h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I have to say that this entry does not cover the subject of junk food properly - if that is its goal.

There's a whole pantheon of tooth-rotting, cholesterol-laden products that have been neglected.

In the sweet cakes category:
• Twinkies - shelf life of five years.
• Ding-dongs - your basic chocolate cupcake with a cream filling & choco icing
• Pink Snowballs - probably the most disgusting confection ever created, it's a sponge cake ball with cream filling and a coating of coconut stained pink.

Salty Munchies:
• Goldfish are not sweets.
• Cheese Whiz - where is the cheese whiz? This is the ultimate in American schmaltz!
• Cheetoes & Fritos - any junk food summary should include these
• Peanuts. Your average American male wouldn't be caught dead in front of the TV without peanuts and a six-pack.

Candy:
• Okay, so where's the Sugar Daddies (or Babies) and the Whoppers?
• Hershey's may suck in comparison to Cadbury's, but their kisses are awfully nice... But I prefer the hundreds of other candy bars available, like Snickers, Almond Joy, Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, etc. (Urp... Well, not all at once!)

Lentilla - Junk food expert...

Pink Snowballs! I just saw some Green Snowballs - all decked out for St. Patrick's Day!

And you want junky candy? How about Circus Peanuts? What are those things made of, anyway? Dots! Eat paper with every bite! And wax lips!

I'm getting a belly ache...

And how could we forget... Marshmallow peeps. Yuck!

I LOVE marshmallow peeps! I like to wait to eat them until they get a little stale...

FYI: marshmallow peeps are basically marshmallows shaped like chicks that are covered in yellow-dyed sugar. They come in pink-sugared bunnies too. Mmmm!

Actually, from what I have heard, Twinkies, kept in a cool, dry place for up to *ten* years are still *INDISTINGUISHABLE* from their freshly-bought counterparts.

*shudder*

Marshmallow peeps are wonderful! They're so much fun. In chemistry class in high school we put them in a vacuum chamber to watch them grrroooowwww!!! Was great fun.

Now, if anyone want to write an article on American food-related travesties, they need look no further than Potted Meat Food Product, produced by Hormel. I know it's not quite junk food, but it is certainly abhorrent to the highest degree.

*SHUDDER*

Güthwinë

There's several varieties of potted meats (combined fragments of various animals stuck together with gelatin & jellied meat juice): Treet and Spam are the most popular. Oddly enough, I LOVE fried Spam. Cut the pieces thin, then fry them until they're almost black on both sides. Toast your bread of choice and slather mustard, apply fried Spam, and eat. Yum!

Any other form causes me to gag.

The worst canned meat product has to be Vienna Sausages. Not only are they tasteless and unappetizing in texture, they so closely resemble a small boy's you-know-what that I just can't bring myself to put them in my mouth. Urp!

- Lentilla

No ... what?

You know...

Oohh, that!

Well then, have a instead!

Hee hee!

Yum, a banger! (hee hee!)

Mmmm... spam is delicious. Actually, I have a friend whose father worked as a meat inspector. According to him, Spam is actually made of relatively high-quality pork, rather than the scraps that go into most potted meats.

Mmm.. spamburger.

Güthwinë.

Wasn't there an urban myth that the fearsome level of preservatives in winkies was having the effect that the corpses of dedicated Twinkie-guzzlers weren't decaying properly and were still basically intact ten years later or something similar?

Quite a horrid thought - mummification through excess Twinkie consumption!

Ooops - 'Twinkies', not 'winkies' obviously. All this talk of you-know-whats has clearly scrambled my brain...

Perfectly understandable!

I'm working toward ingesting enough preservatives during my lifetime that my family won't have the added burden of paying for my embalment after I die. Am I considerate, or what?

I seem to recall that the average junk food addict will have about three pounds of coal tar in their systems... Can't be true, can it?

Hello,

I think we need some separate articles or a large addendum for several notable American snack food sensations. I'm thinking about Peeps, TastyKakes, Mallomars, etc. myself, although I'm sure we can think of some more. And I have a trivia filling too! Did you know that NYC eats 70% of all Mallomars? Or that the Peeps factory has two lines: one that makes Peeps year-round, the other that does seasonal shapes.

Spam is gross, but it has nothing on Armours' "Pork Brains in Milk Gravy", a serving of which fills 1270% the RDA for cholesterol.

Yours,
Jake

I eat 20% of NYC's Mallomars ...