Stupid Food Products

We were shopping at Shanghai's expat food mecca, City Shop, and in the baking aisle found a food product we find so incredibly stupid, we had to share it with you. This item comes from Australia. It's "White Wings Shaker Pancakes ORIGINAL" in a bottle:



Here's the deal. It's sold in a see-thru plastic bottle, and it's only half-full of the dry mix. You are supposed to fill the rest of the bottle yourself with water, give it a good shake, and pour onto the frying pan for your flapjacks. Yes, it's purposefully sold half-full. What a sad sad waste of resources, and what sad way to encourage inexcusable laziness.

Actually, the product has been around for a while, and ran into a bit of trouble back in 1999, being recalled -- "Defect Details: Potential Contamination With Fizzing Agent Causing The Bottle To Rupture."

Yummy!

Who comes up with product ideas like this, and who lets them get away with it? Worse, who buys this stuff? Suckers!

Extra negative bonus points for being 97% fat free -- it's a pancake dammit!

Share with us your favorite stupid food product finds, in the comments below...

Ant Essence at Shanghai Sex Shop

We recently passed a shop in Shanghai, China that had a poster advertising ant essence. We went in to grab some and found the shop was actually an adult sex toy shop. There are lots of these all over Shanghai. They have fake viagra, exotic condoms, dildos, rubber boobies, blow-up dolls, and other plastic genitalia. Yeah, there's some really weird stuff in there. There's also tons of pills and herbals that purportedly give you impressive erections. It seems everyone wants to give me impressive erections these days -- I get tons of emails about this daily.



I picked up a box of ant essence pills. 58 RMB, but I bargained down to 50 RMB. I will eat them and tell you all about what happens next. (See below)

A few years ago I went to an adult sex toy expo here in Shanghai because I'm a pervert out of curiosity. Duh! Why else go? Anyway, I noticed that almost all of the sex enhancement products aimed at the Chinese domestic market were packaged with full-on American iconography. Blond-haired white couples hugging, wrapped in American flags, or the phallic-looking statue of liberty (don't they know it's a chick?). What would Freud say about the Chinese sex toy marketers and their preference for American imagery? *


Chinese condoms with hot American babes!



Vigorous Divinity Rapid Erection? or Tiger Powerful Five Penis Granule?


One of the pieces of schwag I obtained at the sexpo was from some penile enlargement company -- it was a chart of the world's penis sizes, by country. Korea came in last, and France came in first. The United States came in the middle. Scandinavia, China, and Africa were not included. Japan fared much higher than Korea. I suspect the "study" is a total farce, in fact, if you look at the small print, the data was obtained from random and unconnected non-scientific surveys.


Impotence wrapped in American flag?


Anyway, enough cock talk. Here's more info on edible ants, also known as Polyrachis or Polyrhachis. Interesting fact: "Ants can lift up to 400 times their own weight and pull up to 1700 times their own weight, making them the world champions in terms of strength. Ant contains 8-13 times the protein of milk, chicken, duck, beef, mutton and fish."

If you could only have that strength in bed!

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Update

OK I took a pill, an ant pill. I had it on a nearly empty stomach -- the directions don't say to take with food, just "take 15 minutes before sexual activity." It also says "CONCERN ON MALE. MAN EXPERT." -- whatever that means.

But anyway, about 15 minutes later I had this feeling that I'd been looking at my computer screen too long, the colors were starting to look strange. I went for a walk and everything looked purple-ish, like I was wearing some ultra-violet sunglasses. Really weird, kinda scary. My eyes were not bloodshot, but everything looked purple. So I went to have lunch at Da Marco (best pizza in Shanghai), and the purple vision continued through the meal. It gradually wore off about 3 hours after taking the pill.

During lunch, all the women in the restaurant looked amazing. At one point I was drooling on my pizza, and my date asked if I was ok. "Yes, I think so. Everything still looks purple, and I think I'm getting an erection." Let me just say, it was a good pick-up line.

* (Footnote -- things in China are a bit scary and xenophobic right now, take a look at this.

Ant Extract at Oxygen Bar

Mountain Ant Essence @ Oxygen Bar, San Francisco.

