If your children are so fussy that they demand meat shaped like characters which remotely resemble vegetables, perhaps you should try feeding them actual vegetables.

Likewise, if they insist on this sort of thing, yet one more reason to boycott Nestlé, I recommend serving them actual swamp.

Getting back to the other box, though, which on any other day would be the most frightful picture I displayed, I never understood how it was ever considered an appealing notion to eat small versions of fictional characters, vegetable shaped or otherwise. I once had a big cookie shaped like the head of The Monster, Akayay Frankenstein and… it was a good cookie, but I felt bad about eating the poor bloke’s head. It didn’t help that it appeared to be a sort of sad and confused Frankenstein. And why not? His head, which I have to assume has already seen its share of trauma, having been assembled from bits of other heads and forced to accept a completely different brain than it’s used to, has now been severed, flattened, shrunken and coated in sugar. Poor Frankenstein. And then there was the time Burger King inexplicably made its chicken tendersâ„¢ be shaped like the Rugrats cartoon characters (which I gathered from circumstantial promotional evidence and not the shapes themselves). At least vegetables are other types of food. Rugrats are neither rug nor rat, and half as appetizing as neither. Never you mind that I was embarrassed to suddenly get these things, they were so frightful that I had to eat them without looking at them or placing a big enough grasp on them that my fingers became aware of the shapes, and that was quite depressing, if I recall with accuracy.

And maybe you think “good, serves you right, cowardly carnivore. If you fill your fat, jiggling abdominal sack with the tortured, mutilated product of wasted, captive lives you deserve to be miserable.” So what, then, excuses

?
I think someone in my house bought these once, –I don’t know, maybe the store was out of every other frozen potatish product–

which reminds me, I want to dump this whole four pound bag’s contents on to a tray, heat it up and then see how long it takes me alone to eat that all. I may eat nothing else nor pursue other eat-unrelated activities prior to finishing. If I don’t die in the process I’ll definitely jump or intentionally fall out of a window afterwards, assuming I can lift myself up and through one. I took this picture so I could tell you that.

But the SMILES, thankfully, they were consumed before I ever saw them, but, as often happens, one secretly escaped from the bag en-route to the oven and I saw it later and nearly screamed.

Imagine if the mask from Super Mario Brothers 2* that chases the people who steal its key was waiting for you in your freezer, except you hadn’t stolen a key and had no reason to be expecting it. Also, instead of sinister dents where its eyes should be there were just empty round voids with nothing behind them. Like somebody hole-punched right through their nigh 2 dimensional heads. And then I think about there being some vat in Idaho filled entirely with little potato flavored eyes and ewwwwwwwwn. These things have been around for a few years, which alas means some people somewhere are buying them on a fairly regular basis. Well, stop it!