Do me a favor- got to www.google.com and search for "Snack".  Then look and see which link comes up in the upper left hand corner of the page.  For those that don't fret about Google tags, the link in the upper left corner of most Google pages represents the COMPANY that has PAID the most MONEY to be associated with whatever words for which you just searched.  Paying most for "Snacks"?...

... McDonalds ...

They seem to be marketing some new "snack wrap".  If you really want to find out what's in it, I encourage you to go to McDonalds, buy one, eat it, find a place to sit, and then re-think all the decisions that you've ever made in your life.  I feel compelled to ask the reasonable question of, what separates a "snack" wrap from any other kind of wrap?  Is it smaller?  Is it more, or perhaps less nutritious?  Do they not serve it during the lunchtime rush?  What makes a snack?

Well, for good-old McDonalds, what makes a snack is the marketing department.  If they believe that a new product will sell best between meals, then they give it a name like "snack" and add it to their dollar menu.  I suppose then the better question is, what do YOU, or I, or, you know, the REST of society consider a snack to be?

McDonalds has enough cultural and culinary clout to certainly redefine what makes for a snack.  I must confess to being susceptible to their marketing machine- I have, in fact, recently eaten one of their "cheeseburgers" (quotations required) for a midnight "snack", and I can say that I enjoyed it insofar as a person can enjoy a quick bite followed some hours later by a stomach ache and projectile flatulence.  But, sigh, I did pay for it, and I ate it.

Google may not be a major location for finding snacks, but it may well be THE place right new for driving new commerce in general.  One way or another, the OLD ways are threatened- think of the tumult in the recording industry since Napster, or the film industry since DVDs, or the auto industry since Honda, or the grocery/retail industry since Super-WalMarts.  The old playing fields are being demolished to make way for new fields, and new conversations are taking place about the games.

Do we want McDonalds to be a referee?  That's what their little add at the top of the Google page means- they are a major voice in a strange conversation, thanks not to the quality or value of their product, but thanks instead to the might of their bank accounts.  This IS America, and nothing that they're doing is illegal, or even necessarily immoral... it just sucks.

So what does make a snack?  Fruit and nuts?  Well, not for everyone.  But I doubt what McDonalds considers a snack would suffice as a definition for anyone still maintaining a few tough shreds of dignity.  Let's not let them dominate the conversation.

Poem For the Day:

I McMowed my Wal-Lawn this StarbucksMorn,

The Petsmart-Swallows darted amongst the Home Depot Oaks,

And my Brought-to-you-by-CSI terrier brought me in my CNN

As the Haliburton-Officers McTicketed McTeens for MTV-loitering.

It seems these Yahoo.com-days that EVERYTHING (tm) is owned

By something- not someone, but someTHING,

And a THING, at that, which I will never meet.

I wonder who bought the trademark to ME-

Surely someone has found a way to comodify me,

Just as my Estee' Lauder wife was recently bought out

from her former capitolizers, NASCAR.

I hope I'm owned by Toys'R'Us, or at least Southwest Airlines.

WHAT!?!  I seem to have lost two fingers

And sprouted a  pointy tail.

I guess from now on you can call me Disney-E...

EN 

Posted by iankusc at 10:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I need a copy-editor.  I realize that's a practically taboo thing to say in the bloggosphere- bloggers by definition are writers who share their fresh, raw, misspelled thoughts with the world, and no grammar-observing fuddy-duddy will ever rain on that parade.  I find that whenever I do send my entries to my editor/president, she has all these, you know, "suggestions".  Who wants that?!

Well, I sure could have used a little extra copy-editing yesterday.  I've been working for a while on getting some Peeled Snacks T-shirts out to the world.  We made up these T-shirts that said, "Peel Me" for a conference a few months back, and they were a HUGE hit, with lots of people asking for a T-shirt of their own.  Fine, okay, I got to work and we're about ready to let the world have them...

Yesterday I emailed a teaser email about the T-shirts to friends and customers on our mailing list, and the subject line was supposed to read "Peeled Snacks T-shirt Contest Winner!"...  Only I left out an "r", and I didn't leave out the "r" in "winner".  I'll let you take a moment and figure out what that does to the subject line...

Yes, I emailed an obscenity to thousands of our closest friends, business associates, and customers.  Let me get right out there and say that this was NOT intentional, and I am terribly sorry about the typo.  Anyone who's been offended by this has every right to be, and there's no excuse beyond my incompetence.

But most people have taken this with a good spirit, and most of those that haven't didn't even notice the typo.  Isn't it amazing how the human brain can fill in a linguistic gap like that?  I did get some CHOICE responses from readers.  Some were so funny that I just HAVE to share them.  Please keep in mind that these come from the wonderful, twisted minds of our customers... (warning- implied vulgarity ahead...)

"You must be shirting me."

