Foods That Should Not Exist: Crazy Shit We Ate As Kids, Part 2

By C.A. Pinkham | March 26, 2014 | 4:00pm

In Depth

There’s something really magical about destroying childhood nostalgia. Well, saddle up, boys and girls, because your memories are about to get a bruising.

After the Little Debbie Rankings, I figured the best thing was to piss people off even more by crapping on our most cherished childhood recollections. Plus, you all had such wonderful suggestions two weeks ago that I couldn’t stop myself. Seriously, though; we ate a lot of fucked-up shit as children. I mean, goddamn.

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Breadsticks ‘N’ Cheese Dip — Tragically, the 90’s suffered from a desperate shortage of Conjunctions. The great And Factories of Grammarburgh fell silent, their Linguistic Furnaces cold and forlorn as they jutted heavenwards, a grim scar against the Middle-American skyline. The recession hit the children’s food market the hardest, forcing many hard-working companies to rely on cheaper ‘N’s imported from Southeast Asia. Cutbacks also forced them to boil down the cast-off husks of E.T. The Video Game and Elephantitis Barbie, color the resultant mess orange, and sell it as cheese. It was a sad time for all of us.

Squeeze-It’s — The truly bizarre thing about the (thankfully fleeting) success of Squeeze-It’s is that you really had to work to consume them. Not only were you consuming straight high fructose corn syrup, you had to work for the privilege of consuming straight high fructose corn syrup. Are we 100% sure Squeeze-It’s had terrestrial origins? Because those lids looked like some kind of Star Trek torture device, and there’s no way that gloop was originally intended for benevolent human consumption. Do we want to start stockpiling weapons against the day the Squeeze-It embryos hatch and xenomorphs burst forth from the chest cavity of anyone born between 1980-1992? I mean, I’ll be dead, but you guys might want to start getting prepared now.

Kid Cuisine — I ate A LOT of these as a kid. Not by choice — I ALWAYS fucking thought they were disgusting — but because sometimes, my parents didn’t feel like making dinner. Which I totally get, but Christ, Mom and Dad, did you have to feed me re-purposed C-Rations? Somehow, it made it worse that the Linux Penguin’s alcoholic older brother was hocking D-grade chicken nuggets and buttered corn circa the Korean War. That fucking penguin. If I ever see that son of a bitch in person, not even Morgan Freeman will be able to save him.

Nesquik — I have mixed feelings on Nesquik. On the one hand, it’s basically just powdered sugar you dump into your milk and then vigorously stir in an attempt to get it to stop clumping into something resembling an IBS sufferer’s commode. On the other hand, Strawberry Nesquik was awesome if you ate it straight out of the can. Uh, not that I know anyone who did anything of that nature. WHAT? STOP LOOKING AT ME LIKE THAT.

Huggs — Right now, half of you are trying to figure out what Huggs even are. Trust me; you’ve seen them. Remember those weird-as-shit little plastic barrels with foil tops, filled with run-off from Mr. Burns’ Springfield Nuclear Plant? Yeah. Those fucking things. They didn’t even really come in flavors, unless you count “diabetic coma” as a flavor. Also, who the fuck thought those goddamned plastic barrels sounded like a good idea?! And yet, against all semblance of logic, I know a lot of people with fond memories of these monstrosities. “I’ll have the LSD fever juice with a side of facial micro-lacerations,” said apparently a lot of goddamned kids during the 90’s.

Bubble Tape — A never-ending strip of limp bubble gum whose flavor lasts just about long enough to get it into your mouth before turning into sad purple* caulk. Sounds like a fun time. Hey, who tried to fit the entire thing in your mouth at once? Oh, don’t fucking give me that. Get that look of mock horror of your face, you lying assholes. We all goddamn did it at least once, which is why we all know what it feels like to blow the Grape Guy from the Fruit-of-the-Loom commercials.

Go-Gurt — There are so many things wrong with Go-Gurt that it’s difficult to even figure out where to begin. First of all, the entire concept of “yogurt on the go”…I mean, why? Just…why? What eight-year-old leads such a madcap existence that they can’t stop running around the house for five minutes to eat a goddamned yogurt cup? Besides, this shit isn’t even yogurt; it’s more akin to runny, goopy icing. Eating one tasted like you were injecting pure crystallized sugar straight into your facehole and made you look like the star of one of Rick Santorum’s repressed fantasies. There is nothing redeeming about Go-Gurt, and I can’t figure out how the fuck it’s even still around. Go-Gurt is the Justin Bieber of snack foods.

Lunchables — I’m only partially kidding when I say that I think the brain damage from hundreds of thousands of packages of Lunchables is the reason for my generation’s well-established low test scores. You try eating those damn things for years and then correctly identifying John Adams as a subspecies of armadillo. I mean, the package literally said “pasteurized, processed cheese food.” There’s no possible way any part of that description originated as food, not even the “food” part. It’s worth noting that the kids of the guy who invented Lunchables adamantly refused to eat them. I wish I could write a joke that good.

* YES, I KNOW IT ALSO CAME IN PINK, NOW SHUT UP, MOVING ON.