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.

The Worst Gingerbread Flavored Products in America

“Run run run as fast as you can, you can’t catch me because you really don’t care too much, I mean really, I’m not that tasty, compared to other sweets.”

~The Honest Gingerbread Man

gingerbread

We hate to be the bearer of bad news, but summer is over, fall is here, and winter is just around the corner.  We know, we know, it’s a bitter pill to swallow.  But, let’s all take a step back, and think about all the good times, foods, and occasions that fall and winter will afford you.  No, we’re being serious, take a moment and pick your favorite thing about autumn or winter.

Oh, the holiday season, that’s a good one, you over there.

Hmm, bourbon and dark beers, that’s a very solid point, intern whispering in our ear right now.  Now go back to the supply closest and keep on spamming PETA with hate-emails.

Oh, what’s that, distant quiet voice in the back?  Gingerbread gets to come back?  Ugh, fine.  Whatever.  Yes, gingerbread houses and all that shit will be easier to find.  That’s a lame thing to suggest, but not lame enough for us to openly mock you for suggesting it.

Let’s face it, gingerbread is just alright, probably because America didn’t invent it and the most fun you can have with it is putting it into shapes you don’t get to eat until they’ve long since gone stale.  Which is fine—a gingerbread house is a lot of fun, and many precious memories have been made around it, but if we were being honest, a gingerbread house is a great way to have your children or man-child husbands pick at the icing and gumdrops, thinking incorrectly that they’re being sneaky, for a few months until the whole thing turns rock solid and you put it outside for squirrels to eat the shit out of.  That’s pretty much gingerbread’s biggest purpose for American society—it tricks squirrels into thinking we don’t eat anything that tastes better than stale gingerbread, so they by-and-large leave us the hell alone.

Unfortunately, because it’s considered a “seasonal” treat, every goddamn company imaginable decides to release a “limited edition” gingerbread flavored version of their product this time of the year.  Most of them, like gingerbread, are, eh, fine.  But some of them.

Oh, mother of God, some of them.  Are awful.  Terrible.  Sins.

We’re going to tell you about some of them.

The Worst Gingerbread Flavored Products in America

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Discontinued Doritos Flavors Too Beautiful For This World

“Why can’t I have you?  But I need you so.”

~American Taste Buds

doritos blazin jalapeno

Doritos are one of the better snack gifts we’ve given to the world.  Since 1964, when we first decided that we could probably get rid of our leftover tortillas by cutting them into triangles, frying them, and smothering them with fake cheese, Doritos has been there for every Super Bowl party and for every 2:30 AM stoned 7-Eleven run.

Even when Japan tried ruining Doritos, which came as a surprise to no one, they forever stood out as delicious, cheesy (or cool-ranchy) ways to get saturated fats into our bodies and flavor powder permanently tattooed onto our fingertips.

Japanese meddling notwithstanding, Doritos has never been content to stand by with just a handful of flavors.  In fact, they’ve released nearly a hundred different flavors throughout the years.  And despite the existence of “ketchup” or “sonic sour cream” flavors on that lengthy list of Doritos flavors that have been released and then rightfully vanquished to that warehouse where they put the Ark of the Covenant, some of these flavors actually sound delicious.  But they’re gone.  No matter how much we want to try them, we never can.

Here are some delicious Doritos flavors that the Frito-Lay company foolishly decided were mistakes.

Discontinued Doritos Flavors Too Beautiful For This World

 locos on doritos on locos

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America’s 10 Grossest Ice Cream Flavors

“If Benjamin were an ice cream flavor, he’d be pralines and dick.”

~Garth Algar

ice cream

Every summer American childhood memory revolves around delicious treats that cool you down while giving you a hell of a sugar rush.  “You scream, I scream, we all scream for…” we all would shout in our formative years to have it interrupted by our father’s saying, “Shut up with your damn singing and get your father another fucking beer.  Oh Jesus, you’re crying again?  Man the fuck up, here, take this five dollar bill and get something from the ice cream truck, maybe that’ll get you out of my goddamn hair for one fucking minute.”  Ah, memories.

