Category Archives: Strange Foods

America loves food. We love it so much. But sometimes, strange and terrifying things happen in the culinary process, because you always hurt the ones you love.

Cap’N Crunch’s Grossest Flavors of All Time

Posted on September 14, 2016 | 5 comments

“Give me a break!”

~Um, That’s Not The Theme Song To Captain Crunch…

oh-captain-my-captain

When Captain Cap’n Crunch first hit the shelves in 1963, we didn’t worry ourselves with the fact that he’s not an actual Captain, and instead went wild over the corn-based cereal that was the first to be coated in a thin layer of oil to give it an additional boost of flavor.

The cereal itself was developed by Pamela Low, a flavorist (shut up, it’s a thing) (no it actually is) at Arthur D. Little who tried to make a cereal that tasted like her grandmother’s recipe of brown sugar and butter melted over rice.

Now, as far as “tasting like sugar butter over rice” goes, Captain Cap’n Crunch was an abject failure.  But if we look at the product through a “holy shit, this is really good, let’s put some crunch berries in it” lens, it was a roaring success.

Now, Cap’n Crunch is everywhere, and you’ll hear no one complain about that fact because Cap’n Crunch is goddamn magical.  That is, when they’re not trying to showboat.

Yes, much like Marshmallow Peeps, Oreos, or, God help us, M&Ms, Cap’n Crunch has tried many times to fly to the sun, only to see their waxen wings melt away. That was a very elegant metaphor about how you shouldn’t sell Cap’n Crunch that comes with fucking pop rocks in it.

Cap’N Crunch’s Grossest Flavors of All Time

more-like-totally-smashed-berries-amiright

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The Strangest Flavors of Lay’s Potato Chips in the World

Posted on July 13, 2016 | 1 comment

“What?  But…why?”

~Your Taste Buds

crab chips

The potato chip—America’s most effective salt delivery system since 1853.  We as a nation eat 1.5 billion pounds of the stuff a year, which pares down to about 4 pounds of greasy, delicious shame for every American.

It is an actual American invention, coming into existence because of a douchebag customer who kept sending back his fried potatoes for not being thinly cut enough, and the chef who said, “fuck you, I’ll give you fried potato peelings then and oh holy shit he actually likes it?”

Since its inception, potato chips have spread all over the world, which is a good thing for people who work at liposuction clinics, and bad news for people who are trapped in countries that have decided a potato chip can be flavored as anything, no matter how batshit insane it is.

Surprisingly enough, we’re not talking about Japan, despite the atrocities they have committed against the humble Dorito. No, we’re talking about Lay’s, the parent company of Doritos, and a brand of potato chip that, for whatever reason has been hijacked by pure insanity in countries across the world.

And before you say “Hey, I tried a bag of Borsch potato chips one time, it actually tasted pretty good!” we just want to remind you that you’re wrong and we don’t care what you have to say.

On to the distressing potato chips!

The Strangest Flavors of Lay’s Potato Chips in the World

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The Most Absurd Change.org Petitions in America

Posted on May 4, 2016 | 1 comment

“This Change.org petition is really gonna make a difference!”

~No, no it’s not

change

Change.org was founded in 2007 as a tool for people to advocate social causes. It’s used by over 100 million people who either have signed petitions or created their own, and it serves as an interesting launching point for issues that might otherwise get drowned out. It occasionally has caused a difference, most notably for its involvement in drawing national attention to the Trayvon Martin case, but mostly it’s used for what most things on the internet are used for.

Okay, well, not porn, though we probably just Rule 34ed some of that into existence just now. No, it’s basically used for people to bitch and complain about something that annoys them. That ranges from sensible, social concerns to petty, stupid issues. But somewhere in between, something wonderful happens.  Craziness.

So we did some digging to find some of our favorite wtf Change.org petitions for your please. All of these are 100% real and unedited.

The Most Absurd Change.org Petitions in America

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America’s Worst Regional Culinary Dishes (Part 3)

Posted on March 16, 2016 | Leave a comment

“Why can’t you just come up with some unique hot dog toppings and call it your own like a NORMAL regional culinary trend?”

~Overworked AFFotD Taste-Testers

fried rat

We have spent our last two articles discussing America’s dark, sordid food mistakes. We can’t be great at everything 100% of the time, so it’s understandable that, in the course of perfecting hot dogs and Philly cheesesteaks that we’ve had a few instances of bull testicles becoming popular in some region for some reason. All we can do is acknowledge our mistakes and move on.

So onward we will move, as we go into our final installment of…

America’s Worst Regional Culinary Dishes (Part 3)

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America’s Worst Regional Culinary Dishes (Part 2)

Posted on March 10, 2016 | 3 comments

“Just because you like something doesn’t mean the rest of you should like it too. Quentin Tarantino likes licking feet, that doesn’t mean that it is something that the rest of society accepts and embraces.”

~AFFotD Food Critics Dressing Down St. Louis-Style Pizza Fans

mess of a burger

Okay so at some point we should stop ragging on St. Louis-style pizza so much. We’ll admit that. When we started listing the worst of America’s Regional Culinary dishes, we were thinking about St. Louis’ cracker-thin travesty of a pie, but really, in digging through the worst foods that America has to offer, we’ve come to appreciate it, and maybe even begrudgingly respect it.

