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big men, little wieners
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The poor potted meat selection at Safeway brings Patti to tears.
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I guess the sign has always been in the grocery store. I just never noticed it before. Canned Meats. The very name was enough to send chills down my spine. This is a section of the supermarket where SPAM was at the gourmet end of the spectrum.
We were at the grocery store, looking for Turkey SPAM, when we hit the motherlode: the canned meat aisle.
My original idea was to have a Badmouth Thanksgiving. I had noticed the Turkey SPAM on an earlier trip to the store. I thought we could buy some, cook it, dress it up to look like a real turkey, then do a taste test. But once I opened my eyes to the other “meat” on the shelves, I realized that we had a bigger issue than any one can of SPAM. I saw the Armour Potted Meat Product.
I decided then that we needed to have a taste test of the entire canned meat section. I assembled a crack team of tasters consisting of myself, girlfriend Patti and my friends Aaron and Russ. Then I selected
five “meats” in a can for us to try.
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I found this box of “Moist & Meaty” dog food at Raley’s. Coincidentally, “Moist & Meaty” was also my nickname in high-school.
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- SPAM – The control food. SPAM is the only meat in a can that I can remember eating – and that was under threat of legal action. It wasn’t bad, though. It was the benchmark meat.
- Armour Potted Meat Product – This was the nastiest sounding product of the bunch. They couldn’t even call it meat. It was “meat product.” And what kind of meat? Aardvark? Diseased lemur? It kind of left it to your imagination. I read the back label. I should have continued to leave it to my imagination.
- Gerber Graduates Meat Sticks – Okay, so this is baby food, and it came in a jar. But it was meat, and I seemed to remember that putting things in a jar is called “canning,” so I decided it qualified.
- Liverwurst Spread – This came with a fancy paper wrapper around the can and a little picture of a devil. For some reason, the wrapper made all the difference. This was obviously a high-class canned meat product.
- Iams Premium Dog Food: Turkey and Rice Formula – After reading the side of the potted meat can, it occurred to me that dog food couldn’t be much worse. In fact, the top three ingredients in Iams seemed better than the potted meat. The word “premium” seemed vaguely reassuring, too. I picked turkey for variety.
We topped it off by buying a box of Club Crackers to put the meats on. According to the back of the box “The light, flakey, buttery taste of Club Crackers makes everything taste better.“
We were about to prove them wrong.
Next on Badmouth:
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I take careful, scientific notes as Girlfriend Patti dictates.
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So we were down to the tasting. To recap: My friends Aaron and Russ, girlfriend Patti and I were all tasting various “meats” you could buy in a can. The meat-like substances were: Armour Potted Meat Product, Gerber Graduates Meat Sticks, Liverwurst Spread, SPAM, and Iams: Turkey and Rice Formula Dog Food — for variety.
All of our meat products were served on Club Crackers, because evidently “”they make everything taste better“. The crackers were then put on plain paper plates, so the meats became “mystery meats” in every sense of the word.
Since girlfriend Patti and I had a pretty good idea about which meat was which, we thought it only fair to allow Aaron and Russ to choose what meats we would eat. The only rule was, if one of them ate it, I had to eat it too. We warned them that one “meat” was not made for human consumption. Russ won the coin toss, so Aaron went first.
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A boy and his wiener
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Aaron went for the Meat Sticks because they “didn’t look like dog food.” He was pleasantly surprised and ventured they would be even tastier with condiments.
After downing our crackers, the taste team rated the food:
Aaron: “8 out of 10. Not too bad.”
Russ: “I liked them”
Patti: “The most nutritious thing I’ve eaten in a long time.”
John: “Not bad. I bet they’d make really cool little ‘pigs in a blanket’.”
Potted Meat Product also makes excellent glue
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Russ went next, and giving in to some dark masochistic urge, he selected the Armour Potted Meat Product. I will go on record as saying that this had the nastiest-sounding label in the bunch. I guess the Meat Product’s pink, glistening, gelatinous form beckoned to some dark, twisted place deep in Russ’s soul.
