joe randel's art dump

I’m sorry.. but it has to be said. Consider it tough love from your Canadian neighbour. How do I know this? Well… my wife has friends in the States and on rare occasions we do a snack swap. We got a bunch of Canadian snacks together (ketchup chips, Caramilk bars, Eat-more bars, Kinder eggs, etc…) and sent them off and in exchange we got a…

Zero Bar
Cherry Mash
Whatchamacallit Bar
100 Grand Bar
Heath Bar
Baby Ruth Bar
Pay Day Bar
and something called a “Chick O Stick” o_O

Well, we sampled everything and came to the same conclusion. They all tasted extremely cheap. I’m talking like they we bought a bunch of these from the dollar store. The Zero and Cherry Mash tasted like the chocolate you get at easter. You know… like you can taste the wax in it. The Whatchamacallit was… um… interesting. The 100 Grand actually wasn’t so bad and the Heath was quite similar to our Skor (but cheaper tasting). baby Ruth was like our Oh Henry! and Pay Day was… strange. No chocolate in that one… just nuts and caramel. It wasn’t bad… just different.

Then there was the Chick o Stick. Good grief, what can one say about this thing. It’s orange… it’s… um… a stick… it’s crumbles when you eat it and has toasted coconut rolled up in it. It looks sort of like a turd. Sort of… It tastes like peanut butter… sort of. And it’s currently the last piece left from what was sent to us because no one wants to eat it.

The next day I went to work and asked one of my US co-workers “How and Americans get so fat off candy that tastes like crap?” He laughed and asked what I had received from our friends, then proceeded to say some of those where pretty good. o_O He then gave a pretty good reason for why things taste the way they do South of our boarder. He said, as sad as it is, a lot of American’s don’t care about food quality. What they do care about it getting a lot of it for as little as possible. “How much of that can I get for a nickle” is how he put it. He also said that most don’t even realize that they’re eating crap, it’s so far to Canada or Mexico that they’re just stuck with what ever the companies make them. He also agreed that a lot of what we have up here does taste better.

After I heard that I felt sorry for central US people. Not ever really knowing there is better confections then what they get at the local store. I seriously tempted to do a snack swap with others out there that are willing to do so. I’ll send some tasty Canadian treats and you try and convince me that there are snacks out there that are of decent quality in the States.

Anyone up for the challenge?