Category Archives: America’s Culinary Treats

Did you know that the average American woman weighs 163 pounds, while the average American man weighs 190? It’s true. What does that tell us? Clearly some of you are holding us back, you skinny bastards. That’s why we at AFFotD present you with this list of foods which are delicious, American, and amazingly unhealthy. If we all work together, we can bring the average weight of an American above the Mendoza line! Get to reading, get to eating.

The Grossest Marshmallow Peeps Flavors

“I said put down the Peeps, for God’s sake!”

~Wiford Brimley

There are three kinds of people in America.  Children, people who still love Peeps because they remember their childhood fondly, and people who think Peeps are way too sweet for their taste and/or are diabetic and don’t want to fall into another Easter coma.  But no matter what category you fall into, it’s important to remember that there is no ego to the marshmallow Peep—if you went up to someone obsessive with Peeps and said, “I think Peeps are gross, the texture is weird and they’re too sweet” they’d probably just shrug and go, “Yeah, I can see that.  I like them, though.”

That’s because the question of if you like Peeps or not depends on if you like mainlining sugar into your system until the world starts to vibrate around you, with a secondary question of if you like your world-altering sucrose delivery system to be soft and fluffy, or left out a few days so it’s a bit stale in a weirdly appealing way.  Either way, when you think of Peeps, you think of mutilated faux-chickens that all taste the same no matter what color they come in.  And you would be wrong.

Strangely, not only are there flavors of Peeps other than “Impossibly Sweet,” there are over a dozen, and just about every single one seems like a horrible idea.  Like, a two-article–spanning amount of badness.  This is what happens when you mess with perfection, people.  Or, like, just try to add weird flavors to things that don’t need any more flavor.

The Grossest Marshmallow Peeps Flavors

we three peeps

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The Six Most Expensive Cheeses in the World

“Oh wow, I’m sure that is very delicious.  *continues eating a string cheese*”

~AFFotD Editor-in-Chief Johnny Roosevelt

wheel of cheese

Money is a weird thing.  People slave for it, they kill for it, they fight wars for it, but as soon as you get it you turn around and you’re that asshole who’s spending $12,000 to have a chef make a pizza topped with caviar and lobster in your house.  That dichotomy might be why we here at AFFotD are so perversely fascinated at the kinds of people who spend ungodly sums of money for particular items.  Sure, we’ve covered expensive yachts, which are inherently a waste of money, but it’s also incredible how much people have wasted on vodka, hamburgers, hell, even beer.

Normally (with the exception of our beer article) these products are expensive for pointless “look how big my dick is” reasons.  Anything can be expensive if you fill it with diamonds or cover it in shaved gold, that’s just pretentious and obnoxious.  However, sometimes, people spend more money than they should on items because they actually believe it to be top quality.  We’ve seen this, for example, in our discussion of expensive whiskeys—while there are some bottle gimmicks at play, these six figure bottles of alcohol at least represent some of the best whiskey in the world.

With that in mind, we’ve put our focus towards a food that we love but that can also manage to be expensive for a variety of fairly unpretentious reasons—cheese.  Cheese is wonderful in general, but there are huge swings in qualities between varieties.  You can have cheap American cheese for a few nickels per slice, or you can fancy decadent cheeses that’ll set you back twenty dollars for a small wedge, and you’ll be fully aware of the difference.  A lot of cheese comes down to preference, but there isn’t a lot of pretension here.  So that’s why we decided to look into the most expensive cheeses in the world, to look at something that’s expensive due to its quality and scarcity, and not because some asshole decided to toss gold and truffles in there.

Okay, well, two assholes on the list did that, but the rest are legit.

The Six Most Expensive Cheeses in the World

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The Best (And Weirdest) New Fried Foods At the 2015 Iowa and Minnesota State Fairs

“My…heart…tell my family…I died happy…”

~Iowa and Minnesota State Fair Food Critic

fried chicken

Here at America Fun Fact of the Day, we take great pride in the American practice of taking a (usually unhealthy) food and dunking it in bubbling oil until it becomes a borderline public health risk.  And as much as we love fried food, we also love its brother, random unhealthy shit we decided to make for a State Fair.  Most fried food innovations come from our State Fairs, which follows the fairly American logic of “well if we’re going to try to force Americans to get outside and walk around, we should probably entice them with the ability to eat a deep fried version of something they’ve never eaten fried before.”

