Snack News: Pizza Vending Machines Coming to a Breakroom Near You!

Fresh, hot pizza in 30 minutes or less? Funk dat! How about TWO minutes!

No, it’s not a sign of the Apocalypse, just a super-fast melding of pizza-making and machine vending engineering from the folks at WonderPizza. Check out this video of a slender Italian woman plunking coins into a pizza vending machine the size of a Mini Cooper-S while funky fresh beats play in the background.

The machines have been spitting out two-minute pizzas around the world for nearly five years and are heading to the U.S. Duck and cover!

Perfect for people who’ve GOTTA HAVE PIZZA RIGHT NOW!

Thanks to Wall Street Fighter for bringing this abomination to light.

Beverage Review: BOING! Fruit Juice

I love bunny rabbits and kangaroos and the sound they make when they hop around: BOING! BOING! (Okay, I know they don’t make that sound, but I watched a ton of cartoons when I was a kid, so play along.) I also like frogs and toads, and crickets and grasshoppers to a lesser degree. But I wouldn’t eat any of them. Not even if you paid me to write snack reviews about rabbit jerky, fried kangaroo bites, or honey baked insects.

I’m also a sucker for a well-designed, eye-popping, brightly colored logo. This appeals to my graphic artist sensibilities as well as my inner hummingbird. At the heart of all this nonsense is the juice. Ah, sweet nectar.

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Snack Review: Earthbound Farm Organic Dried Plums

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other word would smell as sweet.” So said Shakespeare through the lips of the lovely and tragic Juliet. Would this scene have worked as well if he’d replaced rose with prune? A prune by any other word would taste as sweet doesn’t have quite the same passionate impact.

Lately, I seem to be obsessed with dried fruit as literary metaphor (apricots, anyone?). What would Freud say? Or Jung? Or Carmen Miranda? Maybe I’m craving healthier snacks after all that beef jerky I ate last month.

A prune by any other word would be as ugly. Or would it? Dried plum or prune? That is the question.

Prune. Uttering the word brings to my mind brave senior citizens battling irregularity the natural way. It also sounds like prude; a wrinkled nose condemning a double entendre or bawdy joke. On the flipside, what if the snake had offered Eve a bite of his prune? “Eh, no thanks fella, I’m good.” Alas, it was the apple instead. For want of a prune, paradise was lost.

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Snack Review: Mariani Dried Mediterranean Apricots

Ages ago I had a difficult time with the music of Bob Dylan and Miles Davis - I simply couldn’t figure these guys out. Genius is often misunderstood.

With repeated listenings, however, I learned to relax and let the music speak to me instead of trying to smother it with my own expectations. In the light of maturity (albeit an increasingly myopic light) I can’t conceive of a world without the music of these two musical legends.

Some things are worth a second listen, a second look.

Or, in the snack world, (can you see this coming?) a second taste.

Noble intentions in tow, I would venture back to the land of Mariani after my initial encounter with their Chocolate Yogurt Raisins.

The bag called to me from the supermarket shelf with a siren song, epic images of Homeric grandeur filling my head with promises of exotic adventure and threats of thrilling mayhem. Mariani Mediterranean Apricots.

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Snack Review: Jovy Fruit Rolls

To be honest, fruit rolls (or rollups, which always sounds to me like the stomach-crunching calisthenics I was ordered to perform in seventh grade) have never thrilled me. Maybe it’s because my kids occasionally request them, and most of the offerings on the market are so sickly sweet and utterly sticky (say that ten times fast) that they’re more trouble than they’re worth. On the rare occasions I ate a Fruit Roll-Up, I always felt as though I were consuming artificially sweetened and flavored industrial adhesive, and paying for the privilege.

So, it was with much trepidation that I received a large box of assorted Jovy Fruit Rolls containing enough flattened and rolled fruit to feed a small army of hungry children and nervous adults.
I was pleasantly surprised by this product and enjoyed nearly every flavor. Consider me a convert to Jovianism.

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