It seems like American chip flavors just keep getting crazier, with each trip to the grocery store yielding a rogue’s gallery of strange new monstrosities. But this craziness is also circumscribed, pushed toward ever more extreme, overdriven concoctions, mash-ups and combinations, as well as eerily faithful reenactments of foods that have no business existing as chips. On the fast-food side of this equation, Pizza Hut has recently launched the latest attempt at challenging the Doritos Locos Taco. This hulking abomination expands the humble Cheez-It to mammoth proportions. A Cheez-It is obviously not a chip, but it's pizza-fied offspring (the end-result of years of desperate promiscuity by Sunshine, a company that needs to realize the inherent perfection of its star product and stick with it) is so wrongheaded, and so representative of the grotesquerie which defines the current state of processed food culture, that I would be remiss not to mention it. I should also mention that Extra Toasty Cheez-Its are a godsend, and almost singlehandedly balance out the damage inflicted by the last 15 years of lab-spawned, misbegotten oddities.
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A good, if not exactly terroir-oriented, way to gauge the tastes of a place is through its sodas. These will generally provide you with a shorthand barometer of the national sweet tooth, and also a concise sampling of some of the fruits, flavors and spices favored by locals. Looking at soda, in the case of formerly colonized countries, can also be an inroad toward surmising the influence of the colonizer(s) upon those tastes. The most extensive example of this may be Vimto, the king of the colonial sodas, a nominally British beverage that now enjoys far greater popularity in Asia, the Caribbean and especially the Middle East. A similar situation occurs with the lingering specter of Peardrax, a drink which, although now discontinued in its country of origin, continues to enjoy robust popularity in Trinidad & Tobago, where it’s taken on status as a sort of national soda, a status it shares with its autumnal apple partner Cydrax. All this with names that sound like under-the-sink cleaning agents. Caribbean sodas often grow out of a prior traditional of fermented alcoholic and non-alcoholic brews, skewing toward approximations of juices from fruits (or roots) which, if not always native, at least have some entrenched history in the area. Pear and apple ciders, on the other hand, innately seem like cold-weather concoctions, which would explain why the 'Drax favored at Christmas, and enjoys a likely-related popularity as a toasting drink on special occasions. Both draxes were originally products of the now-defunct Whiteway Orchards (a fact still noted on the label), based in the bucolic southwestern English town of Whimple (a pleasant pastoral picture of the former orchard can be found here). As for the taste, despite the long distance from Devonshire, Peardrax definitely remains true to its cidery roots, with a slightly sweet flavor that’s redolent of hard cider stripped of alcohol. I’m not entirely clear, however, why the drink description on the bottle bears French text.
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The coded language of snacks, sandwiches and seasonings, in NYC and beyond.
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