LUDIC LOG

When you've been on staff with the Ludic Syndicate Moronic Food Product of the Year Awards Committee for a while, you learn to detect little things. Not just like that even though Diet Pepsi Twist has stupider commercials than Diet Coke with Lemon, you shouldn't drink the latter because it tastes like liquid chemical ass; but that even though the label of Safeway Select Diet Cola with Lemon looks like the label for Diet Coke with Lemon, it actually tastes like Diet Pepsi Twist. However, the most important thing you learn is: never try and second-guess the food industry. They'll surprise you every time.

Yes, it's time once again for the Crappy Awards, the glamorous awards ceremony that grants the beautiful Golden Crap Shack to the most overpriced, unhealthful, pointless, foul, wasteful, unnecessary and all-around stupid consumer food item of the year. Enough of the introductions -- let's go right to this year's five candidates!

1. Frito-Lay Go-Snacks Funyuns Rings.

Snack chips have long been one of the strongest contenders at the Crappys, and Frito-Lay has long been the heaviest hitter in the snack chip world. With nine Golden Crap Shacks to their credit, it sometimes seemed that, like Alexander the Great, they had no worlds left to conquer. They haven't fielded a serious candidate since 1999's daring Color-Change Chee-tos. However, this year, they show why they're the Jack Nicholson of moronic food products with this exciting entry, based on the absurd notion that snack chips -- already the crown prince of eat-'n'-toss consumerism -- aren't convenient enough. The recipe? Take less than two ounces of snack chips. Give them a pointlessly "fun" new shape. Put them in a huge, wasteful plastic container, and sell it based on the flimsiest possible pretext -- that now people can put their greasy salty chips in a vehicle cup holder. And of course, for the crowning touch, charge a ludicrous amount of money for them. There are a number of available types of "Go-Snacks"; we chose Funyuns because even in a plain, unglamorous plastic bag, Funyuns taste horrible.

2. Herb-Ox Instant Broth & Seasoning Spicy Chicken Bouillon.

One of the biggest misconceptions about the Crappys is that they only focus on junk products -- flashy foods, kids' foods, gimmick foods, fast foods, convenience foods. As this little number (discovered by one of our judges while searching for a low-sodium chicken broth) proves, that's just not true. Purporting to be a healthful food, it's in fact stuffed to the gills with garbage; purporting to be a old-fashioned mom-and-pop off-brand, it's in fact manufactured by monolithic megacorporate food combine Hormel; purporting -- right on the label, mind you -- to feature "real herbs - real flavor", its ingredient list (featuring such country-cupboard standards as dextrose, potassium chloride, maltodextrin, monoammonium glitamate, propylene glycol, TBHQ, disodium inosinate, and disodium guanylate) reads like a chemistry textbook. To top it all off, the Spicy Chicken flavor tastes awful, which is quite a feat. It takes a dedicated food chemist to screw up something as simple as soup broth, but somehow the good folks at Herb-Ox pull it off.

3. Kraft It's Pasta Anytime Rotini with Mild Cheddar Cheese Sauce Microwavable Pasta & Sauce Meal for One.

Convenience is a favorite theme of the voters. Given its dominance over the last 20 years, it's obvious that a sure way to ingratiate yourself with the Awards Committee is to introduce a particularly loathesome new convenience product. What is it that makes convenience such a popular theme? A number of things. A good convenience food will have lots of wasteful packaging; it will, by virtue of its contents, use enough preservatives to make it about as healthful as mainlining Clorox; it will be ridiculously overpriced; and, most importantly, it will be only marginally less convenient than just making the product in question yourself. It's Pasta Anytime meets those criteria in spades. It's less than 12 ounces of pasta in a huge, shelf-hogging plastic box. It takes three minutes to prepare in the microwave and seems targeted for people who find pasta simply too difficult to fix -- in other words, for people who can't boil water. It costs $3.29, for what is essentially a box of macaroni and cheese -- something you can buy for fifty cents in a box or two dollars fresh. And, astonishingly, it has a stupefying 1,860 milligrams of sodium, or fully 78% of the percent daily value. Of course, simply eating a tablespoon full of salt would be more convenient still, but that wouldn't make any money for the Kraft corporation, now would it?

4. Oscar Mayer Lunchables Brand Lunch Combinations: Soft Pizza Stix Mega Pack.

Combo-packs, by virtue of being overpriced, bad-tasting and of questionable quality, have been a big contender at the Crappys for many years. Who can forget 1995, when the Dunkin Donuts Kids Meal (a sugary soda, two donuts, and two packages of M&Ms) swept the awards? The good folks at Oscar Mayer know this, and their Lunchables line has been a near-constant contender since they were first introduced. But they never were able to get the exact product combination that would win them the big nomination -- until now. Preparing fat kids to become fat adults, the Mega Pack line boasts "40% More Food": menacing enough to start with (this is over a goddamn pound of processed crap), and even more so when you taste what's inside. A package of CapriSun "Splash Cooler" and a Twix bar, for the sugar junkie in ever child whets your appetite, which is then completely crushed by the main course. This is a couple of slabs of industrial flour byproduct mockingly termed "breadsticks", which you are meant to dunk in a plastic vat of "pizza sauce" and a packet of loose mozzarelloid cheese product and eat cold. 62% DV sodium, 16 grams of saturated fat, and the obligatory ridiculous product tie-in completes this absolutely appaling foodstuff.

5. Ore-Ida Funky Fries Cinna-Stiks Crispy Seasoned Potatoes.

What "convenience" is to crappy adult foods, "fun" is to crappy children's foods. Apparently in the belief that children would rather starve to death than eat foods that are not oddly shaped, amusingly colored or capable of making unsettling noises, food manufacturers have given the Crappy voters a lot to chew on lately with a virtual plethora of pointlessly bogus "fun" products, of which Funky Fries are the year's best. Originally considered a longshot because they are neither horribly unhealthful nor unusually awful-tasting, they won voters over by being inexplicably pricey and completely pointless. They further made their case with a range of flavor options, from the pointless (Kool Blue, fries colored a disturbing neon blue) to the misbegotten (Cocoa Crispers, conceived in the ill-considered belief that chocolate and potatoes go together). And as if the dopey Jimmy Neutron tie-in wasn't enough, it's actually co-branded with Heinz EZ Squirt Ketchup, whose pointless purple 'flavor' was a 1998 Crappy winner. So misguided is the combination of potatoes, sugar and cinnamon that we selected the Cinna-Stiks flavor as our champion of this excellent product line.

AND THE WINNER OF THIS YEAR'S CRAPPY IS: Oscar Mayer Lunchables! Overpriced, horribly unhealthful, and guaranteed to put kids on the road to diabetes and sloth, they are truly the creme de la crap!