CHEWING GUM

Sometimes the initiation of chewing chewing gum makes me sneeze. If this was marketed as an advantage, like as a really minor extreme sport, this might succeed. MAY CAUSE SNEEZING!!! Wow, I am buying this renegade product and putting it in my mouth.

Unfortunately, it’s not even mentioned on the packaging, it’s just a fairly rubbish occasional surprise. This reduces the overall score for all chewing gum, ever, by two points without pointing out any further faults. The thing is, there are several further faults.

The major further fault is that chewing gum is not really even a food when you think about it. You actually don’t even have to think about it at all to realise that chewing gum is not food. Swallowing chewing gum doesn’t cause any of the dire playground myths, but you’d have to swallow so many bits to even satisfy stomach-filling it’d end up costing you the equivalent of a slap-up at Hix Champagne and Caviar Bar inside Selfridges.

Other further faults include fruit chewing gum, which is always, always wrong. Keep it mint, if you must go down the chewing gum route. The word ‘mint’ on your packaging is such a failsafe that black mint Airwaves is surprisingly palatable, even borderline advisable.

One thing it is good for is when you ought to have done vocal exercises for some reason, but haven’t. Putting in three pieces of chewing gum and doing an excessively rounded chewing technique makes it feel like your mouth’s warmed up a bit. Conversely, it can also make the inside of your mouth feel like a cool sanctuary on a hot day. Here at Average Food Blog, we give you these gems for free.

All chewing gum, ever: disqualified as non-food, or 4/10.

CADBURY CHOCOS

Steak should be cut into the shape of a tiny thin not-quite cylinder.

Trout should be cut into the shape of a tiny thin not-quite cylinder.

Bread should be cut into the shape of a tiny thin not-quite cylinder.

Goulash should be cut into the shape of a tiny thin not-quite cylinder.

Let’s make this easier:

EVERY FOODSTUFF SHOULD BE CUT INTO THE SHAPE OF A TINY THIN NOT-QUITE CYLINDER.

Instantly adding a whole new dimension to any consumable, Cadbury show the rest how it’s done.

Dairy Milk is little short of utterly unrecognisable in its tiny thin not-quite cylinder form. Maybe it’s the slight slope on the edges that makes it not quite a cylinder that does it, like the slice on the Fugu fish by a knife-wielder in the know making it edible.

Not that Dairy Milk isn’t edible in its raw form, of course, but don’t mess with a diabolically inadequate simile, alright?

Sure, they can fit less chocolate into a fully-cylindrical packet of tony not-quite cylinders, thereby improving their margins to the ultimate detriment of s/he who consumes by volume – but I am a consumer by experience, and this is a heightened one.

To sum up: nobody ever buys Cadbury Chocos, ever, except this one time I did, and this blog won’t change that.

8/10

MORRISON’S ‘FISHMONGER’ THAI PRAWN FISHCAKES

Seriously, what made them think it was acceptable to put what amounts to a somewhat oceanic-tasting variation on the worst kind of school dinner mulch into breadcrumbs and then charge £1.69 for two?

This is not fish; you are not a fishmonger.

1/10

3/10 FOR ALL TESCO SANDWICHES

Show me a Tesco sandwich that tastes of anything, anything at all, and I’ll show you a lying sandwich.

Mayonnaise minus any discernible acidic kick (necessary trait), meat that tastes like the Walker’s crisps flavouring carrying the name of that meat, and Tesco’s famously tasteless vegetable offerings: this all adds up to the fact that the Tesco sandwich is the anti-eating experience, a vortex for the salivary glands to disappear into.

The three out of ten is merely awarded for the satiation of hunger, and even at that they’re not particularly effective. Passable, perhaps, when thrown together with a tasteless banana and pack of Hula Hoops.

A close acquaintance has told me that the exception to this rating system is the supermarket’s offering in the genre ‘Ploughman’s’. This writer has not sampled this sandwich, but it’s too late for a hero. Far, far too late.