Here’s a fun test for you Americans at reading at home (or at work ) (or while pooping, whatever, we don’t judge).  Go to ten strangers and ask if they like ice cream.  You will probably get six people saying, “Um, yeah?” three people saying, “Who the fuck are you” and one person who goes, “No I do not like ice cream.”  Well congratulations, you’ve found the parasite, the host is dead, there’s nothing for you to do but to set him on fire and contain the pathogen.  So, 9 out of 9 Americans love ice cream, meaning that ice cream is infallible, much like pizza or Oreos.

Oh what’s that?  You clicked the above links and saw that it lead to gross examples of those aforementioned delicious treats?  Oh, you didn’t click on them because that seemed time consuming and you’re just skimming through this anyway?  Shut up, just, okay?  Just pretend you did.  Anyway, we’re going to talk about Americans that fuck up ice cream.

America’s 10 Grossest Ice Cream Flavors

 toothpaste and orange juice Continue reading

The Ten Most Caloric Burgers In The World

“I think my heart attack is having a heart attack.”

~Oh God, Ordering Seconds Was A Horrible Idea

thats a giant burger

Many foreigners visiting America find themselves surprised at the amount of relatively fit and attractive people they can see on the street.  In their mind, the typical American is fat, trudging around in clogs with grease stains on their shirt, probably eating a whole pizza right out of the box while they’re walking to the gun store.  Instead, they find that Americans come in all shapes and sizes, and as much as restaurant portions seem larger than they’re used to, and the bread tastes much sweeter than anticipated, America’s culture of excess is largely confined to a very small but visible minority of people and restaurateurs who are fucking insane and are hellbent on cramming as many calories into your maw as is humanly possible before your heart explodes and showers the room with bacon bits like some Lovecraftian horror version of a piñata.

Naturally, our job is to help spread the gospel of this brave minority, these innovators who find ways to put a week’s worth of calories on a plate in front of you, these soldiers of fortune who push us to new limits, pushing our faces down into greasy heaps saying “eat your slop little piggies eat your slop!”  And while we do our best to make each meal as unhealthy as possible using a variety of methods, one of the most time-honored and respected approaches involves the creation of hamburgers so excessive and absurd that the mere sight of them is enough to drive nutritionists to commit hara-kiri.

But we’re no amateurs.  Sure, we could tell you about people who go to fast food restaurants and construct their own caloric monstrosities, or we could point out various chain restaurants’ burgers that double your daily allotment of fat,  but that’s child’s play.  If you really want to grab our attention, you’ve got to make something so obscene that even our own staff would have to take pause before diving in.  But dive in we shall, because this is America, and we’ve always wondered if heart attacks really are as painful as they make it look on TV.

The Ten Most Caloric Burgers In The World

bacon-cheese-pizza-burger

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Meatbeers: 12 Beers Brewed With Animal Meat

“The only thing that can make beer even better is the knowledge that a living creature died so I can drink it.”

~American Beer Drinkers

 meat wave

Beer is wonderful.  We love beer.  You love beer.  Everyone loves beer.  Well, except for Sharon, but seriously, Sharon is the worst.  Like, every time she opens her mouth, just, ugh.  Sharon.  Fuck Sharon.

But horray beer (Horray beer!)  As a nation, America spends an obscene-yet-appropriate amount of time, money, and effort into making new, exciting, and dangerously alcoholic beers for us to punish our livers with.  If we spent the energy we exert on beer innovation on, say, space travel, we probably would have settled colonies on dozens of planets by now.

But are planets delicious, refreshing, and able to get you absolutely trashed?  No, of course they can’t, they’re just stupid hunks of rock.

They’re practically the opposite of beer, so why should we give them the time of day?  That’s right, we shouldn’t, we’ve got a new session beer to try.  We’ve got our priorities straight, is what we’re trying to say.

Seeing as the beer brewing business favors the bold and encourages risk taking, as well as being largely stocked with red-blooded American heroes, it should come as no surprise that there are a dearth of beers that include honest-to-God animal parts in the brewing process.

