Category: Vendy

There is a vend­ing machine down­stairs, recent­ly installed, that con­tains a vari­ety of dirt cheap refrig­er­at­ed lunch prod­ucts. They all look com­plete­ly gross. So, since I’m the kind of guy who eats hot dog fla­vored pota­to chips just because they’re there, I’ve deter­mined to eat one of each thing in that vend­ing machine. Today I had BIG AZ Bub­ba Twins chili cheese dogs.
BIG AZ Bub­ba Twins are made by Pierre Foods in Cincin­nati, Ohio. It appears that sev­er­al of the items in the vend­ing machine are made by Pierre Foods. If this is the case, it does not bode well for my tum tum.

For $2.05 you get 8.5 ounces of “food” in two rel­a­tive­ly hot dog shaped chunks. I hes­i­tate to call them food or even hot dogs because they resem­ble noth­ing so much as two cho­les­terol logs wrapped in preser­v­a­tive. I find this some­what at odds with Pierre Food’s pro­mo­tion­al copy on this item.

Bub­ba Twins tips the scales with two FULL-SIZE sand­wich­es in one pack­age! Twin hot dogs are topped with zesty chili and shred­ded cheese.. Pack­aged in fun, col­or­ful pack­ag­ing and fea­tur­ing a Dou­ble Mon­ey Back Guar­an­tee.

The Dou­ble Mon­ey Back guar­an­tee was my first clue to just how bad these dogs were going to be. Yea, ver­i­ly, behold the wis­dom of Tom­my Boy:

Tom­my: Let’s think about this for a sec, Ted, why do they put a guar­an­tee on a box? Hmm, very inter­est­ing.
Ted: I’m lis­ten­ing.
Tom­my: Here’s how I see it. A guy puts a guar­an­tee on the box ’cause he wants you to fell all warm and toasty inside.
Ted: Yeah, makes a man feel good.
Tom­my: ‘Course it does. Ya think if you leave that box under your pil­low at night, the Guar­an­tee Fairy might come by and leave a quar­ter.
Ted: What’s your point?
Tom­my: The point is, how do you know the Guar­an­tee Fairy isn’t a crazy glue snif­fer? “Build­ing mod­el air­planes” says the lit­tle fairy, but we’re not buy­ing it. Next thing you know, there’s mon­ey miss­ing off the dress­er and your daugh­ter’s knocked up, I seen it a hun­dred times.
Ted: But why do they put a guar­an­tee on the box then?
Tom­my: Because they know all they sol­da ya was a guar­an­teed piece of shit. That’s all it is. Hey, if you want me to take a dump in a box and mark it guar­an­teed, I will. I got spare time. But for right now, for your sake, for your daugh­ter’s sake, ya might wan­na think about buy­ing a qual­i­ty item from me.

The next warn­ing sign was the utter lack of any nutri­tion­al infor­ma­tion on the pack­ag­ing, and upon fur­ther reconais­sance, the web­site. I can only assume there is no nutri­tion­al infor­ma­tion, because there is no nutri­tion to be found in BIG AZ Bub­ba Twin Chili Cheese Dogs. It is now time to cite Good Omens:

“CHOW™ con­tained spun, plait­ed, and woven pro­tein mol­e­cules, capped and cod­ed, care­ful­ly designed to be ignored by even the most rav­en­ous diges­tive tract enzymes; no-cal sweet­en­ers; min­er­al oils replac­ing veg­etable oils; fibrous mate­ri­als, col­or­ings, and fla­vor­ings. The end result was a food­stuff almost indis­tin­guish­able from any oth­er except for two things. First­ly, the price, which was slight­ly high­er, and sec­ond­ly, the nutri­tion­al con­tent, which was rough­ly equiv­a­lent to that of a Sony Walk­man. […] MEALS™ was CHOW™ with added sug­ar and fat. The the­o­ry was that if you ate enough MEALS™ you would a) get very fat, and b) die of mal­nu­tri­tion.

Anoth­er dis­turb­ing “mis­take” is the bro­ken large image of the BIG AZ Bub­ba Twins on the Pierre Foods site. Why don’t they want us to know more about their “food”?

To cook the dogs you nuke ’em for 90 sec­onds. Fast food. After tak­ing them out of the microwave I was sad­dened to see that the plas­tic tray they were sit­ting in [and were sup­posed to be microwaved in] had par­tial­ly melt­ed into the dog. The aro­ma of the cooked item recalls that of a gas sta­tion bath­room after a large truck­er has just crapped out a day’s worth of free truck stop hot dogs. The con­sis­ten­cy of the chili dog was like eat­ing a rub­ber dog bone wrapped in a urine-soaked sponge. The first bite makes the gorge rise, and sub­se­quent bites take the con­sumer on a whirl­wind tour of gas­tro­nom­i­cal hate-crimes. One is remind­ed of the bomb­ing of Dres­den as small chunks of chili fla­vored MSG drop into the stom­ach, the diges­tive gur­gling sound is rem­i­nis­cent of the Labyrinth’s Bog of Eter­nal Stench and its effect on the breath recalls the glo­ry days of Agent Orange. It is the sec­ond to worst hot dog I’ve ever had.

I am con­sid­er­ing call­ing up this Pierre fel­low to demand my $4.10 refund, if they want me to return the unused por­tion to them, I’ll just wait anoth­er half hour or so until it comes out the oth­er end. I doubt they’ll be able to tell the dif­fer­ence.