snackdown! - 2.19.10

it's official, world. it's been a world-class week ever since they lit up the doobie-inspired olympic flame in vancouver last friday. personally, i haven't watched a single minute of the games but from what i hear, we've already had triumph & heartbreak & even death. throughout it all, we've had copious mcdonald's commercials advertising their "sweet chili sauce," the very same duck saucesque sauce eaten by olympians in the olympic village! the same sauce eaten by all those world-class athletes who've decided to wait until the week of competition to say "fuck all" to the strict diets they've been adhering to during their years of training & start wolfing down athlete-sized portions of chicken mcnuggets. maybe the curlers are able to get away with eating mcdonalds, but i'm even skeptical of that. regardless...world-class week.

• last friday, as part of little debbie's 50th anniversary celebration event, airtran unveiled the "little debbie 1," a boeing 717 jet with little debbie's smiling face plastered onto the side of it. in addition to introducing the plane, airtran & little debbie be cross-promotin', giving away fifty vacation packages to lucky customers. at the event, they also announced the winner of their little debbie look-a-like contest, tennessee seven-year old rhea lynne connor. i don't know. she sorta looks like little debbie. since she won, her face is going to be featured on boxes of little debbie for a limited time. too bad she doesn't get it on the side of a plane. (seattle post-intelligencer)


• in the category of "that's bloody disgusting," starting today chessington world of adventures, a u.k. theme park, will be giving away free sample bags of edible insects to guests. theme park general manager david smith has given the insect treats a test & gives them the thumbs up, but he's general manager of a theme park with an area called "beanoland," so you sort of have to take his opinion with a grain of salt. if it turns out that people actually enjoy the bags of edible insects, they plan to start selling them in "wild asia," the new asian-themed area of the park. what can we learn from this? asian people are synonymous with eating bugs. (the telegraph)


• are you obsessively following the olympics? does anyone even do that anymore? if you are olympic-obsessed, you're probably the type of person who would get a kick out of making your very own olympic-themed snacks. luckily, the philly inquirer has offered up a recipe for nanaimo bars, a british columbia coffee shop staple. the treats, which are named for a town on vancouver island, are made up of three layers, "a chocolate-graham cracker base embedded with coconut and nuts; a buttercream middle enriched with vanilla custard; and a smooth dark chocolate top." if you're fancy, you can even top them with icing in the shape of the olympic rings. they're apparently pretty fattening, but what do you care? it's not like you're competing in the olympics or anything. (philadelphia inquirer)


• i don't know what's up with nicolas sarkozy's conservative-republican party, but they seem to have issues with the french muslim population. first they go & ban burqas & headscarves & now that quickburger (a local chain) has started serving burgers made with beef slaughtered according to sharia law, they've got their panties in a bunch again. apparently they're extremely concerned that the existence of sharia meat will lead to cultural isolation. um, yeah. the best way to promote cultural harmony is to take issue with a certain section of the population's religious-based dietary habits. that makes perfect sense. keep up the good work, france! (ynetnews)


• cnn, the cable news channel known for seamlessly blending disaster stories, celebrity breakdowns & political scandal into award-winning news programs, has jumped on the snack bandwagon with their "snack nation" column, a part of their tokyo-based "cnn go" coverage. the column, which provides coverage of different japanese snacks, has in the past taken a look at items such as "chocolate sparkling soda" & "pepsi azuki" (a red bean-based beverage). this week, they reviewed kirin's "espresso tea," a black tea product. according to the review, it actually tastes more like a cafe au lait than espresso, but what did you expect? after all, it's a tea leaf-based canned beverage. from what i can tell, there's not a lick of "espresso" in it...crazy japanese. (cnn go)

snackdown! - 2.5.10

with the super bowl only two days away, the snack world's been positively abuzz with article after article about which snacks you can use to spice up your super bowl party. basically, all the articles do is give some "unique" take on the same snacks people eat every year during the game--nachos, wings, pizza, etc. use turkey wings instead of chicken wings & smother them with dr pepper bbq sauce! make a pizza that's half colts-inspired & half saints-inspired! YAWN. i tell you, if i see another article featuring some cutesy super bowl recipe, i'm taking a hostage.

