Five of the World’s Strangest Chocolates

“I mean, sure, it’s good, but it’s BETTER when there’s booze inside of it.”

~American chocolate consumers

chocolate

America loves chocolate more than just about everyone.  Sure the Swiss might have us outgunned, but we still eat about 10 pounds of chocolate a year, per person.  We don’t want to look it up because we have a specific AFFotD search engine that locks your computer for two days if you try to search for anything about vegetables, but we’ll just assume that this means Americans eat more chocolate every year than they do salad.  You’d think chocolate is a relatively easy to acquire food item, but it’s actually surprisingly arduous to turn cacao beans into deliciousness—they’re naturally bitter, so they have to be fermented, dried, cleaned, and roasted before their shell is removed and the remaining nibs are ground into pure chocolate in its “rough” form, which is then separated into cocoa solids and cocoa butter, which is mixed in varying proportions, and often combined with sugar and milk.

If you stopped reading once you saw the word “fermented” while your mind drifted to visions of alcohol dancing in your head, well, it did for us too, so that’s totally understandable.  The key is, chocolate is everywhere, and mankind has been ingesting it in one form or another since about 1400 BC, and while America doesn’t lay claim to any particularly revolutionary adaptation of it (with the possible exception of Hershey’s) just about every straight man in America has bought chocolate to appease their stressed out girlfriends, and most of them have subsequently gotten in trouble for saying something along the lines of, “Hey babe, this should help with the PMSing, right?”

It shouldn’t be surprising that we have more types of chocolate than “dark, milk, and white.”  It’s not even surprising that some variations of chocolate might do a disservice to the original treat.  We’re not here to focus on that.  We’re here to tell you, the intrepid American who just finally finished the last of the base of your giant chocolate bunny you got for Easter, five of the strangest flavored chocolates in the world.  Because you’ll probably want to eat a few of them, and you’ll definitely want to purposely avoid at least one.

Five of the World’s Strangest Chocolates

keyboard chocolate

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America’s Grossest Soda Pops

“*A constant horrifying stream of vomit*”

~American Soda drinkers

 the hell is this soda

America loves soft drinks so much that every region tries to call it something else.  Depending on your upbringing, you’ve spent your whole life drinking soda, pop, coke, soda pop, or fizzy drinks.  Some of you even grew up enjoying “plain flavored carbonated beverages” but that’s just because you were home schooled, and your parents were too embarrassed to tell you they had tricked you into liking seltzer water.  While carbonated water, the backbone of the soda industry, was first developed in 1767 by Joseph Priestley in, alas, England, America has long since used pop to fatten up our kids while keeping them obnoxiously hyperactive, with soda being available commercially stateside as early as 1806.

Pop is a part of our everyday life.  The average American drinks almost 45 gallons of soft drinks every year.  That sounds even more impressive when you realize that we only average 20 gallons of beer annually, so clearly someone must be doing something right in the R&D departments of old Coca-Cola and PepsiCo.  We love our colas, our lemon-lime pops, hell, we even drink Mountain Dew.  And while there are dozens, if not hundreds, of delicious sodas available at the nearest convenience to act as mixers for all sorts of deserving hard alcohols, there are some companies that, either on purpose or by terrible, terrible accident, make pop that is so repellant that even the Japanese have to take a step back and go, “Goddamn it America, you’re doing it wrong!”

Now’s the time to reflect and think about what you’ve done.  Because some of you out there have drank these sodas.  Willingly.  Ye Gods.

America’s Grossest Soda Pops

 crystal pepsi

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America’s 7 Craziest Doughnut Sandwiches

“It’s magnificent.  It’s glorious.  I can see a beautiful shining light.  I’m heading towards it.”

~Every American With A Pre-Existing Heart Condition Eating Any Item On This List

donut sandwich

Doughnuts.  They’re so hot right now.  Doughnuts.  While doughnuts have been fattening Americans up under the guise of “Breakfast” for hundreds of years, they’ve recently experience a renaissance among those brave individuals who like to intake their sugary carbs in savory or alcoholic forms.  We now live in a world where any doughnut shop that doesn’t make a maple bacon doughnut is full of shit, and if you’ve never tried a doughnut covered in fruit loops you’re not legally allowed to vote in Oregon.

