Folks, Crappin' ain't easy.  Before we here at the Golden Crap Shack Awards for Excellence in Moronic Food Products can even force this inedible swill down our limitless gullets, we have to find it.  And, much like a highbrow art student finding just the right slum in which to buy weed, we often encounter difficulties right off the bat, because the crappiest of crappy foods is often found in neighborhoods that we normally never visit, like the chaotic near-riot that is the children's food section or the sterile condominiums that make up the convenience food aisles.  But we haven't done this for six years without learning to keep a keen eye out for the horseshit.  This year, we visited our local H.E. Butt (don't blame me, folks, I didn't come up with it) and made a selection of things no one was meant to make, let alone eat, and I ate them for you.

People have asked:  what makes a crappy product deserve the capital C?  What separates the crummy from the cruddy, the cruddy from the crusty, and the crusty from the Crappy?  This year, in order to help you, the reader, understand that there's an actual thought process involved beyond just buying things more disgusting than what I normally eat.  Whether it's absurd overpricing, horrible taste, nutritional content that would slay an alpha predator and degrade its entire environment, or simply no reason on God's Earth to exist, you will know the selection criterion for this, the 2007 Crappys.

WHYTE'S LEMON-FLAVORED CHERRIES.  It's a common misconception that the Crappys only concern themselves with the artificial, the preserved, the food products born in a chem lab and made in an industrial extruder or a military-grade flash-freezer.  This delightful little number should dispel that notion -- all-natural and refreshingly low-tech, this product from our Canadian neighbors proves that you don't have to come from the mind of a Frankensteinian mad processor to be woefully misbegotten.  How often, my friends, have you been eating a cherry, and thought, "This is a pretty good cherry.  But I wish it tasted more like a lemon!"  None?  Or, exactly as many times as you have been eating a lemon and wished it was shaped and sized more like a cherry, which would also likely be none number of times?  Apparently, this is a big issue north of the border, and the people at Whyte's have worked long and hard to make sure that we are never lacking in one type of fruit that tastes sort of like another type of fruit.
Expense:  Not significantly higher than other bottled cherries that don't taste like lemon.
Taste:  Not bad, as such things go, although they don't so much taste like lemon as they do cherries that have been sitting next to a lemon for a few hours.  In the sun.
Nutrition:  They're just cherries, so, quite good.  You could eat the whole bottle and not exceed your RDA of anything, plus, free liquor to drink at the end when you're done!  If you're a hopeless wino!
Packaging:  Nothing to worry about here; it's just a plain glass bottle, done up in the splashy, edgy, futuristic style for which Canadian fruit packers are justifiably famous.
Pointlessness:  Here's where Whyte's is the big winner.  There is no reason for lemon-flavored cherries to exist.  Or cherry-flavored lemons, for that matter, although these proved difficult to find.  Designed for the please-God tiny segment of the consumer market who wants fruit that tastes like lemons, but which is not actually lemons, this would be the most pointless item imaginable if it were not for the fact that Whyte's also makes a cherry that tastes like passionfruit.

