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: Breyers Pomegranate Blends All Fruit Ice Pops

Pomegranate is supposed to be one of those new miracle foods that will make you live forever. Trumpeting antioxidants on a box of ice pops seems silly to me. I mean, if you want a fruit-flavored healthy snack, let’s face it, they invented that a long time ago: they call it fruit.

But I’m always on the lookout for an ice pop made with real fruit juice for a more sensible reason: because they usually taste better. So I figured I ought to give these a go. If nothing else, they’d be a lot easier to eat than sucking all those little pomegranate seeds to get the juice off them. You have to feel sorry for the first human who was hungry enough to try that, you know?

The first thing you notice about these is that they have a much softer texture than something like a Popsicle – definitely not that hard snappy kind of ice pop. If you eat them slowly enough they soften into something almost like Italian ice.

They come in three flavors. Fortunately for the fussy among us, they are helpfully labeled on the outside of each pop so you don’t have to rip a corner open to see which flavor it is.

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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: Fruit Leather from Stretch Island Fruit Co.

Have you ever wondered what Spam would taste like if it were made of fruit instead of pork shoulder? Neither had I, until I bit into Stretch Island Fruit Co’s “Fruit Leather,” a kind of Fruit-Roll-Up for (strong stomached) adults.

At 50 cents a pop, these iPod-sized fruit snacks were an impulse buy. Behaving like the easily distracted five-year-old I am, I couldn’t resist their colorful packaging, with its drawings of mangoes and strawberries dancing to what I imagined was kickin’ reggae beat. Needless to say, that tropical vibe had me at hello, and I exited the store confident in my cheap summer purchase.

But oh, how the tide changed when I tore open those pretty packages. Glistening like the US Army’s finest canned meat, Fruit Leather’s resemblance to processed ham was apparent immediately.

To give you a clearer mental picture of what they look like, imagine the sweaty face of an over-tan socialite as she sits on Miami Beach, thumbing through a copy of US Weekly. After weathering years of cigarette smoke and harsh UV rays, her skin has acquired a bumpy, pockmarked quality, which is slightly obscured by the layer of coconut oil covering her cheeks. These snacks resemble those cheeks exactly. Imagine a dermatologist’s nightmare and you’ve imagined Fruit Leather.

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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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