Ou new yummy line, the Peeled Snacks Fruit Picks & Nut Picks, will soon find its way to the Shelves of Whole Foods and, soon after, other retailers.  Gobs of research and testing have gone into this line as we've asked everybody we could find what they'd like in the new line.  Multi-pacls were at the top of the list, so we're going to take our snacks, pick the best ones, and bundle them together with....

....with tape?  With cardboard?  With plastic cartons?  With WHAT?!?!  Well, how about with CORN?!?!

Ain't that just ironic?  Here we are, a company of corn HATERS, a company that constantly rails and rages against the caustic impact that corn is having in our society, and suddenly we're considering wrapping our new snacks in a squished down, processed version of said wrecker of homes and waist lines.  I've probably blogged about corn horror, oh, 8 times this year, but now I'm here to extole the GLORIES of corn?

Well, you can't hate your corn and eat it too, can you?  In this new line, we were really looking to make the packaging in as responsible a way as possible, which to us meant "compostable".  As angry as I get at corn, plastic sucks equally if not even more suck-tastically.  So we tracked down NaturesPLAstics, which makes a corn based, compostable pack that's clear and sturdy like the kinds of clam-shell plastic cases that you get in salad bars.

Great, splendid, problem solved-our customers get their multipacks, which in turn get turned into plantfood, which in turn gets eaten by, you know, "plants", and the "Circle of Life" warms all our hearts and brings peace to the Middle East, and even makes Dick Cheney see the light and buy everyone Christmas Turkeys.  Good, glad that's finished, now we can just ship it all to Whole Foods and watch the money and peace and happiness roll in....

But WAIT!!!  Yesterday we got the word from one of our buyers at Whole Foods that they won't take these corn-tastic wonders of packaging design because Whole Foods isn't sure whether or not they're.....

...made with Genetically Modified Corn!

Gasp!  You mean, we can't use compostable corn products because the corn may have been tainted in some scientist's laboratory?  Because nature hate's unfair competition?  Because cross-pollination might lead to a race of super-intelligent Corn-Monsters that enslave humanity, coat us with butter, and nibble us in rows or pop us giant air-popper machines.....?

We're crossing culturally into a strange battleground, one with a hundred armies on the field, none of who know whom to fight.  Should we protect American labor, or promote 3rd world economies?  Should we provide food for the neediest, or only eat local?  Should everything be bio-degradeable, or should everything be made of untainted material?  And while none of these questions are "either/or," nobody gets to have it both ways.

But, in fact, Whole Foods gets to have it their way.  With that response, we quickly put the Kibosh on the corn-based packaging, for better or worse.  Instead we'll use something that either breeds war in the Middle East (petro-chemicals), or is making it harder to breath (cardboard).  Boy, it sure is tough to have a bleeding heart these days.  Nobody wants to clean up the blood stains....

On an entirely other note, a great British organization has contacted Peeled Snacks about getting the word out about safely managing weight.  They've a website, entitled (obviously enough) http://www.safeslimming.co.uk/,  and it's got some juicy advice.  I especially appreciate their insights about sugar, but I'm sort of an anti-sugar junkie....

Posted by iankusc at 10:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Tis the season again for wedded bliss, or at least "Wedding" bliss.  Sweet weather breeds nuptials like doggies breed puppies, and this past weekend we at Peeled Snacks had not 1 but TWO weddings to attend, and at which to "Represent".   The two events, though spectacularly dissimilar, what with their sonic and dance variations, definitely had two things common- Love, and FOOD.  I'll deal with one of the two.  Guess which.

Actually, it's kind of unfair to compare the two weddings, since one was a Pakistani/Indian fusion (complete w ith family dances, salwar kameezes, and henna), and the other an Intalian-American/Motor-City hybridization (complete with, well, tuxedos and booze).  The food at each event blew my mind- the South-Asian affair offering soul-southing spicing, and the Detroiticized event taking place in East Coast Organic-food Central, Woodstock,

Peeled Snacks found representation at each event (we do a LOT of weddings), though there too, same snack, different worlds: we were in the Goodie Bags of the Catskill Wedding, but our dried fruit actually made it into the CEREMONYof the Pakistani ceremony where dancing girls present gifts.  Our president festooned the bride with, I believe, Figsated.   Too bad the tradition doesn't include sharing the gifts with all of your rich cousins.

