i just spent 3 hours going from a French-audio news story I barely understood about Catalonia to looking up pictures of Kim Jong-il on escalators. Good night, internet. Clearly it’s too late for me to have one.

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Crucial correction: a recent study has revealed that I have indeed eaten peanut butter before. I hated it. Most commonly before I could read, inside brown, chocolate-looking deceptions.

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“Taste the flavors, as nature intended.”

I do not think, if nature had intentions, that one would be for us to chop animals into pieces and then stuff the pieces into little rectangular packages. I think nature’s promises would look more like…

Stix. There was a time when people put food on sticks. That was too complicated. What if you accidentally ate the stick? What if you accidentally jammed the stick into your ear? Now food IS sticks. Excuse me, stix. This is very important, evidently. Much easier and safer. But wait, Fribbage, you say. Wouldn’t removing the stick result in less non-food matter being wasted and discarded? Ah ha! Research has shown that stixifying edible objects allows them to be encased in non-biodegradable material where previously nobody would have bothered.

You might have thought: apples, those are easy! one of the most overproduced and underwhelming fruits on earth. There is no place that sells food where they cannot be obtained. Packaging them is totally unnecessary. WRONG. You neglected to consider the stix factor. Could I cut the apple into stix on my own? No, I could not. By expending the slightest bit of effort, could I remove any trace of a perceived need for another plastic-wasting piece of supermarketfluousness?

I suppose you think these are just regular dumb old raisins that somebody tossed in a structurally unremarkable box behind a picture of Highschool and Musical.

Maybe you think, if it’s REAL FRUIT, with a flashy little graphic saying so, why don’t I just BUY FRUIT? Do not agree, I am mocking you! Consider that “fruit” never has print testifying to it being real fruit. If it doesn’t come in a bag, how are we going to write what’s in it? More importantly, how are we going to put pictures of cartoon characters on it?

This picture is from 2008! Disney appealing this rule was to everyone’s benefit. Goofs are good for business.

True enough, there were those apples whose stickers had a picture of Garfield-the-cat’s head with a barcode frightfully superimposed over his teeth, but stickers are only there to annoy people, and to make consuming the fruit a frightful, obsessive compulsion triggering-ordeal, either when removing and disposing of the things or discovering them permanently adhered to a common household surface when a fellow resident fails at the task. They have no practical function. Fruit stix are much safer, and better to give your kids than Dunkaroos, much as having a pumpkin thrown at you is better than having a used diaper thrown at you.

I hsve often remarked at the ingenuity of Captain Crunch, who could not create real doughnuts or chocolate and so synthesized both, but Little Debbie raised the bar so high that it fell off the supports by failing to even achieve the shape. Worse, she could not spell stix properly. Since there is no Food and Drug Administration definition of what cannot be stix, I don’t know why Debbie would let such an obvious quality error past her diabetic shock fixed gaze.

Glix Stix! Just like glow stix but with less nutritive value.

Martin Short as Jiminy Glick is not too mighty to be stuck into stix. However, he wears a fat suit for the role, so even the glick is 43% corn and preservatives, hence glix. And if Mr. Short had bulked up for the role by eating, then he himself would be 43% corn and preservatives. Anyway, if glix had been spelled glick then it would be visually incongruous and no longer rhyme with “stix.”

Is there nothing we cannot make into stix? Is there nothing we cannot make into Pringles? Unlike a majority of similarly-shaped items, Pringles already weren’t potato chips, and now they are less than that. They weren’t about to let somebody else get the jump on their not-quite-being a regulated commodity celebration. Also, though they dare call themselves neither chip nor stick, “PIZZA” is still a-o-k.

Pringles are also mutltigrain. Not quite whole grain, and not quite food, but wow they sure feel healthy when they have the word grain printed on their tubes!

Kid Cuisine Snack Stix. These are undoubtedly created from the remains of that really loopy-looking mascot seen on the packages through much of 2011.

Though stix-like food was still a factor. Oddly enough less stick-like than a real hotdog. Better poke it with a fork just to make sure it’s dead.

My picture from the store was blurry, perhaps a self-defense mechanism by my camera, so I looked for other people’s pictures of queasine stix. This one is still of minimal quality, but that hasn’t been a factor yet today, and I was fascinated by the picture of the little penguin, also a Martin Short fan, evidenced by the Ed Grimley hair style, stepping on a fute ball while reciting a hubris-filled monologue at the poor hopeless stixling. Sportly imagery is always a good hint that the brand has been criticized for being rubbish, like when Ronald McDonald inexplicably took up basketball in the mid 1990s. Subtly imply that eaters should engage in heavy aerobics prior to eating (or in this case just step on a ball and imagine you might), because changing the product would amount to admitting that it was rubbish, and make you liable in the lawsuits filed against you for selling rubbish and pretending it was food for years and years. Also, if the product itself were changed to be less rubbishy, then people would notice it was different, and this awareness might make them realize they were eating frozen, reheated tubes of goops that they could buy fresh, in jars, at much higher quantities for less money.

There, again! I have never eaten peanut butter or jelly in my life, nor have I in anyone else’s life, but it certainly LOOKS delicious here. And by grebij, it has NO high fructose corn syrup in it! That’s a bonus! A health benefit! Instead of using less sugar, you can use the same amount and boast that you didn’t use a different kind of sugar! It wants you to be impressed not because it did something good, but merely that it resisted doing something bad, even though it actually did, just under a different name. The anti corn syrup hype subdued the too much sugar hype and then they both wondered “why are we fighting each other?” The Westboro Baptist church website should have a glossy seal on it that says “contains no racism!”

I have received mixed messages as to whether high fructose corn syrup is actually “worse” than sugar. However, it being present at all likely indicates ingredient substitutes that ARE worse than what they replace, so ordinarily I would say to stay away from it. Howeverer, something that boasts of the syrup’s absense is probably full of beans (and sugar, naturally). Manufacturers have caught on, to a degree, and have phased sugar back in, sometimes. coca cola now sells “gold peak” iced tea as a classier-looking (id est, with more discrete notice of coca cola’s ownership) alternative to nestea. it has real sugar in it but still tastes weird. Something that boasts of being free of both sugar and syrup is probably poison.

and we are completely helpless.

Meanwhile, the artist is hopeless.

dopes, the amazing human digestive system | (3) comments | Squirmalink