HILLSHIRE FARM ENTREE SALADS.  Everyone who's ever made a salad knows what a gruelling process it is.  You have to chop up vegetables.  You have to somehow get the dressing onto the vegetables.  And you have to somehow force it down, even though it doesn't have any meat in it.  Well, here comes Hillshire Farm -- the sausage company who's now bringing their expertise to the thing people eat to avoid having anything to do with sausage -- to save the day!  If your salad is just too much like yucky green rabbit food, Hillshire Farm introduces an oversized plastic box containing no vegetables whatsoever that you can craft into something that's like a salad, but with tons of meat, cheese and bread.  Just buy your own lettuce, of a lesser quantity than all the processed crap in this plastic box, and buddy, you've got something that technically could be called a salad!
Expense:  Close to three bucks.  Add the lettuce, which you have to supply yourself, and you might as well just go to a restaurant.
Taste:  The dressing is bland, the croutons reek, the cheese has never seen the inside of a cow,  and the tiny cubes of chicken came from some sort of outer space nutrient farm where the chickens do quadratic equations and then cheerfully strangle themselves.
Nutrition:  Crammed with quality incredients like disodium guanylate, natamycin inhibitor, and de-fatted soy flout, this contains 35 grams of saturated fat and 68% of your RDA of sodium, putting your mind at rest that just because you're eating a salad, you might end up doing something healthy.
Packaging:  A big 11-ounce plastic box that you'll only use once and throw away, with instructions on how to wash it first so as to get all the chloroflourotoxins off, this one's the grand champ of wasteful packaging in this year's Crappys.
Pointlessness:  I'm guessing that since you can go to any fast food restaurant or grocery store and buy a prepackaged salad (complete with lettuce!) of the same quality for less money, this thing only exists as a future tax write-off for the Sara Lee Corporation.

SPAM SINGLES.  The most appropriately-named foodstuff of the bunch, this is custom-made for people who want the maximum distance between them and whatever their meat came from.  Following in the I-can't-cook-and-I-won't-cook footsteps of Star-Kist's sealed-in-foil former chicken parts, this is designed for angry lifetime singles like myself who are simply too lazy to open an entire can of Spam, slice off one portion, and preserve the rest for future desperately lonely consumption.  (Incidentally, regular cans of Spam now feature a "70th Anniversary" package, showcasing a 1957 Chevy and a man in a disco suit, neither of which would have existed in 1936 when the product was introduced, but Spam may be aiming at a level of irony undetectable to me.)
Expense:  Rated against the cost of a whole can of Spam, absurdly overpriced.
Taste:  Well, it's Spam.  Take that for what it's worth.  I happen to think that Spam is quite...well, I mean, it's not good.  But it's no worse than...okay, it's not good.
Nutrition:  The further removed meat gets from the bloody carcass of an animal, the more they have to cram it full of preservatives in order to keep it from turning into a pallid, gray slab of poison.  You got your fresh, you got your refrigerated, you got your frozen, you got your canned, and now your got your hermetically sealed in a foil pouch and incanted over by Hormel wizards.  Amazingly, this is less healhful than regular Span, thanks to the higher sodium content which allows it to kill you in the long term rather than immediately.
Packaging:  Not immediately repulsive until you consider the packaging-to-content ratio.
Pointlessness:  Vitally necessary to all of us who are pathetic enough to eat Spam, but not quite pathetic enough to eat an entire can of Spam at a sitting.

COCO LOTO.  Coconut beverages have a glorious history in the Golden Crap Shack Awards:  Vita-Coco, a coconut-water-based 'energy drink' capable of stinking up an entire apartment for weeks, was our 2005 winner when we focused on natural products.  This little number is very popular in Thailand, much like kickboxing and child prostitution, and what caught my eye was the fact that it looks horribly gross:  it's a syrupy, gelatinous affair, resembling a glass full of sputum, with huge chunks of coconut floating around inside.  But what kind of coconut, is the burning question?  The label on the front claims that it is "roasted coconut juice" (how, exactly, does one roast juice?), but the label on the back says that it is "grilled coconut juice"!  What exactly are you trying to pull on the American consumer, Exotic Food Company Ltd. of Chonburi, Thailand?
Expense:  I don't know how much grilled juice should cost.  I have lived my entire life without this knowledge.
Taste:  The taste is okay, I guess, if you like coconut, which I don't.  The smell is far less noxious than Vita-Coco, but it makes up for it with a loathesome texture which resembles something that comes up out of your throat much more than something that goes down it.  Also, and I say this as someone who really likes bubble tea, the presence of hunks of coconut pulp makes it seem like yo're drinking coconut-flavored spit with wood chips in it.
Nutrition:  Surprisingly high in fat, but it's better than the Spam.
Packaging:  This thing has a pull-tab!  It's like 1975 all over again.
Pointlessness:  Coco Loto fills a much-needed consumer void for the professional Gilligan's Island recreationist demographic.