2015 has been no exception to this rule, with the Iowa and Minnesota state fairs coming out with lists of their brand new, never seen before unhealthy food items that we are so excited to try as an excuse to test out that new defibrillator we just bought.  Oh, and we might as well let you know about some of the more ridiculous ones too.

The Best (Or Weirdest) New Fried Foods At the 2015 Iowa and Minnesota State Fairs

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Pizza Puff: Your New Favorite Fried Pizza Product

“I don’t care how it came to be, just gimme gimme gimme!”

~The Average American’s First Response to Hearing of the Existence of Pizza Puffs

pizza puff

America is a pretty big country, all things considered, and we’re not just talking about geographically.  Different areas have noticeably different cultures—you could probably find more differences between a small town in Texas and a co-op in Portland than you’d find between separate European nations that don’t even speak the same language.

This size and diversity makes road trips awesome, while also ensuring that no matter how hard you try, you won’t be able to find and taste every single delicious local food concoction.  Think about it—there is, right now, some awesome, underground food invention in your very hometown or city that you haven’t even heard of yet.

Now just imagine that on a nationwide scale.  Every city in America has a type of food that is unique to them, and the only thing that takes away from the joy we find in that knowledge is the fact that most of America goes their lives not knowing that their new favorite food is out there somewhere.

We bring this up because we’re going to tell you about one of those local treats—the pizza puff.  Made in Chicago, but really only known to the Chicagoans who often frequent run down hot dog stands (so, you know, pretty much every Chicagoan) there’s not much history surrounding it, apart from the fact that it’s absurdly delicious, recklessly unhealthy, and, well, it’s basically like a deep fried pizza pocket, and if that doesn’t sound appealing to you, close this browser, turn off your computer, and drown yourself in a river, because you’re doing life wrong.

For those of you still dry and alive, however, let’s talk about pizza puffs.

Pizza Puff:  Your New Favorite Fried Pizza Product

more pizza puffs

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St. Louis: America’s Weirdest Culinary City

“…The hell is wrong with your taste buds?”

~AFFotD’s Resident Food Critic

st louis pizza oh dear

St. Louis.  We don’t ever really know how to talk about the second largest city in the state of Missouri.  For a time in the 1800s, it appeared that St. Louis, and not Chicago, would grow into the main population center of the Midwest, but the city’s leaders actively fought against the proliferation of railroads and greatly stunted its growth during the largest population boon the area would ever see.  Still, it’s by no means a small town—while the population of 300,000 ranks it as the 58th largest city in the nation, the whole metro area has nearly three million residents, good enough for the 19th largest market in the nation.  Hell, they’re big enough to warrant a good hockey team, a usually not that good football team, and a baseball team filled with the most frustratingly smug fans in all of the nation.  They’re a real city, and honestly it’s kind of condescending of us to spend so much effort trying to bring that point home.

St. Louis has culture, is what we’re saying—you could probably argue that they have more regionally specific cultural touchstones than most similarly sized cities, but that might be us giving the Arch too much credit.  And where there is culture, there is food.  And in St. Louis’s case, where there’s food…well, things get weird.  We’ve talked about it before in passing, but we’re going to go into some more detail for you, because so far, in our extensive search for weird food in America, St. Louis has the title of…

St. Louis:  America’s Weirdest Culinary City

meat and bbq Continue reading

American Sandwich Series: Sandwiches Oddities of America (Savory Division)

“What’s that?  This is the last one?  The no more sandwich articles?  FREEDOM!  FREEDOM!”

~AFFotD’s Recently Over-Taxed Research Department

the last sandwich

Several weeks ago we embarked on a dangerous mission—to write about every kind of American sandwich that we hadn’t previously covered in our four-part Submarine Sandwiches of America series from over a year ago.  Some thought it couldn’t be done.  Some resigned in outrage.  The rest of us got drunk and decided, “Fuck it, we’ll probably miss a few sandwiches, but whatever” and got to writing.  Since then we’ve talked about American classics, regional favorites, and way more open faced sandwiches than we expected to have to cover when we shruggingly decided to count random piles of shit on a single piece of bread as a sandwich.  But we’ve finally come to an end to our journey, and we’re going to take things out the only way we know how.

