Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Doritos 4cheese Flavored Tortilla Chips AND A CONTEST

Today's review is decidedly brief -- it had been sitting on my "shelf" since October for this reason -- because I am announcing a little reader participation event this week. Get the details after the review.

My quest for a mid-morning snack once again turned up a surprise when I noticed the sudden appearance of a new item in the vending machine: Doritos 4cheese Flavored Tortilla Chips. "They're back by popular demand."

The packaging alone is enough to make this snack enticing, but not because it makes it appear overly appetizing.

The hazy pattern of the bag itself conjures up fire, and a silhouetted creepy hand makes me think that someone is being burned alive. This sort of imagery conveys "spicy," although "4cheese" does not sound spicy at all.

Why is "4cheese" one word? Doesn't the Frito Lay family of snack foods have a typographer?

Back, to the creepy imagery, "4cheese" seemed to be tied to horror somehow, because Doritos invited me to "unleash the spirits at snackstrongproductions.com on the back of the package. This URL simply redirected me to www.doritos.com where I was met with some sort of virtual city that did not succeed in enticing me to explore it. What spirits were they expecting me to unleash here?

And why are these chips "back by popular demand" if I have never heard of them in my life?

I had a lot of questions at this point.

The only answer I got was that these chips taste like Nacho Cheese and Cool Ranch Doritos combined. Who, exactly, demanded this?

And now for the High School Lunch Memories Contest!



After my friend Haim, proprietor of the Frosty Insides refrigerator blog, suggested that I sneak into a high school and review high school lunch (a plan that is still in the works) he and I started talking about high school lunch memories. So, I'm asking you this: What do you remember about high school lunch? Share your lists or stories and the lucky winner will receive an exciting prize of my choice. If you live nearby, I'll probably take you out to eat. If not, I'll mail you something cool like a limited edition Nate's Plate promotional coaster, a yet-to-be-produced Nate's Plate lobster bib, or maybe some Taco Bell Bucks®.

To share your tales of dipping fries in cheese sauce, taco pizzas shaped like stop signs and that kid who always lurked around the ketchup dispensers, post 'em up in the comments. You don't even need a Blogspot ID to do it.

13 comments:

Stacey W. said...

Our favorite lunch time delicacy was our weekly "pizza, corn, and applesauce." Where we would spread apple sauce on our rectangle of pizza and then top it with corn. It paired well with a nearly expired chocolate milk. We sincerely claimed that we liked it, I can still remember what it tastes like.

Amber said...

I often enjoyed making a mix of slop using everyone's leftover lunch bits. It usually involved a lot of chunky foods like pretzels & Little Debbies bathed in saucy products like ketchup & nacho cheese & anything else laying around on the big, rectangular, faux-wood table. The slop mix was contained either in one of the flimsy cardboard food-holding boats, or directly on a tray. The slop mix was never consumed and always left for the poor, poor lunch lady to clean up.

Nathan J Rogers said...

My friend Rachel shared this one with me via IM:

Due to some kind of feild trip i didnt feel like going on i wasn't sitting with my normal lunch crew, and these girls were gossiping about some drama i wasnt paying attention to - then all the sudden everyone shuts up as another girl walks up and yells "fucking slut" and pours an entire bottle of red pop on this blond girls head. everyone froze. i think i ran away.

Unknown said...

I remember one time we were in the lunch room in 7th grade just eating our food when some kid threw a snack pack at the ceiling fan.

It was like in slow motion. It was beautiful. It hit the spinning blades and exploded into a chocolately frag grenade of awesome.

This might not be true but I think a food fight started after that. I don't recall. We had quite a few at my junior high. Anyways, yeah.

Unknown said...

During my sophomore year, Art Anderson was in a bet that he could eat a whole jar of mayo. Since he is the ultimate human of all time, he took the challenge at lunch. He got half way done with this jar of mayo and then our not so ultimate principle paid him to stop which was a bummer... but I think she actually paid him more then he would have won through the bet (which was 5 dollars if I recall correctly) which is even better.

most biggest said...

I love the pizza bagel. An amazing delicious scheme for getting rid of three day old bagels.

Nathan J Rogers said...

Kate shared this with me via a MySpace message: We used to have a huge projection screen in the lunch room in high school where we watched the daily "lakeland news" every lunch hour. Well, one day this kid Steve went over and took out the news tape and switched it with a porn video. No one ever saw Steve again after that though.

Waiting for Something to Happen said...

I wrote a different really long story before remembering this one, with a better moral.

I had this friend scott, whose dad was a dj on an oldies station. We used to hang out in the gym at lunch. He was really nice... I mean, he hung out with me, and I was only there for half a day before I had to ride the bus back to catholic school.

He was on the basketball team, which, for some reason, drew the attention of a sort of special girl named charlotte.

It started with "pants"ing. Nylon pants were pretty cool, and pantsing people was all the rage. Charlotte would try to pants scott everyday, and he would tell her to leave him alone.

Then, she started trash-talking like crazy. Everyday, she would come up and say "You suck at basketball. I could kick your a**. I am so much faster than you!!" He would ignore her. The taunts continued, and finally, he agreed to play her. He won, but tried to be nice about it. She wouldn't let it go. She said "I want a rematch, and this time, lets make it interesting. I bet $100 that I'll beat you one-on-one." She didn't. Within days, she "owed" scott over $10,000 which was a lot of money in those days. He figured she would drop it.

A few days later, she came into the gym and started screaming, so that everyone was staring at her. "I don't have the money, and even if I did, I wouldn't pay you, because you're an a**hole" she yelled. Scott had to go to the office and explain why he was trying to hustle special kids at basketball. After that, we were banned from playing basketball at lunch, which made me happy, because I was really bad.

brennen said...