• wall street's taken quite a beating over the last few years, but that doesn't mean that the folks working there don't still know how to have a good time. last friday, a group of investment bankers at calyon decided to GET WILD by holding a chicken mcnugget eating challenge in which one dude attempted to eat sixty chicken mcnuggets in twenty minutes. since wall street peeps love playing with money, they started taking bets on his success & all told, there was $10K floating around. in the end, he finished all sixty nuggets in only fourteen minutes. his prize...$500, an amount that should cover about a fifth of his impending angioplasty. (animal ny)


• in kingsport, tennessee, two dudes had a serious craving for a bounty of snack cakes but no desire to pay for them. lucky for them, there were snack cake-filled trucks parked outside a kingsport bakery, so they made their way into one of the trucks to start filling up. unfortunately, an employee heard them & called the cops. when the cops arrived, they followed footprints in the snow leading up to one of the trucks & found both "$300 worth of hostess snacks - cupcakes, minimuffins, streusel cakes, twinkies, zingers and 100 calorie cakes - piled up beside it" & the two dudes hiding out underneath it. the best part about the article was the readers' comments, which was kicked off with the cautionary "if they aren't careful, their snack cake addiction can sno-ball into more serious problems." ha! (kingsport times-news)


• new yorkers love eating, but this week researchers at the tulane university school of public health revealed that even though we love eating, we're less tempted to snack. as gothamist points out, "we're at less of a risk of coming into contact with snacks at the checkout than anywhere else in the country." i'm not sure how that translates to being "less tempted to snack," since you can be tempted to snack at a lot of other places other than the checkout counter. anyway, there's at least one takeaway from the article--the obesity rate in manhattan is half of what it is in the rest of the country. take that, you mississippi fatties. (gothamist)


• last year during the super bowl, denny's ran ads promoting a free original grand slam breakfast & the promo was so popular that their website had some serious issues. this year, they're bringing back the free breakfast offer & promoting it with a series of ads featuring a "spokesman warning chickens everywhere to 'get out of town' because 'it's going to be a tough week for egg layers.'" in addition to the free breakfast, the first 500k people who sign up for denny's rewards program get a voucher for a free burger & fries and as part of a limited-time offer you'll be able to get refills on pancakes & fries. refills on pancakes? that rules! the downside: you have to go to denny's. (promo magazine)


• the vending machine industry is huge ($30 billion a year) but with the recession & less workers around to spend money on snacks, they have to come up with ways to keep business booming. on wednesday, the national automated merchandising association (NAMA) descended on washington to lobby capitol hill & they brought along a number of touch screen vending machines with them, including "the diji-touch, an interactive touch-screen machine with an interface modeled after the iphone." apparently that's the new recipe for improving the customer experience--make your product more like the iphone. (washington post)

nosh nook #59 - thursday, june 4, 2009

did little debbie snacks have to be dumped? ODOT says yes (link)
06.03.09 - katu - by katu staff & news services

late monday evening, in portland, or, near the intersection of 5 & 217, a semi-truck carrying a load of little debbie snacks was speeding down the highway when it lost control & ended up on its side. what did they do with all the snacks once they had removed the truck from the highway six hours later? fun time snack party on the highway? nope. they threw those snacks in a landfill. to this i offer up a hearty nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!! what a senseless waste of snacks.

yesterday, i kept coming across reports about this story. i have one of those new fandangled google news alerts set up for "snacks" & three straight alerts were about this story. of course, they were conveniently spaced around two hours apart, just long enough for the story to leave my mind & then bam!...right back in. katu had pictures of both the disposed boxes and the truck on their website, so i decided to profile their story in today's nosh nook.

peeps in oregon have been asking questions & pointing fingers over the disposal of the snacks. why would they throw out all that perfectly "good" food? sure, the snacks were likely loaded with HFCS & other such junk, but they're still food on some level & food banks could've used at least a portion of them. as katu reports, "an oregon food bank manager raced to salvage the cargo but it was too late. it had already gone to the landfill."  mckee foods blames the ODOT for rushing the clean up & tainting the food.  the ODOT says both mckee foods & the insurance company told them to toss it.  either way, it's gone now.  amazingly enough, through it all, little debbie has managed to keep smiling...although she looks like she might be a little bit stressed out.