Snack Review: Fage Yogurt

As you may recall from previous installments of Linda vs Yogurt, my life-long horror of fruit-flavored yogurt was temporarily banished by Rachel’s Wickedly Delicious Yogurt, but then a tragic relapse was caused by Trader Joe’s Black Cherry Yogurt.

So when I saw that this Fage yogurt came in honey flavor, this seemed like a good thing: a new flavor I could try that was nothing like fruit. It’s better not to think too hard about honey, which is basically insect vomit, but on the bright side, that is definitely not a kind of fruit, right?

The package says that this is “Greek strained yogurt.” I assume they mean that the excess moisture is drained off, as you can do with normal yogurt if you put it in a strainer lined with cheesecloth. Which is not exactly what I would call ’strained’ even though a strainer is involved, but I can’t discuss this further at this point because now I’m having that thing happen where you know how you write a word too many times and it stops losing its meaning? Strain strain strain. Is that really English? We’ll just have to move on.

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Snack Review: Trader Joe’s Black Cherry Yogurt

After my experience with Rachel’s Wickedly Delicious Yogurt, which blew my mind about the whole concept of fruit-flavored yogurt, I thought, maybe it was not Rachel. Maybe I’ve changed. Maybe my tastes have changed. Or maybe yogurt’s tastes have changed: maybe it’s just that now yogurt comes in good fruit flavors.

After all, the choices used to be pretty lame: strawberry and raspberry were about as radical as it got, in the old days. So maybe I didn’t need Rachel’s with its fancy pretentious sleekly black modern graphics and wickedly postmodern marketing copy. Maybe all I needed was any old brand of interesting fruit flavor yogurt.

And where do you go for unpretentious? Why, Trader Joe’s, of course. No one pretends that Trader Joe is a real person. They don’t advertise Trader Joe’s products with sleek black graphics. They don’t have a website for their yogurt.

So, I got this Trader Joe’s Black Cherry yogurt, and, with my new positive attitude, dug in.

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Snack Review: Rachel’s Wickedly Delicious Yogurt

No, wait! Don’t go!

I know, I know. You don’t come here to read about yogurt. Yogurt isn’t a snack. It’s a meal replacement for deluded dieters who will inevitably be hungry an hour later and succumb to Twinkies from a vending machine, or a health food for people who’ve read that there are some crazy eastern Europeans somewhere who eat yogurt at every meal and live to be a hundred… or at least their lives feel really long, what with having to eat all that yogurt all the time.

I hate fruit flavored yogurt. I like plain yogurt in savory dishes like Indian cucumber raita. I can eat maple or vanilla sweetened yogurt, although without a huge amount of enthusiasm. But I have always felt that yogurt doesn’t improve fruit, and fruit doesn’t improve yogurt.

Well, maybe there really is an exception to every rule.

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Snack Review: Mariani Premium Chocolate Yogurt Raisins

You’d think after many years of mostly responsible consumerism, that I would heed the cardinal rule of grocery shopping: never shop hungry. I invariably break the rule at least once a month. Like this afternoon. And it wasn’t pretty.

The Mariani Premium Chocolate Yogurt Raisins were void of any taste resembling premium, chocolate, raisin, or yogurt. Chocolate yogurt I can tolerate, and I really enjoy plain yogurt-covered raisins, but these things were not at all what I expected. I could have simply eaten balls of wet Kleenex and enjoyed more flavor, and saved time and money, too.

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