GATORADE A.M.  A lot of what wins you a Crappy is "concept".  Or, to put it another way, "marketing".  Or, to put it even another other way, "lying".  Gatorade, who has already sold the entire nation on the concept that nothing rejuvenates a body damaged by jogging, playing video games, or walking from your couch to the refrigerator like a 32-ounce bottle of sugar water, has now had the sheer alloyed balls to come up with the idea of a morning beverage which has exactly the same ingredients as its regular product, but in exciting "breakast flavors".  Sadly, this means not "Belgian waffle" or "eggs and sausage", but rather strawberry/banana and orange/mango.  Best of all, according to the label, which is so heaped with bullshit qualifiers that it comes within a hair of actually being ashamed of itself, it claims that it's designed to help you get back all the vital nutrients and minerals that you lose in your sleep.  The pretense that Gatorade is meant for athletes rather than lazy American slobs who are bored with soda has never been particularly believable, but the claim that it will help you recover from a grueling eight hours of being unconscious is a bit too much even for a 'rade-rager like me.
Expense:  A bargain at exactly the same price as regular Gatorade.
Taste:  I think regular Gatorade is delicious.  Which, by a happy coincidence, this is.  Greatly improved by the presence of a shot or three of vodka, of course.
Nutrition:  Gatorade is super-nutritious, what with all the electrolytes and minerals and vitamins and outer-space astronaut whatnots.  Also sugar.  Lots and lots of sugar.
Packaging:  All you need to know about the packaging is that it as the "A.M" right there on the front, so they have a brand new way to sell all the flavors they couldn't unload before.
Pointlessness:  Has anyone seen Idiocracy?

WISHBONE SALAD SPRITZERS.  Describing one of the many hapless screwheads that inhabit his plays, David Mamet has one character say of another "he could fuck up a baked potato".  This year's Crappys are proof that given a big enough marketing and development budget, there are plenty of companies that can fuck up a green salad, which doesn't even require baking.  Aimed squarely at the fatty market, this is a tiny seven-ounce container of "balsamic breeze" salad dressing with a spray pump at the top.  In addition to allowing Wishbone to eliminate all the spices, vegetables and extraneous crap that might require extra expense, it allows them to advertise this as "dressing more salads than a 16 oz. bottle!".  Which is technically true if you follow their advice and use 10 sprays for a regular serving-size salad.  However, since this product is mostly water, this imbues your salad with about as much flavor as you would get from just washing the lettuce.  The colored label preserves the cunning illusion that the bottle actually contains something, and also disguises the fact that the container is almost certainly the byproduct of a failed Unilever hair care or dental product.
Expense:  Half the size, all the price!  What a bargain.
Taste:  Delightfully nonintrusive.  Have you ever had a big glass of water with a couple of micromilliliters of oil, vinegar and garlic juice mixed in it?  Me neither, but that's the model Wishbone used.  Happily, the spray cap is removable, allowing you to pour the dressing directly on your salad, since it is physically impossible for your taste buds to register anything that comes out of the pump.
Nutrition:  The label deceptively makes it seem that it's not so bad, but when you realize that one serving (10 sprays) of this stuff isn't enough to flavor a single baby carrot, it's basically the same as any other mass-market salad dressing.
Packaging:  Enough to fool you into thinking that it's a portable mouthwash spray.  Which, come to think of it, is probably a better use for it than dressing salad.
Pointlessness:  As long as there is a need for fat people to convince themselves that they are actually doing somethig healthful, there will be a need for products like this.

