Skip to main content

Are you hungry, man?

Image
By
I was in the Tribeca Food Emporium today after work. It's where I usually do my grocery shopping. I didn't really need to buy anything, but I had to go back to look at what I noticed there yesterday. It was incredible. It was chilling. It was a Swanson's Hungry Man™ Hearty Breakfast. You know Swanson's, right? The people who make prepared meals frozen in aluminum trays that used to be called TV dinners? Well, they're still around, though I haven't had their products in years. I wasn't looking for it, but it just sort of jumped out of the freezer case at me and made me look. I saw what I saw, and I can't unsee it, so I'll tell. The Hungry Man™ Hearty Breakfast is quite a meal. The box told me that it includes:
  • buttermilk pancakes
  • French toast
  • hash browns
  • potatoes
  • sausage

The cover of the box proudly announces that it contains "Over 1 lb. of food." What I find noteworthy is that it includes both hash browns and potatoes. That's quite a deal, if your diet is running low on starch.

And what's in the Hearty Breakfast, ingredients-wise? Well, I didn't take the time for that. Suffice it to say, a quarter of the back panel was taken up with a yellow label mostly in Latin and Greek, explaining what everything is made of. I remember one of the ingredients being aluminum oxide. Now that's hearty!

In case you're wondering what kind of nutrition the Hearty Breakfast brings home, they broke that down for you, too. This product brings you 74% of your daily recommended sodium intake, 42% of your carborhydrates, 29% of your dietary fiber, 85% of your daily cholesterol, 94% of your daily fats and—ta dah!—103% of your daily saturated fats, all packed into 1,170 delicious calories, 550 of which come from fat! Sounds like good eatin' to me!

A tough-but-friendly-looking guy is looking at you right in the eye from the back panel, wearing a plain blue tee shirt and raising his right index finger. Under him the box reads, "I know what I like, and I like a lot of it." Yeah, well, okay; I'd say the Hearty Breakfast has a lot. Not bad fare if you're going to head out to plow the back forty before lunch... and if the food were made of stuff that's, y'know, not from a chemistry lab.

The box also tells you, "It's good to feel full.™" Um... sure. You can accomplish fullness with carrots and water, if that's what you're after (not that that constitutes a real meal, either.) I just can't wrap my head around the test audience for these things. But considering how popular fast food is these days, I guess it's not inconceivable you'd find lots of people who are interested in a breakfast of nearly 1200 calories that's half fat. The box didn't say anything about serving sizes, but if the product's called Hungry Man and not Hungry Men, I guess that pound of food in the aluminum trough counts as one serving.

Hungry now? Yeah, me neither...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How the Lemon was Invented

By
Lemons How do you make a lemon?  Silly question, isn’t it?  You just take the seeds out of one and plant them, and wait for the tree to come up, right?  That’s true, but it hasn’t always been that easy.  Lemons today are a widely cultivated citrus fruit, with a flavor used in cuisines of countries where no lemon tree would ever grow.  You might think that it was just a matter of ancient peoples finding the trees, enjoying their fruit and growing more of them, but that’s not true.  The lemon is a human invention that’s maybe only a few thousand years old. The first lemons came from East Asia, possibly southern China or Burma.  (These days, some prefer to refer to Burma as Myanmar .  I’ll try to stay out of that controversy here and stick to fruit.)  The exact date of the lemon’s first cultivation is not known, but scientists figure it’s been around for more than 4,000 years.  The lemon is a cross breed of several fruits.  One f...
6 comments
Read more

Origins of the Word Hoser, eh?

By
Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas as cultural icons Bob and Doug McKenzie These days we often hear Canadians referred to as “Hosers”.  It’s a strange word, and it sounds a little insulting, but it’s sometimes used more with affection than malice.  Any such word is difficult to use correctly, especially if you don’t belong to the group the word describes.   I can’t say I feel comfortable throwing the word around, myself, but I can offer a little information about it that might shed some light on what it means. First off: is it an insult?  Yes… and no.   The word hoser can be used as an insult or as a term of endearment; the variation hosehead , is certainly an insult.  It’s a mild insult, meaning something like jerk or idiot or loser .  Its origin is unclear, and there are several debatable etymologies of the word.  One claims that it comes from the days before the zamboni was invented, when the losing team of an outdoor ice hockey game...
1 comment
Read more

The Whoopie Cap

By
What can you do with your father’s old hats?  If you were born after, say, 1955, the answer is probably “Not much.”  Men were still wearing fedoras in the 1970s and 1980s, but by 1990, fashion had turned to the point where unless you were Indiana Jones, the hat didn’t look right.  Some blame Jack Kennedy for starting it all, strutting around perfectly coiffed and bare-headed in the early 1960s.  In 1953, Harry Truman, a haberdasher by trade, stepped out of office, and just eight years later we had a president who didn’t care for hats?  The times, they were a-changin’. If you set the WABAC machine to the 1920s or 1930s (when Indiana Jones was supposed to have lived), you would see the fedora was still very much in style.  Men just didn’t leave the house without a hat of some kind, and for what remained of the middle class, the fedora was the topper of choice.  But like any other piece of clothing, hats wear out, too.  When that happened, you’d ju...
Post a Comment
Read more