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Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Crack Food

It seems impossible these days to keep up with what and what not to eat.  As a primary school kid, I was told by Healthy Harold that carbs were the best thing of all, bottom of the food pyramid, five to six servings a day to stay fit and strong.   But now carbs have become public enemy number one.  What sort of a world do we live in where a talking robotic giraffe who lives in a psychedelic caravan can be misinformed on the facts of nutrition?

Deluded that Harold was not in fact the animal oracle I had perceived him to be, I decided to stop listening to nutritionists, current affairs programmes and infomercials and invent my own dietary principles;  foods that are amazing for us taste average, foods that are okay for us taste pretty good, and foods that are terrible for us taste amazing.  All in all, I’ve found this a pretty good system to go off, but it has come to my attention lately that I, like many others I presume, am haunted by a fourth, silent category.  These are the foods which are neither good for us nor enjoyable, yet we cannot resist them, they tease us, play on our minds, once we start we can’t stop despite the near crippling shame and afterwards we are left with nothing more than a bad case of the sweats and a chronic comedown.  These are crack foods.

The archetypal crack food is the cheese single.  Those plastic coated yellow squares of shame whose creation is surely so mechanically induced that we cannot call them dairy.  I think the only way a cow could naturally produce a cheese single would be if you deprived it of all water and fed it only candle wax and glad wrap.  But there is something irresistible about them.  Some chemical composition that has us running back to the fridge before we’ve finished the first to grab another three. 

Don’t get me wrong, like all losers with too much time on their hands, I have trained myself to appreciate smelly expensive cheese and I pretend to know something about it in the same way I pretend to know about red wine or Dadaism, but it doesn’t give me that single buzz – that euphoric transcendence to a time of sprinklers underneath trampolines and stress free days!

It is interesting to consider that cheese singles and all other crack cheese products (it can come in sticks, wedges and even stringers) are marketed at children.  At first you might think this is because the rubbery artificial flavour is not suited to mature pallets.  Wrong.  It’s just a ploy to activate our receptors.  Essentially, anybody who has been exposed to a single is permanently addicted, although years of abstinence may have made them inactive.  If you don’t believe me, offer a cheese single to an adult, watch their pupils dilate and check their fridge a week later.

But crack foods can also take more subtle and appealing forms.  Boost smoothies are crack food.  If you make a smoothie at home or buy one from a cafe, halfway down you’ll be rather full.  You’ll finish the whole thing, but only just.  You’ll feel satisfied and full.  If it’s a Boost, then you’ll slurp it all down so quickly you get a brain freeze and before you know what’s happening you’ll have combed your hair the other way and be ordering again under another name.   After a few years the taste get’s unbearable but you won’t even be able to get out of bed without a Brekkie to Gogo. 


I’ve seen Boost Boss Janine lately on TV lately explaining how she is saving Gen Y by giving them an opportunity....an opportunity to work in her glorified drug labs for minimum wage.  Boost staff may seem to ‘love life’, but that is just because they’re so whacked out on the smoothies.

But don’t live in fear of crack food addiction.  Just be weary of any foods you don’t enjoy but can’t put down.  And keep an eye on the marketing.  Pringles’ slogan ‘Once you pop, you can’t stop’ is practically telling you it’’s a crack food.

In reflection, I realise this post has been rather flippant in its reference to substance abuse.  So I’d like to clear something up; in no way do I condone the production, selling or consumption of cheese singles or Boost smoothies.

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