JIMMY DEAN BREAKFAST BOWLS.  We get some of the best tips for featured products here at the Ludic Syndicate Golden Crap Shack HQ from fans of the site.  On a recent trip to Austin, a tipster told us that while we were shopping for Crappy nominees, to check out Jimmy Dean's frozen offerings, and brothers, she wasn't lying.  Frozen breakfast entrees are always a perennial contender, because they contain not only horse-choking nutritional ingredients, but also contain many an ingredient that was never meant to be frozen.  For our sample, we choked down the sausage bowl; speaking of being able to fuck up a baked potato, this thing included greasy, hapless country-style taters, massive quantities of failed cheese and prison-grade pizza sausage, and best fo all, a base of reconstituted frozen eggs that puts one in mind less of a hearty breakfast than it does the roofing materials of the men who are eating it.  Appaling on every level.  Is this is what the rebel without a cause has come to?
Expense:  About the same as going to a diner and ordering the same ingredients that haven't been sitting in a frozen railroad car for nineteen days.
Taste:  There is no reason, ever, to freeze eggs.  Eggs freeze badly, and when you try and eat them after you have unfrozen them, you deserve whatever you get.  I firmly believe that.  And yet, eating this thing, taking many years off of my life for the sake of your getting a mild chuckle, I found myself wondering what anyone could possibly do to deserve having to eat this.  I have done many, many bad things in my life, but I don't think that they justified this sort of punishment.
Nutrition:  Get a load, baby:  34g saturated fat, 500 calories, 50% RDA of sodium, clarified butter (why clarified butter?  why?), potatoes that contain seven ingredients other than potatoes (including disodium dihydrogen pyrophosphate), and best of all, 125% of the maximum daily value of cholesterol.  When eating just one of something constitutes eating too much, you know you've got one quality piece of crap on your hands.
Packaging:  Even a product as noxious as this can't suck in every way, and this is pretty innocuous as far as packaging goes.  Don't get me wrong, it's awful -- a too-big plastic bowl topped with film -- but it's no worse than any other frozen entree on the market.
Pointlessness:  Perhaps you need this product because you are a very, very lazy person who lives in a town so small that it does not have a diner that serves breakfast, but large enough that it has a supermarket that stocks these Breakfast Bowls.  Otherwise, it has no more reason to exist than a four-headed cat.

VARIOUS ENERGY DRINKS.  I have never quite understood the appeal of energy drinks.  Essentially double-sized cans of foul-tasting cola, they are overpriced, awful-tasting, and with no particular reason to exist other than to cater to a clubgoing demographic who don't seem to understand that the whole reason for clubgoing is to get really drunk, not to stay up late.  Still, they have vast consumer appeal, so who am I to ignore them?  All the qualities that make them so loathesome -- their high price, horrible taste, ridiculous ingredients, bogus radical extremeness, and failure to justify their existence -- makes them a perfect candidate for the Crappys.  For this year's competition, I picked three brands:  Coolah Energy (an allegedly lemon-flavored lemon concoction whose selling point rests on Australia's reputation as world headquarters for lunkheaded sporting dudes), Rockstar Juiced (one of the leading brands, and 70% juice, making it even more pointless as it's basically nothing but a big can of off-brand orange juice with a couple of caffeine pills ground up in it), and my favorite, Monster Assault.  I had the displeasure of drinking four cups of Monster Energy drink at a party a week ago, and its flavor was so unpalatable that not even the addition of huge amounts of vodka could help; but the Assault sub-brand takes it one step further by adding a pointless camoflage pattern to the can, as well as a gutless disclaimer lest you think its some sort of Com-symp hippie anti-war energy drink.
Expense:  Sure, it costs five times as much as a soda, but it's almost twice as big, and is twenty times more likely to give you a fatal heart attack!  So really, it's a great deal.
Taste:  The Rockstar Juiced was the best, because, again, nothing really more repugnany than the kind of canned "juice" you might get at a gas station if you were really desperate to convince yourself that you were eating well.  The Coolah was decent, tasting not unlike a slightly sour lemon cola into which someone had dunked a couple of Claritin-Ds.  The Monster Energy Drink was like Red Bull that had been run through a diesel engine a couple of times.
Nutrition:  Contains 200% of your RDA of Vitamin B6!  Why, you'd be crazy not to drink it!  By the way, keep in mind I drank three of these in one day, which is the most you're even allowed to have according to the label.  It's okay, though!  I like not sleeping and peeing every five minutes!  For COMEDY!
Packaging:  It's just a big can.  Although a big can that is festooned with extremity.  The Monster drink is decked out in black and gray camoflage, allowing it to blend in so well with the shelving that I almost forgot to buy it.
Pointlessness:  For goodness' sakes, haven't you club kids ever hard of cocaine?

