Top 4: Foods that could be confused with some kind of artificial packing material

Yeah that's a long title, but so what? 150 years ago or so, every bit of food that the average American ate was probably easily identifiable as meat, grain, fruit, or vegetable (except for that pesky tomato that can't decide which of the latter two it wants to be). But these days, sometimes looking at the food we eat, it's easy to think you might be eating some sort of styrofoam product. In most cases, I gather that it's just heavily processed corn.


#4. Circus Peanuts: I don't think I've ever eaten a circus peanut. They're too creepy looking. What are they, anyway? I guess marshmallow, which could probably make this list on its own. But what kind of crazy person takes one food and make it in the shape of another food?




#3. Funyuns: Vaguely onion-flavored rings of a mysterious yellow-brown foam, I fully understand the onion half of the clever portmanteau, but I still don't see what's so fun about them.





#2. Froot Loops: I assume Froot Loops are made from heavily refined flour, lots of sugar, and all sorts of chemical flavors, colors, and preservatives... maybe with some real fruit extract thrown in so that it almost seems healthy. One real positive about Froot Loops is that it was one of the products (along with Pennzoil and Butterfinger) endorsed by Maya Angelou in a Saturday Night Live sketch that the audience didn't really seem to enjoy, but that remains one of my all-time favorites:



#1. Cheetos: Technically any cheese puff type product would do, but cheetos are especially weird in the packing material-ness of it all. Apparently the crunchy puffy thing is corn, but how you get corn to turn into that, I have no idea. I'm also creeped out by the salty orange dust that is supposedly some kind of cheese flavoring, but that's for another list.


Full disclosure: other than the circus peanuts, I do occasionally eat these sometimes frightening foods, which will probably lead to my early death.