"Looks like the shirt's hit the fan."

"These sh!ts stink."

"You think your shirts don't stink?"

"It's okay- shirt happens."

"Holy furcking Shirt!"

"You've really stepped in shirt this time."

"Can I get that in dog-shirt?"

"Did you mean to-sort instead of T-sh!t?"

"Your writing's for shirt."

...and my favorite, "I like the T-sh!t contest better." 

 I'd just like to say that it's an honor to sell snacks to, and occasionally offend, such a wonderfully, sinisterly creative group of people.

I think those slogans are poetry enough for today, don't you...? 

EN 

Posted by iankusc at 09:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I eat a very healthy breakfast- high fiber cereals, organic skim milk, and coffee that's single-handedly saving the Alaskan rainforests.  I find, though, that all that "health" just can't go down my gullet lest I'm reading, reading something, reading ANYTHING.  Usually I take in the New York Times along with my obscene dose of non-soluble fiber, but today, for a lark, I picked up AM New York.

AM New York, for those not in the know, is one of those advertisement based weekday rags that basically puts together some AP articles, some pictures of Lindsey Lohan, and some Sudoku, and tries to pass itself off as "news".  The genius behind them is that they GIVE themselves away, thus giving morning subway commuters no excuse NOT to pick one up.  Li-Lo and Sudoku win the day.

This morning's AM NY had an interesting little 3 paragraph AP teaser entitled "Obesity worse than hunger".  The snippet points out that there are more obese people in the world than starving people (thanks TEXAS!), and it blames the problem on "a global dietary shift away from cereals and grains to animal products and vegetable oils."

I've naturally been tracking this problem for a while, what with my interest in bad eating habits and all.  Peeled Snacks has naturally positioned itself as an anti-obesity campaigner, and articles like this, however modestly positioned they may be, just float my boat.  Have you ever checked out:

www.blogher.org ?

Granted, I'm probably not supposed to be snooping around there, what with my XY thing going on, but there are a great number of passionate writers in the Food and Drink topic section (I LOVE Denise) who are taking on such issues with wit and candor.  A recent post basically labeled obesity as a form of malnourishment, given that all that excess weight that's inflating our kids has no real value, or at least not until the Martians come down and harvest those plump little spuds for their version of Thanksgiving.

In my family there's an old saying- "It's not what you do, it's what you over-do".  Obesity in this country, to my mind, stems from an over-doing of worthless carbohydrates and saturated fats.  Plenty of outlets would like to blame individual eating habits, but I see it as a form of economic warfare- cheap, lousy food for America's poor insures that they stay poor.  Cheap labor is good for business.  Our country has always relied upon its poorest and most disenfranchised to make money for the already-moneyed, and corn syrup is a cheap way to do that.

Don't confuse this for a conspiracy, though- it's just dollars and cents.  BAD cents, but bad cents that makes cents. 

Poem for the Day:

It's about time, Zergplek.

Yes, Metzelfark, it's almost harvest season.

Olympus Mons' Southern Face is turning

from amber rust to crimson fire,

and the Valles Marinaris runs full with squabe.

Zergplek, get your plucking gloves on-

It's time to reap the fattened terran crop.

Yes, all the fat little morsels

on yon planet so blue

will taste so deliciously like Cheetohs...

...and sweet, sorn-syrup filled Pepsi...

..oh yes, and pepsi, 

at this October's harvest barn dance.

My moorsaphate has knitted me a snazzy bib,

lest I spill saturated transfats

all over my brand new vyxerpus vest.

Fire up the interplanetary drive,

and let's go harvest some fatsos! 

Posted by iankusc at 10:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm swimming right now in the warm, fuzzy glow of a wedding this weekend- my dear sister-in-law (sister to Peeled Snacks' president & CEO) and my dear friend got married, making for a DREAM of an in-law situation, and scoring me some SERIOUS points with my sis-in-law, since I introduced them.  I could wax poetic about the beauty of the wedding, the loveliness of the bride, the delight of the dancing, the bounty of the beverages, but instead I'm going to talk about the goodie bags...

What?  Everybody knows what a beautiful bride looks like- you don't need to READ about it, do you?  She was a knockout, all right?  Nothing more need be said.

What needs discussion is that in her goodie bags she included Peeled Snacks.  Every guest got to try our treats, and though most had already (this was a wedding for the family of the company owner), some hadn't in a little while, and some few hadn't ever.

Now Peeled Snacks I still consider to be a bit of a discovery food.  That is to say, right now dried fruit and nuts aren't a regular part of the American diet, and many snackers resist opening their hearts and mouths to, you know, food with wrinkles.  But when they open the bag and taste it, they "discover" it.  At this weekend's wedding, many people "discovered" or "re-discovered" Peeled Snacks, and I got to witness it.  Nothing gives me more professional satisfaction than seeing people pop open those bags, bite into an apple slice and go wide-eyed with delight.

