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...

Kangaroo vs. Crocodile

Boya redeems himself by eating the weird jerky

I once called my friend Boya a weird-meat wimp. Today he redeemed himself. He recently returned from a trip to Australia with boxes of Crocodile Jerky and Kangaroo Jerky. He also picked up some Emu Jerky, but the jerks at New Zealand customs confiscated it. Apparently Kangaroo and Crocodile meat are OK, but we're not sure why the Emu meat wasn't allowed. Some chap at the airport must be enjoying it now.



Reggie, a real authentic Australian mate

So today we broke out a bottle of Australian wine and even invited an authentic Aussy person to join us for some exotic meat jerky. Wasn't so exotic to him though -- he'd eaten kangaroo many times before. It was my first time, and hopefully not my last, because these jerkies were delicious.



Cammy likes soccer, techno, and crocodile meat

We talked about animal families and I was reminded that kangaroos are marsupials. They look like big rodents to me, and I'd eaten rabbits and rats before, but the taste is different. Of course, it's kinda hard to say, when it's jerky, full of spices and all dried up.

The kangaroo meat was almost black in color and nice and spicy. The crocodile meat was a beige color and flavored sweet and spicy. Both were excellent munchies and good with wine or beer.



The packages are really silly, with all sorts of Australian slang written in the description -- "G'day Mate!" and "fair dinkum good."

Actually I had been wondering this week about if there are species of animals that eat each other. Not like cannibalism, but like two different species that dine on the other if they win a death match. So I suppose the crocodile would fall into this category, at least against man. Some people like to wrestle crocodiles. Does the winner get to eat the loser? I guess sharks vs. man would be another example, although I've never heard of someone wrestling a shark for entertainment. So does this kind of thing exist elsewhere in the animal kingdom? Other than man vs. animal? Anywhere on the food chain?



Speaking of eating shark, did you hear about Yao Ming's wedding?