In the late 1990's we lived in the Mission District in San Francisco. This mostly Latino neighborhood (some claim it's the true birthplace of the burrito, as we know it) saw a period of gentrification and hipster-ism coinciding with the dot-com gold rush of the time. We had mixed feelings about this, but the diversity of people it drew, and the variety of shops and galleries and bars and restaurants with passion and integrity can't be denied. Several blocks of mid-range Spanish tapas, the best Thai in town at Suriya, a Senegalese restaurant, Italian delis, California pizza, lesbian cafes and bars, experimental film studios, French crepes, and the Slanted Door made Vietnamese food so exciting it hosted everyone from Bill Clinton to The Rolling Stones. Not to mention all the Latino options long familiar to the area -- from burritos to Guatemalan, Colombian, Cuban, Salvadorian, Peruvian, etc.

And then there was the Oxygen Bar.

The Oxygen Bar served air. You bellied up to the bar and bought your very own nostril tube (which you could keep and re-use on future visits), and selected a flavor you wanted your pure oxygen to be. We usually had our oxygen scented with lavender. You sit on a comfy couch and plug your tube into an oxygen tank, and breathe in the crisp and pure (supposedly) oxygen for 20 minutes.

There was also a menu of vegan desserts and non-alcoholic cocktails, and healthy herbal elixirs. Yeah, this was a real hippy/hipster hangout, with New Age pamphlets and Goa trance music. A bulletin board offered yoga classes and tarot card readings. But even vegans and non-alcoholics like to "feel good" in their own special way, so Oxygen Bar had a selection of "smart drinks" and elixirs purporting to give you a natural high. The most exotic, and expensive, of these was something non-vegan, actually. Based on traditional Chinese medicine, they served shots of "mountain ant essence." When the party was pumping in the place and things got a little crazy, the bar-tender would occasionally give out free tincture drops right on your tongue. Just like those tourist Mexican bars that have a 10 minute "free tequila pour" and some sexy chick stands on the bar and pours straight from the bottle into your mouth. Except this was tincture drops of mountain ant essence.

What is ant essence? They get these big "Chiangbai" mountain ants and turn them into a concentrated liquid syrup. You drink it and it's supposed to give you stamina and energy and super sexual powers. Some of the nodding hippies at Oxygen Bar would insist it made them feel like they were on ecstasy pills. Wow.

We tried the ant extract a few times. While we can't say the health claims are nonsense -- most herbal remedies don't obviously give you an instant rush like chemical substances -- we felt more pep from the Coca-Cola we got at the corner store.

The same goes for the oxygen -- we didn't feel any different after inhaling the special, $20 air -- but maybe the subtle, cumulative, and long-term benefits make it worth it. (San Francisco's air is actually quite nice for an urban environment -- we could really use an oxygen bar in Shanghai!)

By the way, do they really pump oxygen into Vegas casinos to make people more alert and stay gambling longer?

If you're in California, you can even rent an "oxygen party bar."

The Oxygen Bar at 795 Valencia in San Francisco appears to have closed and is now a wine bar.

Brains in Bombay

After a month of easy village living in the South of India, we took a break from the yoga routine and went up for a wild weekend in Bombay (Mumbai). There we ran into our friends in the Smirnoff Ten, and checked out a new music club called Blue Frog. In the club's brochure, the chef claims to be knowledgeable about "obscure meats" but we didn't see any on the menu.



We were told that lamb brains were on menus all over the city, so after a long walk among the grand colonial buildings of Colaba, we stepped into an Iranian restaurant north of Victoria Terminal, called, simply, "Iran Like Restaurant," with Pepsi/7UP as a sign sponsor. Sure enough, fried lamb brains was listed as a special.



The manager recommended the brain masala fry with a side of roti bread, and an order of sweet chai to wash it down with. Everything was matter-of-fact, and I didn't attract stares or smiles as a foreigner ordering something "weird", as often happens in China.

The lamb brains were soft and delicate like silken tofu, and soaked up the curry sauce perfectly. They were white in color, unlike the pink pig brains we ate before. We haven't been fond of animal brains thus far, but we really liked these, and even ordered them again a few days later. The soft smooth texture and neutral flavor compliment the spicy masala.



Iran Like Restaurant
69/73, Palton Road, Opp. J.J. School of Arts
Besides New Haj House, Mumbai 400001