This wasn't the first wedding that Peeleded Snacks have been in, only the first such wedding that I attended.  We're also poised to be in a slew of weddings this Fall, all of which makes perfect sense to me- I delight in imagining all those well-dressed wedding guests stumbling back to their hotel rooms faced with the munchies, only to "discover" just how good Peeled Snacks make you feel when you've drunken too much champagne and/or danced to one Isley Brothers song too many.

     Poem for Meital, my sweet sister

I wonder if my eyes' corners hide

two cherry red tear ducts each-

one for the bitter tears, sad and salty;

the other for the tears bucked

by the sweet of days

such as you make, by the wonder

and sweep of bliss and the sublime.

I swear, the tears of the bitter ducts,

which may or may not lurk in my head,

taste a different taste, A sea taste,

lashing endlessly, swallowing, unforgiving;

the other taste of fresh dew.

Can someone know the difference

looking at a glistening face,

which kind of water there flows?

Posted by iankusc at 02:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday whilst browsing trough New York's famous Strand Bookstore, Peeled Snacks founder and president (and my gorgeous wife) Noha Waibsnaider stumbled upon Real Food- What to Eat and Why by Nina Planck, a food thinker and enjoyer who actually is speaking tonight at the Strand.  Noha picked up Ms. Planck's book, plowed through it, and then passed it to me to peruse.

I'd be slightly understating it if I were to say that we agree with Ms. Planck.  If I may be so bold as to summarize her thesis, the way in which we grow, raise, and plan for the foodstuffs we eat greatly determines how healthy or unhealthy those foods turn out (much more so even than the actual preparation of a meal).  Today's food industry undercuts nutrition for the sake of a quick buck, but the long-term health and environmental costs of how most food is raised makes for a long-term disaster.

Check out her website: www.ninaplanck.com

She pays a great bit of attention to the science of farming, which we in our nice little Consumer-Packaged-Goods Society don't bother to mess with much.  In one juicy bit, she dissects the interplay between grass, flies, cows, and the chickens that peck at the cow patties.  It's a fascinating look through a microscope that we rarely tarry with, and I recommend her highly.

These days it feels like a lot of the sort of "Peeled Snacks Mission" is about consumer education- we're trying to impress upon potential customers why spending 3 dollars for 2.6 oz. of dried fruit and nuts is better than spending half that for twice as much weight in pringles.  So many people are trained to think that cheaper is better.  Since when did "Cheap" stand for American values?  Why is it so difficult for people to get past price to get to quality?

But I'll banter about that another time.  Poem for the Day:

The sun shines down onto dirt,

on the little clover seeds,

which grow into, you know, clover.

The gravely cow tongues pull up the grass,

and all those churning stomachs,

mull over every little grain,

grabbing all the good stuff, so much good stuff to grab.

The poop comes out- yeah, I said POOP!

and flies buzz around,

doing fly business (don't laugh- everybody's got business),

making little baby flies in the POOP.

Along comes the chickens, pecking pecking pecking,

eating up the baby flies, making their own

happy happy baby chicks.

All of this, and the sun, and the raindrops, and the poop,

falls back to the dirt.

We eat all the glory grown from this stuff,

then we fall, too, to the clover. 

Posted by iankusc at 12:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

So last week someone "mentioned" that my Peeled Skinnies were getting a little, shall we say, off topic. Apparently I'm supposed to be writing about all things snack oriented- the snack industry, marketing snacks, snack nutrition, the dangerous world of snacks espionage... All of that's great to write about, and occasionally important, but these days it sure seems like there's some white elephants in the room that need SERIOUS consideration. Far more consideration, in fact, than high-fructose corn syrup (devil that it is) need suffer. But fine, this is peeledSNACKS.com, so let's get to it...

Okay, so, snacks... I caught a great concert last week at New York's famous Summer Stage in Central Park.  Headlined by Canadian power-pop indie super-band the New Pornographers, the concert took place under a burning Summer sunset, and the bands literally played to the changing weather (a heat wave was just breaking as the bands were playing).  My new favorite band of all time ever, the Frames (they're from Ireland, sort of emo by way of U2 arena rockdom), started out the evening playing to rain showers.  Southwestern indie-mariachi stalwarts Calexico followed up drably, aside from some serious spice added by some flamenco maestro they'd picked up on a recent tour through Spain.  New Pornographers suffered from no sound check (they sounded aweful, truly), and an under-used Neco Case (as if she could ever be over-used), bet generally rocked the evening nicely.

 Now Summer Stage this summer is promoted by Snapple and Stella Artois, along with some other non-food companies.  Without going into the merits or defecits of those two companies, I'll offer up that I HOPE that neither of them had any say in the food that was available.  Summer Stage does have two small eateries with which they seek to feed the kids... only, all that they serve is hamburgers, fries, and pretzels.

