Food In Real Life

Healthy Choice Bacon & Smokey Cheddar Chicken

Looks: You’d be forgiven for wondering why I took a picture of this meal after I chewed it and spit it back out, but hold onto your butts: that’s what it actually looks like immediately after cooking. The vegetables still look frozen, and the chicken and rice mixture is pale, mushy, and completely unappetizing. 1 out of 5

Taste: Worse than it looks. The vegetables were flavorless, and while the chicken and rice had a flavor, it wasn’t one I’d like to taste again anytime soon – bitter, oily, gritty, disgusting: much like my last foray into microwave chicken and rice. 0 out of 5

McDonald’s Big Mac Snack Wrap

Looks: The wrap in the ad is beefy, the tortilla filled to the point of bursting. The wrap in real life looks like a scared little hamburger turtle, just barely poking its head out of its shell. No lettuce or onions to speak of – just beef and cheese.

If you were to open up the wrap, you’d see this work of art:

I’m getting hungry just looking at this picture, aren’t you? Not even half a beef patty, and even fewer toppings than are visible poking out of the end of the wrap in the ad. 2 out of 5

Taste: It tastes… very much like a Big Mac. Well, until the third bite, when you’ve used up all the special sauce and cheese, and you’re left with three more bites of dry beef and tortilla. I would have given the first bite a four, but the last bite was more like a 1 – I guess I’ll have to go with the average. 2.5 out of 5

Chex Mix Chocolate Chunk Bars

Looks: This bar looks like someone took the bar on the box and bashed it with a hammer. There are none of those mini chocolate pieces, the Chex pieces are all crumbled, and the bar is struggling to maintain a rectangular shape. 2.5 out of 5

Taste: I think I have the actual recipe for this bar: take some Chex mix, pour some sickly-sweet chocolate all over it, bash it with a hammer, and then have a kindergarten class form this mix into bars. The bar is very gritty – it falls apart when you bite it, and the chocolate is too sweet for this to be in the same category as granola/nut bars, putting it firmly in the cookie/sweets category. 3 out of 5

Wheatables

Looks: The crackers don’t have as smooth a surface as the ones on the box, and their color is bit more varied. (If you look closely, you can see that I managed to snap a picture of the mythical “unseparated cracker” in the top of the photograph – the fault line is there, but it was never completely broken.) 4 out of 5

Taste: You’ll notice that the box claims that these taste “Better than Wheat Thins!” I’m a big fan of Wheat Thins, but I agree with the box. Wheatable are like a cross between a Wheat Thin and a Ritz cracker. Wheaty and slightly sweet like the Wheat Thin, but crispy, like the Ritz; I had to stop myself from absentmindedly eating the whole box. What’s the deal with their shape though? 5 out of 5