously ancient-looking, and displaying the unfortunate tendency to take on the shape of the can, merely opening the fish salad conjured unsettling thoughts of the logistics involved in transporting it from the central part of Europe to the central part of America. After the container was unsealed, no one seemed to be willing to actually eat any of it, and attempts were made to place individual molecules of fish salad on the tines of a fork.

CLAIRE: It looks like tuna salad, but bloody.

STEVE: It tastes like what I would imagine seafood cat food tastes like.

LEONARD: Aftertaste?

STEVE: Oh yeah. It's not bad...it just tastes like I've been eating nothing but fish for a week.

CLAIRE: It's not, like, throw-up bad...

LEONARD: But it's not good.

CLAIRE: No. It's not good.

LEONARD: I think this one is gonna have to go down as not a success.

CLAIRE: I guess bream is more like the pigeon of the sea.

LEONARD: I don't think those leftovers are going to be eaten.

After tasting and not enjoying miniscule amounts of the fish salad, it became all the more dismaying that the suggesting serving size was a quarter-can. Estimates as to how long it would take to consume an entire can ranged from "until tomorrow afternoon" to "a week".

Final Rankings:
CZ:  2.5
SD:  2.5
LP:  2.0

SMAK BRAND CARROT BALLS. Another relatively nutritionally benign but nonetheless unpleasant product of Smak, although this is apparently a different Smak than the Smak who made the "Neptun" fish salad. I will leave it up to my readers to make the obligatory "I didn't even know carrots had balls" joke and inform you that carrot balls are in fact carved spheroids of raw carrot in a vinegar bath. They proved to be very, very, very, very vinegary. The nutritional informational label on the back was so faded with age that we estimated they had been manufactured sometime previous to the Second World War. These insanely tart carrotoids win the "It Was Claire's Idea" award for 2004.

STEVE: Do we have to eat a whole one?

CLAIRE: It's just a carrot!

LEONARD: It's a carrot ball. I think that's an important distinction.

STEVE: It's just that I'm a big texture person.

CLAIRE: That's why you have so many velveteen suits.

LEONARD: See, I hate this much more than you guys did. This is terrible. I don't like you, carrot balls.

In the final analysis, I was severely traumatized by the hyperintense vinegaracity of the carrot balls, but despite a number of very trepidatious looks from Steve, these were generally thought to be less relentlessly awful than they could have been.

Final Rankings:
CZ:  3.0
SD:  3.0 (-1.5 for appearance)
LP:  1.5

CHERSI BRAND BREAD KVASS SODA. Despite its label's claim that it was made in all-American Brooklyn, NY, this 2-liter bottle of soda clearly originated in some heathen clime where people's idea of a good time is drinking carbonated beverages that taste like yeast. The label features a brace of wheat, and sure enough, it smells, tastes and even looks like Diet Pepsi that has been put in a blender with one part Marmite and three parts really old, stale whole wheat bread. My abilities as a writer are altogether insufficient to describe how awful this stuff tasted. Even being served in my finest Robin, the Boy Wonder glassware could not defuse its heinousness.

LEONARD: Oh, boy. This does not smell promising. Eek.

STEVE: Well, you look happy. You look ecstatic.

CLAIRE: Leonard has a jolly demeanor.

STEVE: It has a sort of molasses smell. My dad used to have a bread machine and it smells like that.

CLAIRE: I don't think it's that bad.

STEVE: What is going on in Poland? What is with the Poles and yeast? It has a weird candy feel.

LEONARD: God, that smell. It's so awful. I can't even see how you could drink it.

CLAIRE: It has a certain appeal to it.

STEVE: No.

LEONARD: You can have the rest of it. It's all yours.

CLAIRE: No.

Claire's inexplicable failure to loathe the wheat soda skewed its numbers, but I maintaint that this is one of the worst products ever marketed for the purposes of human consumption. I have three-quarters of a bottle of this stuff left and I am afraid that if I pour it down the drain my kitchen will smell like a spoiled Vegemite sandwich for months afterwards.

