I
will update more often than monthly from here on. That's a
promise. Maybe. Sort of. Don't quote me.
ADVENTURES IN REFERRAL:
a daily assortment of random
search engine queries leading people to the Ludic Log in the past 24
hours
"funny Mona Lisa fuck you looking"
"soda good or bad"
"to this man will I look"
"if we keep going hard we gonna take this money"
"ass munch"
"commie smasher"
"Myanmar feed fuck"
"blasphemy porn"
"what's wrong with Ayn Rand?"
"BRUCE LEE VS. THE DEMON"
LUDIC LOG
04.03.2005
Well, hello there, the two of my six readers who still check on whether
or not this site ever gets updated! The answer is: yes, it
does, around every daylight savings change or so. And do we have
a special treat for you today: it's the 2005 Crappys!
The Crappys (or, to give them the glory of their full name, the Ludic
Syndicate's Golden Crap Shack Award for Moronic Food Product of the
Year) are an annualtradition around these parts, where I gather
all that is malformed, ill-conceived, foul-tasting, poorly thought out
and utterly misguided in the world of consumer comestibles. I
then select a few, choke them down with heart-damaging force of will,
and tell you, the reader, which one is worthy of the title of Worst
Thing I Have Eaten All Year.
In 2004, a new wrinkle in the process developed: for the first
time, I enlisted the aid of assistants, and used the miracle of
photography to illustrate the fact that, in many cases, this food
looked almost as bad as it tasted. This year was no
exception. Although (at the cost of great scorn from my
loudmouthed assistant) I forgot to take any pictures of the actual
process of consumption, I did get snaps of the food and of the people
who, sometimes reluctantly and sometimes far too enthusiastically,
helped me consume it. In addition, this year had a theme:
while 2004 featured the cruddiest foodstuffs Eastern Europe had to
offer, as purchased at Chicago's own Bobak's Grocery, 2005 would
feature hippie food: organic, natural, cruelty-free, no
additives, no preservatives, but still a lot of shitty taste.
Finally, we took the show on the road for the first time, as St. Paul,
MN hosted the Crappys and their local Whole Foods Market supplied the
test prodcut.
I was
ably aided by my game-for-anything girlfriend Shauna McKenna, who was
more than enthusiastic to aid me in this frightful and misguided
endeavor, and her daughter Annie, who being less than two years old,
may not have fully appreciated the theory behind these taste tests, but
had one thing going for her: she would eat pretty much anything.
The
foods were lined up on our official test surface, a plastic Clifford
The Big Red Dog table, and placed next to a talking Tickle Me Elmo doll
for size comparison. This had the further salutory benefit of
preventing the grating, ceaseless doll from talking during the duration
of the photograph session. We then proceeded to strap our young
taster to a chair (we weren't so lucky) and began the tasting.
First
off was Turtle Island's "Traditional Smokehouse Tofurky Jurky".
This horrible miscalculation is 100% vegan, 100% preservative-free and
100% inedible. Sliced into vague round shapes that are supposed
to approximate pepperoni but really look like spoiled liver, these
"jurky" clumps feature label art of a man on a bike gazing purposefully
at a far-off mountain in the naive belief that eating this awful crap
will get him any farther than the nearest stomach pump. The claim
that these are "traditional smokehouse style" is bad enough (I,
personally, have never seen a traditional smokehouse that contains
vital wheat gluten, tofu, or garbanzo beans), but those lying bastards
at Turtle Island have the nerve to actually claim, right there on the
front of the package, that their product is "delicious". Which,
there was a consensus among all taste-testers not in the habit of
eating things they find stuch to the bottom of their shoes, it is
not. Oddly enough, I happen to know from my days in the natural
foods racket that this is not the worst-tasting vegetarian jerky in existence; hard as it may be to
understand, there is at least one brand that is worse. But it was
the worst-tasting vegetarian jerky available,
and that's enough.
Next up
was BioChem's "Ultimate LoCarb Bar, Cool Cappuccino Flavor".
Hippie food stores sell tons of these snack bars, based on the curious
belief that it's better to have 1000 calories crammed into a tasteless,
raspy mini-log sprinklied with chromium chloride and D-calcium
pantothenate than it is to just eat a cheeseburger. Anyway, aside
from the handicap of being manufactured by a company that sounds more
like it should be making weapons of mass destruction than things you're
meant to eat voluntarily, this didn't start out so bad. Of
course, it didn't taste anything like cappuccino; like every other
nutrition bar on the market, it bore the stink of failure that is
carob, a.k.a. chocolate's alcoholic younger brother who can't hold down
a job. However, it wasn't notably worse than any other such
specimen I've tried -- until the aftertaste kicked in. Then I got
the full, chalky, proteins-gone-sour rush I've come to expect from
condensed chemical tubes. Annie was not able to eat this due to
possible nut-allergy conflicts (I wish I'd thought of that as an excuse
not to eat it myself), but Shauna was, and she didn't hate it quite as much as I did: "If I
was guaranteed to look like a supermodel forever by eating these," she
admitted, "I could probably do it." That's just the sort of
imperceptibly faint praise that made me fall in love with her.
Desperate
for something with which to wash down these last two culinary mistakes,
we next popped open "VitaCoco Coconut Water Natural Rehydrant
Drink". From the dynamic copy on the box, you might think this is
some kind of super-high-tech energy-boosting hydrating drink -- sort of
a Third World version of Gatorade -- but really, it's just plain old
coconut water. Not coconut milk,
mind you, which is what we thought it was at first -- but coconut water. What's the difference,
you ask? The difference became clear the second we opened the
container: coconut milk
doesn't smell unspeakably foul, and coconut water does.