No, you’re still wrong if you like it, and no, we’re not going to take you up on your offer to get some fucking Imo’s, get that shit out of our faces, but at least it tries to be something delicious and normal. It fails on both fronts, but it tries dammit. There’s no offal or rolled balls of fat and meat powder in play. No bad ideas, just really, really, really bad execution.

With that semi-apology out of the way, we’re going to delve into more of America’s worst regional dishes. And we’re sorry.

We’re so, so sorry.

America’s Worst Regional Culinary Dishes (Part 2)

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America’s Worst Regional Culinary Dishes (Part 1)

Posted on March 8, 2016 | 4 comments

“I don’t care if it’s just how your mama used to make it, your mama used to make it WRONG.”

~AFFotD Taste Testers

ummm what

When it comes to the culinary arts, America, and by extension the staff of America Fun Fact of the Day, is a lot like a caterpillar, in that caterpillars don’t know how analogies work.

Wait, no, we can salvage this. American cuisine spent years languishing as underdeveloped and, frankly, sad attempts at inventing dishes that lagged far behind Europe’s more significant and time-tested methods.

Only 85 years ago, Julia Child wrote a book that basically told the country, “Um, so France uses a lot of butter in their food, maybe if we tried that it would taste pretty good too” and people lost their shit so much that they still buy that book to this very day. But eventually our tastes matured, and we burst out of our cocoons to make hundreds of dishes that are insanely unhealthy, undoubtedly American, and still delicious enough that other countries try (and often fail) to replicate on their own.

Part of the beauty of American cooking is how diverse it can be, considering how every single area of this great sprawling nation has its own approach to filling us up. Hell, asking for a simple clam chowder can get you eight different soups, depending on where you are when you ask for it.

Just looking at all the things we can do with the humble hot dog gives you an idea of how inventive and varied we can be when trying to find the most effective ways to give you a quick coronary.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t always translate to successful dishes, and even more unfortunately, some of these failures randomly get embraced as “part of the culture” of various regions in America. This isn’t surprising—with so much good food, America was bound to have some swings and misses. But when we miss, ho boy, do we miss.

But you can’t appreciate the good without being made aware of the bad, so as much as it pains us, we’re here to present to you an unflinching look at…

America’s Worst Regional Culinary Dishes (Part 1)

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The World’s Saddest Cuisines: Latvia

Posted on October 27, 2015 | 65 comments

“This is what you guys eat for dinner?  Great, now I’m hungry AND sad.”

~Tourists in Latvia

 latvian food

America, in case you didn’t get the memo, is better than all the rest of you wannabe country motherfuckers out there. That’s just a basic truth, and if you disagree with it you’re either French or one of those jerkwads that writes those magazine articles about “happiness indexes.”

Why is America great? Our education and health care system? Okay, don’t be a sarcastic asshole, we’re asking a serious question here.

Well, many of you shouted all sorts of great things, like freedom, whiskey, and we’re pretty sure we heard someone shout “the world’s largest charcoal grill in Magnolia, Arkansas” which, um, that’s definitely unique but hey we’ll give it to you.

But if you ask us, of the many, many aspects of America we truly love, there’s one that tends to take a special place in our heart. Well, yes, booze, but we’re talking about something that has a special place in our heart because it’s physically lodged there.

That’s right, America’s tradition of culinary excellence. We make amazing food! Horrifically unhealthy, sure, but amazing nonetheless.

Which is what brings us to our latest series here at AFFotD. While America is clearly the pinnacle of the food world (sit down and shut up, France) there are other countries whose national cuisines, the food they grew up eating out of a sense of identity and history, are…well, pretty depressing.

So we’re going to take some time to tell you about countries who don’t just do food worse than us, they do food worse in us in a way that we don’t even want to make fun of them for it, we just feel kind of bad for the poor guys. Plus, we’re totally going to make fun of them.

The World’s Saddest Cuisines:  Latvia

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More of the Grossest Marshmallow Peeps Flavors

Posted on September 23, 2015 | 2 comments

“Why are we still doing this?”

~AFFotD’s Candy Taste Testers

all dem peeps doe

A few weeks ago, we talked about marshmallow Peeps.  Specifically, the fact that marshmallow Peeps, which exist only to taste like sugar coated with more sugar, with the added benefit of being able to bite the head of a cute inanimate object, puzzlingly comes in a variety of flavors, most of which are horrible.  The formula for the Peep is basic—pump enough sweetness into a marshmallow as you can without it technically becoming a hate crime, drop it in some children’s Easter baskets, and laugh as you watch their parents hopefully try to control them.  Trying to make Peeps taste like anything else is just showing off.

Well actually, it’d be showing off if they were actually good at picking flavors.  Which they are not.  So, they’re showing off in the way you’re showing off if you try to do a backflip and land on your fucking neck.  Anyway, here are some more mistakes made by the Just Born company, makers of marshmallow Peeps.

More of the Grossest Marshmallow Peeps Flavors

scaaarry peep

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The Grossest Marshmallow Peeps Flavors

Posted on September 3, 2015 | 4 comments

“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

Posted on July 22, 2015 | Leave a comment

“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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