Don't Eat It!
Sometimes it irritates me when I can't remember who pointed out some blog to me that I end up wanting to point out but then, in a sort of anti-anal-retentive moment, can't point out the pointer out. There are other times when we might be better off, though.
It's very, very hard, I think, to write brilliantly about something so that's it's both digusting and humorous at the same time, the literary equivalent of laughing while cola comes out your nose.
Ta da: a whole series called "Steve, Don't Eat It!" in which the eponymous* Steve tastes various "food delicacies" and writes about the experience — with pictures! Watch as Steve samples — to name just a few — pickled pork rinds (not the crunchy kind), "potted meat food product", fermented soy beans, and Cuitlacoche (also known as "corn must"). These "foods" need to be seen to be believed, although one would really prefer not to have seen them.
I have never had to eat anything as "delicate" as any of these so far as I can remember — which might, of course, mean that the experience was so awful that I've repressed all memory of it, although there was that time I got sick from eating too much peppermint ice cream, so that now the scent of creamy peppermint slightly nauseates me.
But it does put me in mind of two favorite "foods" that I used to find slightly mystifying:
- "Imitation Peanut Butter", whose only ingredients are peanuts and salt.#
- "American Style Pasteurized Process Cheese Food Product", which has the longest name of any "food product" I've ever seen, which in itself I find suspicious.
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*One so rarely gets to use a word like "eponymous", although it seems to pop up more than one might expect, leading one to think that people go out of their way to contrive a reason to use it. Rather like "palimpsest", which is really not at all interesting enough for metaphorical use as people seem to think it is. To my mind "palimpsest" is not nearly so useful a word as, say, "pentimento" which means nearly enough the same idea for metaphorical use.
#I realize now, of course, that this all has to do with federal standards for the labelling of foods and how, to be called "Peanut Butter", a product has to have less than a certain percentage of fat, which explains the name of this product which happened to have more than the allowed amount of fat in it, or maybe the other way around.