What once was just a simple fried dough confectionery for the masses has now evolved farther than it was ever intended, sort of like New Jersey.  But unlike New Jersey, the vast majority of the strange, bewildering doughnut products that we’re being exposed to are actually delicious, enjoyable, and something you’d consider taking home to your parents.  Your fat parents.  From the fat side of your family.  That you eat fatty foods with.  Just…fat…fat… JUST LISTEN THIS IS A LIST OF SANDWICHES MADE WITH DOUGHNUTS YOU KNOW YOU ARE GOING TO EAT THEM RIGHT NOW FAT FAT ALL AT ONCE FAT FAT FATTIE SOO-WEE SOO-WEE OINK OINK OINK!!!!! oh wow, Jesus Christ, we don’t know what happened there.  We started looking at our research for this article, and everything went red for a second, and when we woke up we were covered in jam somehow.  God, we hope it’s jam.

Anyway, the 2010s have been a revolutionary time for people who like doughnuts, but hate the fact that you can’t buy them with additionally unhealthy foods in the middle.  And they’ve gone out of their way to correct this oversight by making…

America’s 7 Craziest Doughnut Sandwiches

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Budweiser’s Five Worst “Beer Products”

“More like Bud…WHYYYYYYY…uh, ser.”

~We’re not the best at puns

Bud Light- the worst

Budweiser is the number one selling beer in America.  Let that sink in, America, and think long and hard about what you did.  Do you do this just to make us upset?

Do you?

The reason doesn’t matter, all that we know is that Americans spend more of their money buying beer produced by a Belgian-Brazilian conglomerate than on beer that tastes like anything other than sadness.

We’re not joking, we’re pretty confident abject sorrow  is the active ingredient in Budweiser, and we got confirmation of this fact once we saw this Yahoo Answers post which is easily the most depressing thing we’ve ever read about beer.

While Budweiser is not exactly known for pushing the envelope past their “straw flavored spit water” standard, they do branch out on occasion and try to introduce new beers to an always-hungry-for-innovation market.

The most popular of these efforts tend to range from “Bad but people seem to like it” to “this beer is not actively awful.”  Even though they set a pretty low bar with all their products, they have managed to, time and time again, create terrifying concoctions.  Beverages that haunt all who drink them for the remainder of their days.

Here are five such monstrosities.

Budweiser’s Five Worst “Beer Products”

did you know that budweiser is german for shitty bear

Well, you know, apart from their actual beer products

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The Six Worst Marketing Gimmicks By Major Breweries

“Sure it tastes like garbage, but it looks like a bow-tie so suddenly I want to drink it!”

~Americans according to Budweiser

budweiser can

You see that up there?  That’s the latest attempt by Budweiser to dangle shiny things in front of American beer drinkers in order to trick them into buying their watered down, rice-brewed beer.  The marketing strategy is simple—hey, people will buy any beer if the can looks all funny.  It’s a bow-tie guys!  The beer inside must taste like something other than wet cardboard and dirty barroom floors.

While there are craft beers that veer towards the “pointlessly novel” in order to entice novice drinkers (looking at you, Clown Shoes Brewery), they usually have a quality product they’re trying to introduce to the masses.  The largest domestic beer brewers, however, can’t make such claims.  They know they’re selling you cheap swill (that admittedly will get you drunk…eventually) but dammit, if the bottle is cool enough, maybe they can trick you to think otherwise.  That’s where we get…

The Six Worst Marketing Gimmicks By Major Breweries

 bud light lime

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The Five Worst Regional Pizzas In America

“Pizza is a lot like sex.  When it’s good, it’s really good.  When it’s bad?  It’s still pretty good.  And when it’s God awful, you find you can’t stop screaming, and it takes years for the nightmares to finally stop.”

~You

 grossa

Previously, we showed you the five best regional pizza styles in America, with a hidden agenda of angering New Yorkers.  Today, we’re looking at the dark underbelly of pizza.  Because, as great as America is at making pizza, not everyone can get it right.  Hell, Brazil makes and eats 1.4 million pizzas every day, but even with all that practice they still do shit like put chocolate on it.  So as great as pizza is, it’s not always a winner.  The best pizzas?  Are glorious.

These pizzas?  Are terrifying.

The Five Worst Regional Pizzas In America

gross american flag pizza

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The Five Best Regional Pizzas In America

“Goddamn it AFFotD, now I REALLY want pizza for dinner.”