Once I proposed to a girl with a Funyun, the crappy dried onion ring (chip?). She rejected my offer and my heart sank, but my spirits were still in full swing. I decided to purchase all of the Twix candy bars (by far the most popular item at the "Snack Bar") and headed out to the playground. Schoolmates flocked to me, eyes eager and mouths salivating with anticipation of paying the inflated price for a Twix bar. Mrs. Rejector came up to me asking for a candy bar as well. The rejector suddenly became the rejectee! Boo-ya bitch!

Matthew said...

Ah, high school. I remember eating on the floor of a large dusty landing and listening to the suicide machines on a tape player that looked like an answering machine while Andrew Miller jumped down the stairs repeatedly.

When I purchased actual food, which was rare, it was usually a piece of pizza with the flavour and consistency of modeling clay and an apple juice with a foil lid that always managed to find new ways to spill all over my pants. Most of the time though, it was three chocolate chip cookies.

Three glorious, gooey, tooth-rotting freshly baked cookies for a dollar, shoveled into a bag gone translucent from the fat and pure awesome they contained. Quite often these cookies would clump together, and you would be forced to pick at the edges before finally manning up and confronting this absurd, half-baked brick of semi-solid goo. It was impossible for me to eat this brick without smearing chocolate all over my zit-pocked face and billabong hoodie in full view of the cute, popular girls who hung around the Salem School Store. Not that they were paying any attention to me, instead making googley-eyes at the meatheads behind the counter with their hooters t-shirts and downy soft whispers of goatee.

One time I decided to venture to the Canton building (my high school, and Nate's high school, and possibly your high school was actually two high schools on the same campus) to see what sort of mysterious and exotic cookies they peddled. Turns out they were the exact same cookies, albeit sold in what resembled a holiday inn gift shop next to a useless set of stairs to nowhere everyone called the pit. I think people hung out there because they felt they had to. Anyway, I had not idea how to procur cookies at this location. Being incredibly shy and awkward, I conveyed my need for sugar and empty calories through mutters and frantic stares, but the meatheads remained unresponsive. Inwardly furious, I got out of there as fast as I could, striding in speedy shame back to Salem in order not to be late for art class. Having missed my fix, I bought a bag of cookies during passing time and ate them so quickly they made me sick and my stomach loudly gurgle all throughout english.

I'm not sure what lesson to extract from this, other than cookies are great and stay out of the Canton School Store.

Travis Bye said...

Three lunch memories:

I once lost my lunch money, which meant a free PBJ. I didn't want the sandwich, so Curtis the school bully threw it and hit the milk lady in the face. He was our Nelson.

Another time, when 'Don't be a fool, stay in school' was a thing, I said 'Don't be a fool, get me a fork.' to my lunch lady. She didn't get the reference and I got a pink slip.

Finally, PUTTING FLAMIN' HOT DORITOS ON SANDWICHES AND MAKING THEM CRUNCHY AS FUCK. Win.

Unknown said...

This story definitely began during school lunch but extended for several hours beyond in the emergency room.

So I was one of those kids whose mom packed their lunch. Every lunch was wholesome and nutritious; carrot sticks, Oscar Meyer ham sandwich, Welch's juice box, maybe a bag of Doritos. That sort of thing.

Around seventh grade, my sister and I started pestering my mom to buy 12 packs of Coke for us to take in our lunches as they were delicious and we were thoroughly addicted to caffeine. After a few weeks of begging she finally conceded.

One day I grab my brown bag lunch off the top shelf of my locker and take it down to the lunch room. Upon arrival I was horrified to find that my lunch was squashed (mayo shooting out of the side of the sandwich, chips crushed) and the Coke can was dented to hell.

"What the hell," I thought. "I'm young and virile, I can handle a dented up Coke can." I did the "tap the top" thing that supposedly takes down the pressure in the can (it doesn't), popped the fucker open and started drinking the Cola-flavored corn juice.

At the end of lunch I had finished my meal and daily routine of throwing bagels at nerds and pickles at windows and tipped the Coke to get the last drops of my brown rebellion.

Something totally hurt. Like a lot. In my throat. So I went down to the drinking fountain to drink some water. Ouch. Every time I swallowed there was an INTENSE pain. It felt fucking weird and I couldn't figure out what the fuck was going on. I still had the Coke can with me and examined its insides. Had someone put razor blades in it?

No, the tab that goes inside the can when you popped it had fallen into the can and I had drank it and got it stuck in my throat. I went to the school nurse and she called my mom and my mom took me to the emergency room. I was put in a room at the back of some darkened hallway with nothing but a spitoon. I couldn't swallow without intense pain, so I spit. For hours.

Finally, they came to take an X-ray of my fucked up insides. They took me into the room and gave me a cup of this milky, chalky white liquid to drink. "Barium," the technician said. "Barium swallows." I laughed at the phrase "barium swallows" (obvi) but it hurt so I stopped. "It'll let us see where this pop can thing is stuck." I drank it.

The barium tasted like chalk and gunmetal. It was fucking gross. So after I swallowed it they put me under the X-ray machine and I realized it didn't hurt anymore. Somehow the heavy metal cocktail washed it away, down into my guts. I went home with my mom super pissed at me for not previously drinking a heavy metal cocktail while I worried about shitting out a pop tab the next day.

I never shit it out (I presume it dissolved in my stomach acid) but the next day my shit was white from the barium.

johnny said...

domino's pizza day, baby:

2 slices + chocolate milk = $1.25.

who cares about the scoop of canned fruit cocktail?