The meals filled my belly marvelously, but a fascinating discussion brewed around the Catskills buffet table when we learned that the Beef was "Organic".  Organic Beef has certainly been turning my head since speanding the Winter in California (where it would seem that the cows are treated so well that they actually slaughter themselves out of gratitude).  Shocked I was, yes SHOCKED, when a fellow attendee said, "No way man, I don't eat Organic Meat".  "Why not? I asked.....

...."Because it's INHUMANE"....

The arguement: USDA organic certification for beef demands that they be free of anti-biotics.  Anti-biotics are used to keep people (and animals healthy).  By changing their herds to certified organic, ranchers are denying their cattle proper health care.  It's like Organic has gone past "Health Food" into the realm of Christian Scientist Fundamentalism....

The belly of the argument proposed by this sensible post-hippie at the buffet table was that organic has gone too far, and that federal regulation has mired the movement in faulty science, as exemplified by not protecting cattle from disease for some rash ideology.  The counter argument is that antibiotics were over-used on cattle and showing up in meat and mill.  The counter-counter arguement is that anti-biotics were overused because of the abuse of Bovine Growth Hormones.... 

Fascinating.  This is certainly something to present to Nina Planck or Michael Pollan, but the takeaway is clear:  no more organic meat for me.  Just hormone free meat that's been grass-fed....

I think there are, like, 5 cows in the world that fit that description.  Sigh....

Posted by iankusc at 04:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Here at Peeled Snacks' World Headquarters, located high above the trees of Manhattan's Central Park, we have 3 favorite pass-times.  First, of course, is eating- whether we're trying out some new, exotic dried fruit, or dabbling in the latest variety of Dorito (Sizzlin' Buffalo Ranch?  YUCK!  Yet strangely scrumptious....), we spend a lot of time sitting, chewing, and then cracking jokes about how it tastes.

Second, we play a lot of Water Polo around the office.

And thirdly, we LOVE a good brain-storm session.  We can sit in a circle and throw names around for this or that for HOURS.  There are rules to our sessions- write EVERYthing down, give it a time-limit, and nothing is forbidden.  While we try to hold our opinions back, occasionally a doozy comes up that just demands riotous, crippling fits of laughter, and some are so bad that boos aren't unheard of....

Case in point- we've recently wrapped up the design of our new line, which we've dubbed the "Peeled Snacks Picks" line.  It'll be single servings (instead of the current double), and it'll be organic.  We had significant problems with the name though- there's two sort of "sub-lines", the "Fruit Picks" and the, ahem, "Nut Picks".  Yes, that's right, "NUT PICKS."

We spent hours battering names around for the line, and the Nut Pick name was a tough one to grapple.  It's a name easily contorted into a dumb-guy-scratching-his-crotch joke.  The images on our packaging have usually been the silhouettes of fruit- cherries, figs, peaches.... for the Nut Picks line, we COULD have a cashew silhouette... or we could have a picture of Tooth Pick.

To skirt around that testy political issue, we devised names for each individual snack in the line, all basically comprised of puns involving the principal ingredient.  I don't want to spoil the names just yet, but some of them are quite clever (thanks in no small part to our bad-ass interns, Brittney and Amanda), and all of them distract from potential jokes about itchy groins.

I've always thought that books and movies and TV shows all had to have names that couldn't be twisted into insults.  Yet critics and drinking buddies alike can spoil even the sturdiest nomenclature.  "ER"?  "ERror".  "The Departed?"  How about, "The De-Farted"?  "Atlas Shrugged"?  "Audience Shrugged".  The same rule, I guess applies to snacks, unfortunately, though it makes for entertaining brainstorms....

Posted by iankusc at 09:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)