"These pretzels are making me sterile..."

(or- Why do humans find very bad foods so very tasty??)

Ah, yes!  The strangely illicit joy of chowing down dreadful salt-flavoured meat-tinged baked biscuit-y type "nourishment" at the midnight hour, when all the children are in bed asleep and unable to raid the stash of overly-preserved flavouring-enhanced goodies in this foil-esque packaging....

Complete in the knowledge that I will regret this folly in the morning; my tongue will stick to the top of my mouth, my eyes will feel like there are salt fields in them, and my intestines will have gone on strike for better working conditions.  The modern human's appetite for tasty-but-terrible food is bizarre, and none of us is immune from preservatives' peculiar charms.

Tofu is an innocent enough food- well, not so much a food as a cry for help. People who voluntarily eat it are REALLY in need of therapy or were a middle sibling that didn't get enough love in their youth.  But the anoemic tofu, for all its reported health benefits, pales (as an anoemic food should) into comparison against Arnott's BBQ Shapes- a baked good so filled with additive-awesomeness, preservative-punch and flavouring-fun that you can actually TASTE THE MEAT OFF THE GRILL- all in a biscuit!  It's the Vegetarian's Guilty Pleasure to scoff a box of BBQ shapes to get their fill of meat-lust, albeit in placebo form, before saving a poor innocent ferret from becoming the main ingredient of someone's kebab.

Cheezels- or as they are more accurately described, The Rings Of Salted Doom- are best used as packing filler, but one cannot help adore their inherent cheesiness. Burger Rings- a blight on the nutrition of the schoolchild- are so far removed from tasting like Burgers that they should be re-branded as Sulphur Rings instead.  But once proffered in a Tupperware bowl at a party, very few mere mortals can resist turning into Burger Gollums at the sight of These Salty Preciouses.

But the TRUE EVIL snack is an aberration so malevolent, so very abhorrent, that I shudder to type its name on these innocent pages.  I speak, naturally, of the foulness of Chicken Twisties.

Why does this food even exist?  Can it be used as a biological weapon? Was it one of Mengele's experiments in edible form?  Is it smallpox in a snack? Chicken is the most vicious of the flavours, the others being cheese and battery acid.  But the true horror of these "treats" is their more-ishness!!  We sentient beings know they're slowly dissolving our innards, we know they're doing irreversible damage to our kidneys and that the chemicals are probably re-jigging our DNA... but gosh-darnit, WHY do they make our tastebuds zing and synapses fire like nothing else on earth??  "Bring me another packet of Death Lumps!!", we scream foolishly as our teeth waste away under the 28% concrete content of this sodium-chloride atrocity.

And yet for all that, an apple a day just doesn't cut it against these terrors.  I would cheerfully munch all day on celery if the chemicals in it aroused me to the same degree as Smith's Cheese & Onion chips.  But the don't.

Unless you dip the celery in salt and additive A2270988400....

The Bass Guy