Final Rankings:
CZ:  4.0
SD:  2.0 
LP:  1.0

CHIO BRAND ERDNUSS FLIPS, "CLASSIC PEANUT" FLAVOR. The package for this German snack product seems to promise peanut butter Chee-tos, and in fact, it delivers on this promise in spades. Chio makes a number of snack chips, from the confusing "Texas Barbecue" paprika crisp to the faux-exotic "Indian Spice" potato chip (which we sampled to mixed results). But this strangely addictive, conceptually misbegotten peanut-flavored corn puff was by far the oddest and most compelling. For some reason, the Flips package was devoid of nutritional information, though the prominent mention of monosodium glutamate in the ingredients list no doubt accounts for the compulsion to eat them by the handful.

STEVE: You're trying them first, so that if you die, we'll know.

CLAIRE: It's got somethin'. I bet these would taste really good if you were stoned. I like peanuts and I got Chee-tos, so I got no complaints.

STEVE: I'd rather just eat a peanut. I don't see the appeal of them.

LEONARD: They're not bad. You know what they remind me of? Peanut butter cereals. These are sticky on the outside, like Peanut Butter Crunch cereal.

CLAIRE: I'm giving these a five. Everything we try just gets better and better.

LEONARD: I'm giving them a five too, but I don't agree that everything is getting better, because that Bread Kvass is the worst thing I've ever tasted. That was the pits.

CLAIRE: I like these.

STEVE: You have to give them more than a five. You just keep eating them.

CLAIRE: I like these more than I like you.

STEVE: So I get...

CLAIRE: You get a three.

LEONARD: So you'd rather be dating the bread soda.

It was generally agreed that these would be a good thing to sit in front of the TV shoveling into your maw. It's not that they set the world on fire, as snack products went, but they definitely encouraged you to eat more and more of them. Claire, who was transported into a state of bliss by the Flips, had the rather brilliant idea of dipping them in jelly.

Final Rankings:
CZ:  6.0
SD:  3.0 
LP:  5.0

MILKY WAY. Upon first inspection, this appeared to be a Nutella-style breakfast spread made to resemble a Milky Way candy bar. On a closer look, though, it is made in Poland, has no connection whatsoever to M&M/Mars, and is surely headed for a lawsuit. There is no nutritional information on the label, and I don't speak Polish, so I will simply assume this attractively-blended frosting (which the label seems to suggest you should spread on rye toast) has about two and a half pounds of raw sugar in it. The mascot, which unfortunately is drawn too small for my camera to capture, is a cartoon alien with a rather sour and angry expression on his face; perhaps he is enraged at having been unwillingly made party to a massive case of trademark infringement.

CLAIRE: I bet I'm gonna really like this. I bet it's gonna be good.

STEVE: Nope. It's going to taste like eels.

CLAIRE: It tastes like the inside of an Oreo.

LEONARD: Does it taste anything like Milky Way?

CLAIRE: Nope. But if that's what the Milky Way tastes like, then sign me up for space camp! Zing!

STEVE: Ugh. You're fired. You're no longer a writer for us.

Being naught but whipped chocolate and vanilla frosting, this was very popular with the judges until we caught sight of the English-language ingredients list on the top of the lid. I reproduce it here in full, although no one will believe me.

"Hardened vegetable fat (rape seed oil), sugar, lactose, skimmed powdered milk, powdered cocoa, soya lecithin, artificial aroma. May contain tracy amounts of monkey nuts."

Final Rankings:
CZ:  8.0
SD:  7.0 
LP:  6.5 (docked for monkey nuts)

And the winner of the 2004 Crappy Internationals is...CHERSI BRAND BREAD KVASS SODA! Packed with sugar, foul-smelling, completely misbegotten (it's a bread-flavored soda!), and bad-tasting beyond belief, it's the kind of thing that could only be made in Eastern Europe. Or Brooklyn.