Snack Review: Whole Foods 365 Organic Chocolate Chip Cookies

You may wonder why I keep buying cookies at Whole Foods, given my past experience. Which is at best indifferent (think Crummy Brothers Chocolate Chip Cookies) and at worst, infuriating (Late July, I’m looking at you).

The fact is that I live basically right across the street from a Whole Foods. Whereas the Safeway is five blocks away. And given the total lack of meal planning in my household I am in the Whole Foods most days of the week. And given that I crave a snack every day of the week… well, you see the inevitable result.

I am determined, therefore, to find something that will work to fulfill my chocolate-chip cravings without walking all the way to another supermarket. My chocolate-chip craving is usually looking for either a completely homemade cookie, or for Chips Ahoy, which is the brand I have been eating all my life. The in-store bakery has something that will do for the homemade thing. But what about that all-American craving for a cookie made in a huge factory by an enormous corporate conglomerate?

Read more

Snack Review: Michael Season’s Baked Cheddar Cheese Pops

When I hear the words “cheesy poofs,” my mind immediately jumps to a little round kid in a red sweater, sitting on his couch and screaming obscenities at his cat. Don’t know what I’m talking about? Well, I suggest you hunker down for a marathon viewing of South Park – during which you will inevitably encounter Eric Cartman singing the praises of puffy cheese treats.

Nary a South Park season goes by without Cartman preaching the cheese puff gospel. Despite the free advertising this implies, I’d venture that snack manufactures aren’t terribly pleased with this development. After all, with “healthy” foods flying off supermarket shelves, no one wants to be the snack with the high calorie count. Personally, if I were a cheese puff CEO (those exist, right?), the last thing I’d want is a slightly obese cartoon character giving my product two pudgy thumbs up.

How then, would a snack manufacturer remake the cheese puff image? Well, according to Michael Season, the answer lies in using organic ingredients, shying away from food coloring, and slapping the word “gourmet” onto your packaging.

Oh yeah, and making your product so tasty that snack reviewers demolish their sample bag. That always helps.

Read more

Snack Review: Crummy Brothers Organic Chocolate Chip Cookies

Used to be, it was pretty safe to walk past the cookie section at a natural foods store. There was very little that was tempting – it all seemed to be designed as “treats” for the sad offspring of parents who were terrified to let little Madison and Joshua put anything in their mouths that might be remotely fun.

Well, I took a wrong turn down an aisle at Whole Foods recently and, boy, things have changed. A lot of this stuff is surely way too fancy (and expensive) to be meant for junk-deprived kiddies. And here’s the thing: these natural products ought to have a real fighting chance to be delicious. Because when I read the box, I see real ingredients that I would use to bake at home: butter, vanilla extract, sugar… rather than extra-high-test corn syrup and multisyllabic words that would be more at home on a Periodic Table of Industrial Foodstuffs.

Read more

Snack Review: FruitaBü Organic Smoooshed (TM) Fruit

There comes a time in every snacker’s life – for me, once or twice a week – when she contemplates the desirability of healthier eating habits. And then decides, nah, the hell with it.

During the brief interval between those two states of mind, I tried this fancy brand of fruit leather. When I was a kid growing up in New York, I used to love the apricot fruit leather that was sold in big sheets rolled into a cone-shape. It was a vaguely Middle Eastern ethnic delicacy at the time. Now, of course, this idea has gone mainstream and morphed into all those fruit leather and Fruit Roll-Up sorts of thing that is sold in all kinds of flavors and advertised to moms who, tragically, think that their kids should eat healthy snacks.

Read more