Thursday, August 30, 2007

Rickey Reviews Odd Food Left in the Second Floor Staff Kitchen

Every now and then, someone at Rickey’s office will leave food in the staff kitchen with the intention of giving it away gratis. Generally, this food is either: bizarre, rotten, unhealthy, or all of the above. Rickey, being the curious individual that he is, will often take aforementioned food back to his office and examine it to see if it qualifies as a suitable mid-afternoon snack. Yesterday, a tiny plastic cup in the second floor staff kitchen caught Rickey’s eye. Colored red and labeled only “JELLY,” Rickey deemed this gelatinous oddity to be worth a closer look. Below are Rickey’s field notes on the matter.

Interesting: neither the product’s manufacturer nor distributors are listed on the jelly cup. Alarm bells are stating to jingle in Rickey’s mind.

The label does however clearly state: CONTAINS NO KONJAC. What exactly is this konjac they speak of? A Saturday morning cartoon supervillan? Is it good that Rickey is not ingesting any, or bad that he’s getting enough in his daily diet?

A Wiki search reveals that Asians use this konjac ingredient frequently in cooking. And the FDA issued a full-blown ban on it in 2002. Uh oh. Evidently there was a show on this on Oprah a while ago involving paramedics trying to save children that had choked on konjac. The paramedics would use an instrument that sort of vacuums the konjac out of the wind pipe. Sometimes however, the konjac sticks to the walls of the windpipe and so there is nothing paramedics can do to save a choking child once they ingest it. Klaxon sirens are now sounding in Rickey’s head.

But hey, at least the folks manufacturing this product wised up and removed the konjac from their product. So everything’s hunky-dory, right? Not quite. The ingredients in this highly suspect snack only heighten Rickey’s concerns. The contents are:

1) R.O. Pure Water (holy shit, just how bad does water need to be to require reverse osmosis?)
2) Fructose (mmm, healthy!)
3) Sugar (what, the fructose wasn’t enough?)
4) Coconut (well hey, at least that’s a natural ingredient)
5) Seaweed Extract (ewwwww, what the fuck?)
6) Acidulants (hooray for additives!)
7) Natural Lychee Flavor (sorry, but there’s nothing natural about a fruit that comes from the soapberry family)

Feeling just barely brave enough to sample this seemingly lethal children’s snack, Rickey peels off the plastic top and gingerly licks it. Hm, tastes kind of like mop water. Sickly sweet, and there’s something else in there too… …a slight after-taste of what Rickey imagines horse semen must taste like. Awesome.

Now convinced that the experience cannot possibly get any worse, Rickey pinches the bottom of the cup, and tilts his head back to force the gelatinous mop water into his mouth. Oh god. If Beelzebub were to mandate that the eternally damned take jello shots in the fiery abyss, we imagine this is kind of what they’d taste like. An entire afternoon of work productivity has been lost and Rickey must now unleash hell in the second floor men’s bathroom.

Rickey’s not entirely sure precisely which Asian country this awful food hails from (to prevent a full-scale nuclear strike, the label wisely doesn’t identify that information). But once Rickey finds out, he’ll definitely be writing a few letters to his congressman. And a big shout out to the sadistic bastard in his office who tried to poison Rickey today. It’ll take more than that to keep Rickey down.

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11 comments:

Anonymous said...

Rickey - Be careful about food you find sitting around. Egan has a history of mischief...

http://eganfoote.wordpress.com/2006/12/18/is-that-a-baby-foote-in-my-salad-dressing/

Egan, out.

TheJackSack said...

You're eating abandoned foods! Time for an intervention, methinks.

Toasty Joe said...

That's quite a charming office park in which Rickey works. That view is enough to make one contemplate suicide on a daily basis, I'd wager.

Rickey said...

The view isn't all that bad Joe--there's a few trees off camera to the right that house a family of squirrels who antics entertain Rickey. But yes, the window does overlook a goddamn parking lot.

Toasty Joe said...

Speaking of that parking lot, is that Fred Sanford's truck all the way in the background?

Darcy X said...

"there's a few trees off camera to the right that house a family of squirrels . . ."

Squirrels? Well, Rickey, there's your problem. Are any of these squirrels, perchance, black?

Rickey said...

Nah, no black squirrels in Westchester.... they do however exist across the bridge in NJ.

Noah said...

Rickey:

You have described much of what the food in an MRE tastes like. That's why they put little bottles of tobasco sauce in all the MREs. That way, the mop water tastes like tobasco sauce and mop water. And that, my friend, is much more tolerable.

Rickey said...

Smitty: remind Rickey never to join the armed services.

Ryan said...

That was probably the best thing I've read all day, and that includes the epic tale of Gilgamesh.

Well done, sir. I'm pretty sure the man-beard is the only reason you are still alive...

michael o. said...

Awesome.

RE: Black squirrels in NJ...I've never seen them. In Denver maybe, but not in NJ.

Also, they call them Abraham Lincoln squirrels out there from what I was told.