Because we like our beer like we like our women: swirling in a vat surrounded by chunks of creatures that once had a fully functioning nervous system.  Um, wait.  Let’s try that again…

Meatbeer:  12 Beers Brewed With Animal Meat

rooster in a pint glass- turtle power Continue reading

Five Ordinary Foods Made Needlessly Expensive With Edible Gold

“Yes, this burger is pretty tasty, but what it really needs is someone to shave flakes of yellow rock on it to make it obnoxiously expensive.”

~Obnoxious people

gold chicken

For a species that used to feed itself by throwing pointy sticks at charging animals and playing a constant game of “will this berry make me puke until I die” we sure do spend a lot of our efforts making food as fancy as possible.  Normally, that’s not a bad thing, it’s led to fascinating and delicious culinary experiences for those daring individuals with a worldly palate who are willing to try anything and everything at least once.  It’s what drives America to create burgers like these, and why gummy bear bratwursts are a thing that you can actually buy.  However, it also can lead to pretentious food additions that only exist to as a way for people with more disposable income than shame to spend ungodly sums of money on future-poop just to show they can.

The most obnoxious development in culinary excess doesn’t involve molecular gastronomy, expensive “trendy” gimmicks, or even kale.  No, the worst thing to happen to haute cuisine is gold.  Tasteless flakes of gold added to your food so your small intestine can digest the daily wage of the person whose job it was to mine the precious metal that you so callously shucked into your oral cavity.  While certain societies used to eat gold in the past, this was because we had reached the level of scientific enlightenment of “assuming eating gold would restore your youth” which of course is to say, we weren’t all that bright.

The most affordable and least obnoxious addition of gold to our stomachs of course comes in the form of booze (most notably, Goldschläger).  Goldschläger, better known as “gold-flecked cinnamon frat juice,” and similar liquors initially put gold flakes into booze for medicinal reasons because, again, it was the 1600s, let’s give everyone a break.  Now, the gold remains as a gimmick, but when the total amount of gold involved in a bottle of booze ends up being about half a dollar worth of the stuff and ends up finding its way into a shot called “Liquid Cocaine” we doubt anyone drinking Goldschläger is putting on any airs.

The same can’t be said for these following dishes, some of which cost more than your monthly rent, and all of whom are ordered by people who deserve to be immediately punched in the face by their waiter.  So let’s dive in.

Five Ordinary Foods Made Needlessly Expensive With Edible Gold

emporers eggroll

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America’s Grossest Pizzas

“Pizza pizza, you so yummy, pizza pizza, OH GOD GET IT OUT OF ME, OH GOD WHAT DID I JUST INJEST?”

~Consumers of the following pizzas

gummy pizza

We know that other countries out there like to ruin pizza for the rest of us.  Scotland’s out there making Haggis pizza, Pizza Hut’s international office is apparently being run by a chef who recently suffered a horrific brain injury, and Japanese pizza is, well, you know.  Japan.  When faced with the horrors of snail pizza or whatever the living fuck cream corn potato pizza is, it’s comforting to come back to America and feast on the various ways we’ve perfected the pizza pie.  Sure, some parts of the nation have kind of shat the bed as far as their take on the dish, but in general, America makes a simple, hearty, delicious pizza.  At least we don’t have people actively trying to ruin it for everyone else, right?

…Right?

the hell is this pizza

Oh, goddamn it.

Goddamn it.

Here goes nothing.

America’s Grossest Pizzas

 potato on pizza Continue reading

M&M’s Grossest Flavors of All Time

“They melt in your heart, not in your OH MOTHER OF GOD SOMETHING HAS GONE HORRIBLY WRONG.”

~Rejected M&M slogan

M&Ms

In 1941, Forrest Mars, Sr., son of the Mars Company founder Frank C. Mars, patented a process for tempering a hard shell of chocolate around chocolate pellets in order to prevent the candies from melting.  Production immediately began under the name M&M Limited (named for Mars and Bruce Murrie, the son of the president of Hershey’s chocolate with a 20% stake in the product), with an agreement to only use Hershey chocolate.  These button-shaped candies exploded in popularity during the second World War due to their durability, and the shells were given bright colors such as yellow, green, red, and violet to go along with standard brown-colored shells.  And with that, an American institution was created.

