Lo, a new age dawns in lunch-based automation
Scott Feschuk
To be a Canadian entering an American supermarket is to be Alice standing before Wonderland, Harry before Hogwarts, Oprah before one of those slimming fun-house mirrors. It is to marvel unblinkingly at the miracle of it all. Compared with our own grocery stores, the array of food products is so vast, so overwhelming, it is to feel one's eyes glisten from anticipation and from wonder or possibly from contact with a cloud of saturated fat blowing in from the microwaveable pork rinds.
We have Snickers. They have 80 different kinds of Snickers, including Snickers Charged--a chocolate bar jammed with caffeine. We have ice cream. They have roughly 47,000 different brands of ice cream, including American Idol Mint Karaoke Cookie (dig in--you can really taste the Randy Jackson!). We have sausages and pancakes. They have Jimmy Dead sausages wrapped in chocolate-chip pancakes and served on a stick. One day the scientists of the great nation of the United States will use their mighty brainpower to cure horrible ailments like cancer and marrying Billy Bob Thornton. But first they have much to teach the developing world about wrapping one thing inside another thing, and then placing both things on a stick.
Some Canadians lament environmental and labour deficiences they believe to be inherent in our free trade accord with the United States. Me, I don't get why I still can't buy Apple Jacks here at home. It's unfair. And I worry about the ability of the next generation of Canadian children to compete and thrive in a world in which their American rivals can, from an early age, prepare and eat entire meals in under 90 seconds.
You see, today's food-based innovation in American supermarkets is all about convenience. Remember how making a hot dog used to be so difficult and time-consuming? Me neither. But apparently it was, because Oscar Mayer went and created something called Fast Franks--three wieners prepackaged inside three "soft and warm buns" placed in three paper trays, and each ready to be eaten after 35 seconds in the microwave. You just remove the outer packaging, pick up the wiener, remove its individual packaging, wipe that tear from the cheek of Iron Eyes Cody, place the wiener back in the bun, nuke it and laugh in the face of China and its backward, water-boiling ways.
Not that these hot dogs are perfect yet. Oscar Mayer claims it created Fast Franks "to satisfy America's love for hot dogs in a more convenient way." That's a noble goal and a good start--but the sad reality is that consumers still have to chew the wiener and bun themselves. Americans are busy people, Oscar Mayer: call them when your franks are fast
and pre-masticated.
For sheer convenience, it is hard to imagine a greater advance than that achieved by the super-geniuses at Smucker's, who created a product they call Uncrustables--a package of four, 10 or 18 frozen peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with the crusts cut off. "All you do is thaw and serve," Smucker's boasts. "A simple way to enjoy one of life's simple pleasures."
Finally, at long last, someone has found a way to simplify the gruelling peanute butter and jelly ordeal. And lo, a new age has dawned in lunch-based automation! No longer shall our stoutest men be forced to toil all day in the jelly mines. No more shall our womenfolk be enslaved to operate the elaborate and often lethal system of levers and pulleys required to press together two slices of bread. Never again shall defenceless children be confronted with the monstrous indignity of having to ingest bread's hard and foul and brown outer layer.
Sure, each Smucker's Uncrustable has high fructose corn syrup not only in the jelly but (somehow) in the bread. And sure, the ingredients for the bread alone list almost a dozen different chemicals under the heading "dough conditioners." But when the alternative is sacrificing as many as nine precious seconds to spread peanut butter and then also jelly, well...suffice to say the Middle Ages called: they'd like their way of making sandwiches back.
The American economy is in the dumps but its spirit of innovation lives on at Smucker's, Oscar Mayer and the many purveyors of incredibly popular prepackaged lunches, several of which are to sodium what Britney Spears is to crazy.
Perhaps one day these pioneers of convenience will ensure that all oranges and bananas come pre-peeled, that hamburgers and hot dogs are sold in liquid form, that all soups are packaged inside a syringe for speedier internalizing. Perhaps one day these sultans of expediency will invent a cereal with the milk already in it, and the spoon already in the cereal, and the cereak and milk and spoon already in your colon.
Until that day, Americans will continue to rejoice over the societal benefits of Lunchables, Fast Franks and Uncrustables. Emancipated from the chore of having to make lunches for their kids, parents now find they have much more time to holler at their pale, obese children to stop wheezing.
Instant food
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Originally Posted by Penguin
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