~You

more pizza

We here at AFFotD have a hard time shutting up about pizza, probably because it’s delicious and incredible and if you don’t like pizza you’re a bad person and you should feel bad.  However, in our rush to point out things like “Pizza with toppings put in the crust” or “Goddamn it Japan you’re doing it wrong” we’ve overlooked one of the most important aspects of pizza’s culinary life—its European beginnings, and America’s impressive ability to adapt it for its own heart-clogging purposes.  Pizza as a dish originated in Naples, Italy, much more recently than you would assume—while variations of bread baked with cheese have been around since the ancient Greeks, and Italians were eating some combination of baked bread, cheese, and tomato called “pizza” since the 17th century, the “modern” pizza likely wasn’t invented until 1889, using red tomato, green basil, and white mozzarella so as to cover the pie in the three colors of the Italian flag.  It’s basically the same logic that America applied when inventing red, white, and blue jello shots.

Despite being such a famously “Italian” food staple, America wasn’t particularly far behind the curve in the pizza department.  The first American pizza establishment opened up in the Little Italy neighborhood of New York by 1905.  Once pizza reached our shores, we went to work on perfecting it, and we’ve since gone on to develop countless regional forms of the dish, some of them barely resembling the original Italian creation.  Usually that’s for the best.  Sometimes, not so much.

But we are a land of experimentation, and we’re here to embrace that quality, so join us for the first part of a two part pizza spectacular where we show you the best and worst of America’s regional pizzas, starting with the best because we know you’re hungry right now and we do so love to torture you.

The Five Best Regional Pizzas In America

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America’s Best (And Worst) Cheer Squad Team Names

“I feel more connected to my team and engaged in this sporting event for reasons totally unrelated to arousal!”

~American Males Watching Cheerleaders at a Sporting Event

Nothing celebrates the flower of American womanhood quite like cheerleading.  We take athletic, energetic, scantily clad women, and have them hypnotize predominantly male audiences at sporting events into learning how to spell team names.  We also decided to create a bitter, occasionally violent, rivalry between them and girl volleyball players, because hey, cat fight.  It’s a beautiful tradition that our nation embraces wholeheartedly, and it’s what separates us from the goddamn Europeans. However, the names of most of these teams are so embarrassing that those of us with a weak stomach for poorly misplaced puns sometimes question if it’s even worth it.  That’s why we’re here, with the help of some outside research from an intrepid AFFotD supporter who felt that “the people HAVE to know” to run down the best and worst of the Cheer Squad names in America.  Well, it’s more like the so-so and the worst.  Okay most of them are just plain awful.  Let’s move on and post some pictures of women not wearing a lot of clothing to skyrocket the page views for this sucker then, shall we?

America’s Best (And Worst) Cheer Squad Team Names

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Five Strange Auction Items

“Worth it.  Totally worth it.”

~No, guy…it isn’t

marilyn monroe dress

Most Americans buy their goods in the typical fashion—on sale from a Wal-Mart while fending off ghosts summoned from the Indian Burial Ground the store was built on top of.  One-stop shopping.  Of course some people have copious amounts of money and the strange obsessive ticks that you only see in inbred European nobility and coke-addled money men who struck it big in the 80’s, and they prefer to buy their items from auctions.  Not useful items, like food, clothes, or cheap DVDs that trick you into thinking they’re blockbuster films, of course.  No, these intrepid individuals like to throw money at things like Bonnie and Clyde’s guns, or a Brazilian girl’s virginity (oh how we wish we were making that one up).

When you think about the fact that millionaires literally competed with each other to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on these following items, you can rest comfortably in your futon knowing that you can never be happy without money.  Wait, that doesn’t sound right…

Five Strange Auction Items

elvis hair

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The History of Chicago-Style Pizza

“That’s not a pizza, it’s a damn casserole!  I feel strangely threatened when I see different versions of a food my city’s supposed to be known for!”

~New Yorkers

chicago style pizza

At its heart, pizza is just cheese, dough, and tomato sauce, topped with whatever additional ingredient you want.  Inherently, pizza exists to breed creativity and adaptivity.  In the hands of madmen and foreigners, this culinary freedom can be disastrous, but in the hands of true Americans, this can create an unhealthy, delicious American meal glorious enough to single-handedly keep additional-belt-hole-punchers in business.  One of the most glorious examples of this, of course, is the Chicago-style pizza.  Less of a pizza pie, and more of a pizza cake, Chicago’s deep dish pizza gives you as much fat, grease, and cheese as you’d expect to find from a city that’s primary gift to the realm of fine cooking involves hot dogs and roast beef dipped in its own juices.

So with a casual, “Get over it, yes, we get it, you guys are proud of your pizza, and you have good pizza places, but stop acting like you’ve done anything original to the style just because you use special tap water to make the crust” to our now-livid readers in New York, AFFotD is proud to present you with…

The History of Chicago-Style Pizza

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