These “m” printed candies are now sold in over 100 countries, but remain the most popular to-go chocolate snack for Americans everywhere.  The simple elegance of the coated milk chocolate delivers a burst of flavor with each individual candy, and just thinking about M&Ms while reading this article has you saying, “Goddamn it, I really want a bag of M&M’s right now.”  And you should.

Throughout the years we’ve been sampling the best of America, we’ve learned through painful, gut-wrenching trial and error, that sometimes the best American ideas are cruelly marred by our at-times overzealous imaginations.  Yes, the same good intentions and terrible execution that gave us Watermelon Oreos has befallen the perfection that is the M&M candy.  And, as is our sworn duty, we are here to let you know that these mistakes exist, because it’s only when we see those we care about at their ugliest that we can truly learn to love their beauty.  Or we just like telling you about terrifying candies.  However you want to look at it.

M&M’s Grossest Flavors of All Time

 printed m&ms

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The 10 Messiest Burgers In America

“I mean, how do I…finish this?  It’s EVERYWHERE.”

~Consumers of the following

messy burger

Hamburgers are a wonderful.  We’ve often explained why in great detail.  We’ve searched around for the largest in the world. Hell, we’ve even unleashed our wallets to let you know the most expensive burgers in the world.  Hamburgers are wonderful.

That past paragraph was technically a palindrome.

Anyway, as much as we love hamburgers, America loves them even more, which is why there are millions of variations of the suckers out there to clog your arteries.  Some are fancy, some are plain.  Some are tofu.  All are delicious.  Except for tofu burgers, you get that right the hell out of our face, eat yourself a nice rare steak, and write us a 4,000 word essay on why you are bad and should feel bad.  No, we’re serious, go home and think about what you’ve done.  We’ll wait.

Ahem.

Of course, as we can see with doughnut burgers, Americans love their burgers unhealthy and sloppy.  That’s why we’ve decided to scour the google internet our contact list the nation, on foot, forming painful blisters from thousands of traversed miles to find you the sloppiest, messiest burgers that our fair country has to offer.  Are there other examples of potentially messier burgers out there?  Well, probably, Jesus “messy” is such an objective term and maybe if you’re nice we’ll do a follow up to this article.  But in the meantime, sink your fangs into…

The 10 Messiest Burgers In America

mexican hamburger Continue reading

America’s Unusual Single-Item Restaurants

“What do you mean you only have baked potatoes?  Are you an Irish farmer?”

~New York Restaurant Patrons

hummus place

Since the turn of the century, the restaurant business in America has constantly evolved.  We don’t remember 1999 too well because alcohol and constant internet stimulation has pretty much decimated our ability to hold onto memories to a degree that would make people really sad and go, “Aww” if we were old instead of just young(ish) and irresponsible.  But, if memory serves (it doesn’t) back in 1999 people only ate at Taco Bells giving out Star Wars Episode 1:  The Phantom Menace action figures, and if you wanted to impress your date right out of her flannel shirt you’d take her to a nice French Bistro and try to tell yourself that the shear amounts of butter being used was enough to forgive the food for it’s French origins.

Since then, there’s been a foodie revolution in our country, which has brought us wonderful culinary delights as well as pretentious shit that makes us roll our eyes.  And one of these trends, for better or worse, is single-item eateries, restaurants that only serve one specific dish.  Sure, opening an eatery that only sells, say, overpriced baked potatoes might not be the most sound practice, but some places manage to find enough excitement in their ability to do one thing really well that they thrive.  Even if you can’t fathom how enough people could manage to support a place that solely exists to give you pudding.

But hey, if you’re in New York you might as well be doing something other than waiting in line at 4AM to get a fucking doughnut, so sure, we’ll help you out by telling you some of the more unique and unusual single-item restaurants out there.  Technically in America, but let’s be real, this concept totally spent the last 8 years radiating outwards from New York.

America’s Unusual Single-Item Restaurants

 baked potato Continue reading