VARIOUS MEXICAN CANDIES.  In hopes of giving this year's awards a bit of a San Antonio flavor, I decided to sample a few Mexican candies.  If you are only familiar with American candies, you are locked into a very limiting conception of what "candy" means, a white imperialist philosophical weakness that, if this year's Crappys do nothing else, I hope will break you of.  In your straight-edge, button-down world, I bet you thin that candy has to be (a) sweet and (b) tasty.  Well, welcome to Mexico, my friends, where candy only needs to be two things:  (a) so hot and spicy that it makes your chest sweat; and (b) so incredibly, disgustingly salty that you literally want to vomit for a full day afterwards.   The best of these were Fresiux, a dried strawberry dunked in  chili powder, in that they only ruined the sweetness in one way instead of two.  Next up was Tiliko, which, despite sounding like an H.P. Lovecraft monster, is actually a sort of horribly salty, nauseatingly spicy fruit rollup flavored (at least if the label is any indication) like watermelon and bicycle pump.  Last came "Chinese candy", a Satanic concoction of dried salted pickled plums soaked in lemon juice.  There's a deformed canary on the package, driving his car to physical therapy where he will begin an agonizing lifetime of recovery from having eaten a couple of these things, and he is saying "Will make your mouth water!" as if this is an enticing promise instead of a dire warning.  The fact that this lethally salty, foul-tasting monstrosity is called "Chinese" is evidence that not even the Mexicans are willing to take the blame for it.
Expense:  I can say a lot of bad things about thes stuff (see below), but they sure aren't overpriced.  They weigh in at about half a buck each, which is slightly more than just buying a salt lick, but muc more portable.
Taste:  It takes a lot to screw up dried fruit, but the Mexican candy industry has managed to do it many, many times over.  Each of these products virtually defines the phrase "lingering, unpleasant aftertaste", and the Chinese Candy has the distinction of being perhaps the worst single thing I have ever eaten in six years of deliberately ingesting horrible foods.   No one was ever meant to eat these, and if the Chinese are truly responsible for them, it should be counted as a war crime.
Nutrition:  Terrifyingly, none of these candies feature any nutritional information, but judging from the fact that I shivelled up after eating them like I had been attacked by the salt vampires from Star Trek, I would guess it's pretty bad.  Also, the fact that the Chinese Candy doesn't know if it contains plums or apricots cannot be a good sign.
Packaging:  Not wasteful, but pretty depressingly bad.  Looks like it was designed by the same guy who puts them in cardboard boxes.
Pointlessness:  I've just spent the whole day eating the absolute worst things I could find to eat, and you want me to come up with something insightful to say about their market value?  My head hurts, I need a bath, my blood pressure is 680 of 430, and I have about 1200mg of guarana in my system and I don't even know what guarana is.

AND THE WINNER IS:  They weren't the strangest item in the batch, or the most exotic, or the most miconceived, or even the grossest, but after eating the sausage Jimmy Dean Breakfast Bowl, I found myself not only wishing that I had never eaten it, but that its production could be forcibly suspended by an act of Congress and that its manufacture, sale and consumption could be made a felony under U.S. law.  I therefore declare it the winner of this year's Golden Crap Shack Award, and the thing I most regret eating other than the Chinese Candy, which I'm not entirely sure was even real.  Thanks, everyone!  See you at Bowel-Blockage Hall next year!

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