Nostalgia for this bygone taste may explain my tolerance for these Veggie Sticks, which are in many ways pretty foul. Purchased at Elmhurst Filipino grocery Sariling Atin, their packaging promises a bountiful field of baton-shaped crackers, sprouting from the soil like the Emerald City skyline. Instead the contents resemble a bizarro Cheez Doodle, with the cheese substitute swapped out for a sweet vegetal taste, dusted with a substance that's gently redolent of mulched grass clippings. Yes these are formed from a base of rice, not corn, but when you get down to the core mechanics of food-grade styrofoam snacks it appears that the grain of origin doesn’t matter too much. If nothing else, the bag at least blends nicely into the surrounding landscape.
I’ve always had a special fondness for Vegetable Thins, a snack that’s long occupied the second string of Nabisco’s cracker team, paired with perennial misfits like Chicken In A Biskit, Better Cheddars, Sociables, and the VT's polar opposite, the now-defunct Bacon Thins. Even in my early years, when I refused to touch a single earth-hatched tuber or legume, the taste of freeze-dried vegetable scraps preserved inside vinegary, MSG-laden crackers was alluring. even more so for the way the snack appeared in approximated vegetable shapes, all of them tasting exactly the same. Things have changed now in Nabisco Land, and while I do enjoy the fact that the above Wiki cites separate varieties clocking in at 40% and 44% less fat, respectively, it's likely that the VT will never be the same.
Nostalgia for this bygone taste may explain my tolerance for these Veggie Sticks, which are in many ways pretty foul. Purchased at Elmhurst Filipino grocery Sariling Atin, their packaging promises a bountiful field of baton-shaped crackers, sprouting from the soil like the Emerald City skyline. Instead the contents resemble a bizarro Cheez Doodle, with the cheese substitute swapped out for a sweet vegetal taste, dusted with a substance that's gently redolent of mulched grass clippings. Yes these are formed from a base of rice, not corn, but when you get down to the core mechanics of food-grade styrofoam snacks it appears that the grain of origin doesn’t matter too much. If nothing else, the bag at least blends nicely into the surrounding landscape.
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