By telling you about extremely strange sandwiches that have been created by America’s culinary know-how and disregard for convention.  Well, not like last time when we talked about sweet ones.  This here’s the savory division, y’all.

American Sandwich Series:  Sandwiches Oddities of America (Savory Division)

big ass sammich Continue reading

American Sandwich Series: Sandwiches Oddities of America (Sweet Division)

“What?  You don’t think that’s a sweet-flavored sandwich?  It’s got fruit in it, for God’s sake.  Yes, cranberry counts as a fruit, I don’t give a shit if it’s tart!”

~Inter-Office Debate Among AFFotD Staffers

sandwich fool

For the past few weeks, we’ve been shouting at you about various sandwiches that originated in America, using a list of arbitrary rules that, frankly, we’ve ignored more often than not in deciding what sandwiches warrant inclusion in our Sandwiches of America series.  We’re now in the homestretch, where we talk about what we’ve deemed to be the oddest sandwiches in America.  Admittedly, most entries in the open faced sandwich article, and some regional entries, definitely qualify as “odd” but we needed to limit this article’s length so we just kind of played fast and loose with our definitions of regional sandwiches and just general oddities.  Deal with it, this is already published, and there’s nothing you can do to fix it.

For the rest of you who don’t particularly care about what sandwich shows up in which article, we’ll delve into our second to last article, where we tell you about strange sandwiches that we’ve decided to arbitrarily place in the “sweet” category.

American Sandwich Series:  Sandwiches Oddities of America (Sweet Division)

god this looks fucking delicious Continue reading

American Sandwich Series: Lesser-Known Regional Sandwiches of America (Mountain, West Coast and Southern Edition)

“No, we’re not going to do EVERY Southern barbecue sandwich, we’re not insane.”

~AFFotD Editor-in-Chief Johnny Roosevelt

 sandwiches

So, we’ve been writing about sandwiches a lot lately, and we’re going to keep that train going.  Okay, listen, this is the sixth article out of eight about how bread is a thing that can taste better when you put random shit in it, so at a certain point you just run out of ways to introduce the damn topic.  “Hi, AFFotD here.  As you’ve surely noticed, we’ve decided to take on the daunting task of telling you about every sandwich that’s unique enough to warrant discussion, outside of submarine style sandwiches that we covered in a four part series a year ago.  After telling you about classic sandwiches, open face monstrosities, regional sandwiches of the East, and the unhealthy bread monsters birthed by the Midwest, we’re going to cover the rest of the nation, focusing on the South (and Miami, which doesn’t really count as the south), the Mountain Time Zone region, and the West Coast.”

Huh actually that was a decent way to set up this article.  We’re not really sure why we put it in sarcastic quotation marks, come to think of it.  Anyway, let’s talk sandwiches!

American Sandwich Series:  Lesser-Known Regional Sandwiches of America (Mountain, West Coast and Southern Edition)

 more sandwiches Continue reading

American Sandwich Series: Lesser-Known Regional Sandwiches of America (Midwest Edition)

How do Midwesterners ever live past 40?  Are their hearts made out of Adamantium?” 

~Non-Midwesterners Reading About Popular Midwestern Sandwiches

italian beef

Another day, another discussion of sandwiches coming long after you’ve tossed up your hands and screamed, “AFFotD, listen, I get it, there are a lot of sandwiches out there, you don’t have to tell us about every damn one!”  Well too late reader, by the time you’ve read this, they’ve all been written, and nothing can stop us from posting them, so you’re going to take your two more weeks of sandwich articles and like it!

Anyway, we’re moving on to the Midwest now in our regional portion of sandwich celebration.  As stated in the first article of the series, there will be no discussion of hot dogs, and we’ve also covered regional favorites such as the Italian Beef (though we put that picture up there because, God, how good does that look right now?).  But don’t worry, there will be plenty of unhealthy food items, even from Chicago despite our decision not to include literally every food they’re famous for, for you to stuff down your gullet before sobbingly calling your dietitian to apologize for cheating.  Westward, ho!

American Sandwich Series:  Lesser-Known Regional Sandwiches of America (Midwest Edition)

giant sandwich Continue reading

American Sandwich Series: Lesser-Known Regional Sandwiches of America (East Coast Edition)