Taste team comments:
Russ: “I didn’t know you had a Bass-O-Matic”
Patti: “Holy Mother of God, what am I eating?”
Aaron: “Please tell me that was the dog food.”
John: “I want to meet the person who thought that was edible…and give him the beating of his life.”
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SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, SPAM…
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Aaron was up again, and wisely went for the SPAM. Guessing again that the more solid processed, meat-like substances were not the dog food. I’ve had SPAM before, and it really isn’t all that bad. So there were no big surprises here.
Aaron: “Quite tasty.”
Russ: “I think this is what ham would taste like in hell.”
(Editor’s Note: I think Russ recognized the SPAM and thus invalidated this portion of the experiment, as his answer was meant for laughs, and not a true reflection of the tastiness of SPAM.)
Patti: “Tastes like chicken�mechanically separated chicken. Salty.”
John: “I love the taste of SPAM in the morning. It’s my favorite luncheon loaf.”
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Cat food or liverwurst: What’s the difference, really?
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We were down to the nitty-gritty here. Russ was left with the foul smelling liverwurst and the fouler smelling dog food. He went for the liverwurst because it “looked more like cat-food compared to dog food.”
Due to that comment and the strong liver taste, the notion that we were eating cat food became firmly entrenched in the taste panel’s minds after this and the results reflect it.
Russ: “Probably cat food. Not bad none the less.”
Aaron: “I feel like I just deprived some Third World cat of its food.”
Patti: (Did not finish cracker. Our first sign of weakness.) “Meow! Meow! Meow! Meow!”
John: “Like grout except with a fouler texture � the aftertaste appears to be with me for the next few days. Ugh!”
Despite the general consensus that this was cat food, everyone agreed that the Armour Potted Meat Product tasted much worse.
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Crackers give John’s coat body and shine.
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This was the moment of truth. There was little doubt about which was the dog food at this point. I tried to find a brand with good wholesome ingredients that might not taste too bad, but I failed. This was some repugnant crap on a cracker.
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You can’t keep a good meat product down
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Aaron knew it was dog food. We all knew it was dog food. It smelled like rancid meat left in the sun for three days wrapped in unwashed jock straps. The only sensible thing would be for Aaron to walk away and forget about the whole thing.
The bastard ate his cracker.
Now per the agreement at the beginning of the experiment, I had to eat a cracker, too. Patti and Russ looked like a team of Israeli commandos could not have gotten a cracker within 20 feet of their mouths. So I was all alone on this one.
I folded the cracker in half so that there would be a small pastry barrier between me and the Iams as I started chewing. It didn’t help. It felt like something crawled up in my mouth and died. After a chew and a half the bile poured from the back of my throat. You can’t keep a good meat product down.
I barfed.
After spitting out the dog food and sending a little of the meat product after it, I was still consumed with the dry heaves for a minute or two. I grabbed a glass of milk we had prepared for this sort of emergency and swished it around in my mouth then spit. Repeat. I drank some to wash the fetid taste of stomach acid from the sides of my throat.
I fought the meat and the meat won.
Aaron: “No comment. I’m spending all my energy keeping it down.”
John: “I tried. I tried. Oh Lord, I tried.”
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Russ finally manages to make smoking look cool by killing some taste buds after eating potted meat.
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So what did we learn from all this? I learned that Aaron is some sort of sick degenerate who will eat anything. In his defense, he claimed that he “felt he had no choice” and that by the rules he “had to eat it.” So he indulged in his perverse desire to eat food not fit for humans, and he drug me down with him.
I learned that Russ likes wieners designed for small children. I learned to avoid foods that I never would have eaten in the first place. I learned that no matter how nutritious the dog food label reads, it still tastes like dog food.
Even on a Club Cracker.
God Bless.
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