The box copy promises a "taste of Brazil", but the smell is that of an
illegal medical waste dump in rural Uruguay. The taste was
actually not egregiously offensive -- it's just coconut water -- but
the smell was so hideous you could barely get it all the way to your
mouth to find out. Shauna compared the odor to that of baby
clothes stained with soy milk and then crammed behind the radiator for
several weeks. This stuff doesn't so much quench your thirst as
asphyxiate it. As final proof of its utter grossness, allow me to
mention that Annie -- a child who will walk around with a piece of
lettuce in her mouth for two hours before eating it; a child whose
favorite game is dropping her lunch on the ground, leaving it there all
day for the cats to walk over and then eating it again for dinner; a
child who, as I have mentioned, likes to eat corn flakes she finds
wedged in the treats of her shoes after a day at the petting zoo --
would not even try this garbage.
Things
could only get better from here, even though it would turn out that
'better' was a pretty subjective judgment. The next candidate for
the Crappys was "Chocolate-flavored OatsCreme Premium Dairy-Free Frozen
Dessert". (As with regular groceries, a rule of thumb in the
natural food biz: the longer the description of the product, the
worse it will be.) This was an ice cream analog for people who
couldn't eat cream, milk, soy, rice, recycled newspapers, frozen water
with Cremora, or any of the other things you can make ice cream out
of. It was made with...oats! Mmmmm, delicious, sweet,
creamy oats. Who
wouldn't want to sit down in front of a tempting, tasty bowl of frozen,
carob-flavored oat byproducts? Well, me, for one thing.
Once again, we diverged on how bad this product was: Shauna, who
is lactose-intolerant and isn't in the habit of eating several gallons
of cow's milk products in a day, thought it was passable and compared,
if not particularly favorably, to Rice Cream, Tofutti, Soy-FroGurt,
Wheat Sundaes, Banana-Less PseudoSplits, and Ben & Jerry's Tempeh
Hempeh, or whatever else dairy-deprived fatties load up on when their
soaps are cancelled. I, who would be happy to subsist on nothing
but steak, butter and sweetened whole milk, though that it was like
eating a BioChem Ultimate LoCarb Bar that had been left in the freezer
for several weeks. Annie, who is a toddler and likes anything
crammed with sugar, ate all of the rest of it and then bounced off the
walls for the remainder of the evening.
I've
never quite understood why vegetarians go to such great lengths to make
things taste like meat; as Kyle Baker asked, "do monks buy a lot of
inflatable sex toys?" But, thank goodness they do, because
otherwise there'd be less fodder for mockery like this. I had
originally wanted to fill this slot with a vegetarian beer brat, but it
was manufactured by Turtle Island, and I didn't want it to seem like I
was picking on them. (Although, given that they made that horrid
Tofurky Jurky, it's not like they don't have it coming.) That's
too bad, because I'm sure the veggie beer sausage would have been a
real world-beater of awfulness, while the product that replaced it was
actually quite acceptable. Every Crappy Awards features a product
that turns out to be much less horrible than anticipated, and this
year, it was Lightlife's "Smart Chili Veggie Protein Chili with
Beans". Although it didn't look very good (it resembled the
results of a shotgun murder, squeezed into a tiny plastic pouch) and it
featured some very dubious package copy, it was actually, if not
delicious, certainly not non-delicious. I was able to enjoy it
despite my philosophical objection to chili that contains beans; Shauna
liked it so much she'll probably become a repeat customer; and Annie
was so enamored of it that she threw a full-blown tantrum when we took
it away from her. (The label claimed it contained "just enough
spice to lift your spirits", but we didn't want to take the chance that
a more accurate claim would be "just enough spice to lift the contents
of your stomach out onto your bib". Lightlife's Smart
Chili: so not bad, it's almost good.
As a
final palate-cleanser, and another opportunity to rub it in the baby's
face that she isn't allowed to eat all this stuff, we sampled "Glee
Gum", cinnamon flavor. This didn't seem all that strange to me,
but Shauna liked that it looked pretty weird and I liked that it was
only 79 cents, so into the basket it went. A tasting proved that
it was perfectly acceptable gum -- after all, it's pretty difficult to
fuck up cinnamon gum -- but despite its failure to fail in the taste
department (its only flaw was that the flavor vanished after about 15
seconds of chewing, which doesn't distinguish it from any other gum on
the market), it proved worthwhile for the cover copy. A leaping
goofball exclaims "Finally! All natural gum!", thus easing the
unbearable longings of hippies who are tired of that fascist Wrigley
pushing them around; a bit of copy on the front says "Made with
rainforest chicle, the way gum used to be made" -- presumably before
they started making it with old tires or discarded panty elastic or
soylent green or whatever they use now. Best of all, the back of
the package features an address you can write to for a "Make Your Own
Gum Kit", which will allow you to manufacture chewing gum in the
comfort of your own home, and, one assumes, put the company out
of business. Love the optimism!
This year's Crappys were special. They took place in another
city; they featured food that, while terrible, was probably less likely
to kill me; and best of all, they were done in the company of two gals
I love a lot. But all good things come to an end, and finally, I
announced the winner of the 2005 Crappys: VITACOCO COCONUT WATER NATURAL
REHYDRANT DRINK! Pointless, wastefully packaged,
unneccessary, excessively hyped, and unquestionably the worst-smelling
product in the history of these awards, it managed to be so bad that
even a baby wouldn't put it in her mouth. Bravo, VitaCoco, and
keep on' crappin'!