Sigh.  Young people, dudded up for a fantastic night out in the park, dancing to hipster tunes and flirting with each other glore, and all that they have to eat is a bunch of nutrition-free food that's more or less designed to make them fat and sick.  And people wonder what's wrong with youth today.

Here's what's wrong with youth today- cheap food is TOO CHEAP.  The Summer Stage is clearly selling crappy food because it yields the best profit margins- hamburgers and french fries are somewhat cheap to make, and all the kids love that stuff.  But the overall cost to kids (and their livers, and their gym instructors) doesn't quite get factored in.  The culinary norm for our culture seems famously wretched- high fat, high carb, low nutrition bunk.   And we wonder why kids aren't doing well in school?

So, to whit, the secret to advancing our culture and reclaiming our place as the greatest nation on Earth is by selling only healthy snacks at rock concerts.

Today's poem:

Fries need more Catsup.

What? I don't understand you?

Oh.  Needs more Ketchup!

Hipsters scoff at rain.

Lightning wipes out the whole band?

They scoff at that too.

I feel my liver.

Late night, it whispers to me...

"Please leave me alone..." 

Posted by iankusc at 10:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Last weekend while I was staring at Pacific Northwest tide pools, Newt Gingrich (shudder- flashback from 1994) was sending vicious ripples through time and space courtesy of his (self-declared) Churchill-like prognostications of us being already embroiled in WW3.  No sooner had he banged the WW3 drum than pundits further to the right started acting as if everyone's known about this WW3 business for, like, EVER, and former New Republic correspondent Michael Ledeen retorted, "no way, Newtie- this is World War FOUR!"  I guess I slept through one somewhere in there.

So a couple of sloppily dropped statements from a former professional liar (Contract with America?  Broken long ago), and suddenly everyone's looking for a definition of a World War.  Does it take superpowers fighting over smaller countries?  Does it have to involve Germany somehow?  Doesn't France have to surrender first?

I'm unconcerned with such definitions, as if we assume that there's some World War going on, then people will be quick to say, "the U.S. needs to jump in there and finish this mess."  After all, we tipped the scales in the Great War, and more or less brought Japan to its knees single-handedly in that war's sequel.  Those events, though, differ tremendously from the current slew of disgusting events in many ways, most of which I'll ignore, except one: this time, we're the bad guys.

Now hold on a sec- US?  The aggressors? Didn't those fundamentalist Islamists start this thing back in 2001?  Yeah, that's what the aggressor always says.  The aggressor always likes to blame the aggressed.  See, the aggressor moves in to territory that isn't his, and then cries foul when whomever lives in said invaded territory fights back.  In that way, the Germans and Japanese didn't start World War 2- the Polish and Chinese did when they started objecting to being raped and killed by Huns and Japs, respectively.

When the US jumped to Kuwait's aid in 1991, we started a global conflict whose bills we're still paying.  We hunkered down in a country that had no love for us, and whose regime maintains power only through draconianism.  We offended a whole generation's worth of the fastest growing religion on Earth, and did so blatantly in the name of keeping down gas prices.  When we lingered after the first Gulf War, we overstayed our welcome and became the aggressor.  We're the bad guys.

But it doesn't have to be that way.  The solution to the problem is straightforward and simple- pull out of the Middle East.  Take ALL of our troops out of that region.  Maybe keep the NATO forces in Afghanistan, but everywhere else, bolt.  We do it in such a way as to boldly and clearly let the people of the Middle East know that they can solve their own problems now, and that we're sorry for overstaying our welcome.  Then we can sit back and watch as the Sunni-Shiite war that's been brewing for 1300 years reaches a new, completely insane peak.

The right-wing pundits that I've tapped in to usually claim that this WW3 nonsense is being fought over ideals.  Hogwash, I say.  Wars are not fought over ideals, neither religious nor political.  Ideals are what END wars, and they can certainly be used to rally the troops.  Wars are fought over resources- iron ore, water, agricultural land, manpower.  This war is being fought over oil.  And that's a lousy reason to fight a war.

Poem for the Day:

When is a bad idea a bad idea?

When first it's thought up, smoke rising

From the glowing coals of some twisted imagining?

Or maybe when it's played out

to disasterous headlines, sad 3 minute spots

accompanied by melancholy Sanyo chords? 

Or is a bad idea only a bad idea

when someone finally actually contracts his or her vocal chords

in such a way as to say 

"uh, this is a bad idea."

Or is a bad idea actually a GOOD idea,

until the goofball who cooked it up in the first place

finally admits that, "okay, I was drunk that night,

and we never should have gotten into this mess

in the first place. Sorry..."? 

Have a nice day... 

Posted by iankusc at 11:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)