A Tribute To The Fast Food Burgers of Summer 2017!

Bidding summer adieu the only way that makes sense: by reminiscing on all of the seasonal, limited-time-only hamburgers that have been making us fat since Memorial Day.

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

With Halloween rapidly approaching and the official cutoff date for autumn sneaking up on us (it's Sept. 22, if you were keen on the specifics), I reckon now is as dandy a time as ever to reminisce on the limited-time-only fast food hamburgers that made Summer 2017 one of the most memorable ever for people who don't care about dying ten years earlier than they should've. All in all it was a pretty solid season for special-edition burgers, with just about every major chain you can think of trotting out at least one major LTO offering. Really, this thing could've been 30 or 40 entries long if I honestly put the effort into it, but I reckon limiting the retrospective to just ten LTO burgers is good enough. So what do you say we cut the empty pleasantries and get right down to business, eh? Yeah - I didn't think your fat-ass would complain, no how.

McDonald's Signature Crafted Burgers!

This is as good a place as any to begin our whirlwind tour of seasonal fast food hamburgers, since the May launch of the trio above more or less marked the beginning of the LTO summer rush. The gimmick here was that Mickie's D was allowing you to custom build your burger from a select group of ingredients; i.e., you could pick a regular hamburger bun or a greasy ass artisanal roll, pack it with beef, fried chicken or grilled chicken, etc. The burgers came in three different dressings, which I've outlined from top to bottom; the pico-guacamole permutation, the sweet BBQ bacon iteration (which came with both grilled and fried onions) and the maple bacon Dijon variation, which was apparently the least popular of the trifecta since it got subbed out for the Signature Sriracha burger a few months after it dropped. All three were pretty good (if not overpriced) burgers, but really, they didn't offer anything wildly different from anything you've probably eaten before. Still, it was cool to see McDonald's at least try to bring a little diversity to their all-too-predictable menu lineup; maybe we'll get lucky and they'll finally resurrect the Arch Deluxe for Summer '18?

Hardee's Jalapeno Double Cheeseburger!

Hardee's (known as Carl's Jr.'s on the West Coast, for whatever stupid ass reason), is one of those chains that's ALWAYS releasing seasonal LTO Franken-burgers. Indeed, they usually trot out some kind of newfangled specialty sandwich every two weeks, and this here Jalapeno Double Cheeseburger is one of the better they've churned out over the last couple of years. The ingredients are pretty basic: you've got sliced pepper jack cheese, lettuce, tomato, two chunks of beef and a couple of chunks of diced, pickled peppers thrown in for good measure. But what really made this sumbitch pop was the proprietary Santa Fe Sauce, which was a really nice goulash of chipotle, barbecue and some kind of mayonnaise like substance I just can't put my finger on (so yeah, it was probably just plain old mayonnaise.) Few things in life irk me as much as fast food that touts itself as being spicy that don't live up to their own hype, but this one really impressed me for a change. That you can still get these suckers for $2.50 a pop in locations in the remote American southeast suggests the things were quite the regional sellers; I take it these little buggers are now going to be an annual offering, right, Hardee's/Carl's Jr.'s executive marketing department?

Steak 'n Shake's Bacon 'n Cheese Triple Xtreme!

I'm not entirely sure how many words I can say about the Bacon 'n Cheese Triple Xtreme burger, but I'll give it my best shot. Obviously, the Steak 'n Shake offering is a humongous, 900 calorie-plus abomination of a sandwich, complete with no less than three huge ass strips of bacon. I don't remember too much about the sandwich (basically, it tasted like any other steakburger you'd get at the eatery, only far heavier) but I DO remember it having a downright preposterous amount of sodium in it - like, an entire day's worth. But hey, we don't eat fast food burgers because we're trying to live forever - we're just doing it to enjoy today while we're still able to, ain't we?

Chick-Fil-A's Smokehouse BBQ Bacon Sandwich!

Chick-Fil-A is a chain that doesn't fuck around with its core menu that much, so this early summer addendum to the line-up was a pretty big deal. As you can see with your own peepers, it was a grilled chicken breast topped with two strips of bacon, marble cheese and a hearty dollop of sugary (but not too sugary) BBQ sauce. I'm not sure which brand it was, but I assure you it was pretty doggone good - I mean, not as solid as the shit good old J.R. hawks, but good nonetheless. Anyhoo, I thought it was a very, very good little sammich, and since it only packed about 500 or so calories, it was also one of the healthier (I guess less unhealthy is a more fitting term) LTO burgers circulatin' around the fast-food-o-sphere. And apparently it's a pretty big hit with the bible-readin', first-wife-havin', homosexual-marriage-denyin' C-F-A base - I mean, here we are in September, and in my neck of the woods the thing is still being advertised all over the place.

Arby's Triple Thick Brown Sugar Bacon BLT!

So, uh, does a product still technically count as a burger even if it doesn't actually have a burger inside it? I'm hedging my bets and saying this Arby's LTO qualifies, despite its flagrant lack of a patty of any kind. As the picture above indicates, it's basically just a huge honking sandwich filled with lettuce, mayo, tomato and - the obvious selling point - three downright humongous pieces of artery-clogging, cholesterol-raising, deep fried sugar-encrusted bacon supplying it with its protein quotient. Alike Burger King, Arby's is a franchise that's always trotting out LTO stuff, a strategy akin to Sega's in the mid 1990s when they kept releasing consoles nobody in their right mind would've purchased out of the desperate, childlike hope that at least one of their wacky ideas would've stuck. And with that clumsy analogy in mind, the absolute best thing I can say about the Triple Thick Brown Sugar Bacon BLT is that it, indeed, tasted way better than anything that came out on the 32X.

Wendy's Bacon Queso Burger!

Really, Wendy's should've called this the "fuck your pants burger," because there's scientifically no way to consume it without getting at least four ounces of chili all over your blue jeans. Despite being billed as a "queso" burger, the bulk of the LTO sandwich comes in the form of a weird-tasting red sauce, which isn't quite cheese or chili - just this iffy, disharmonious batter runoff comprised of the two. Throw in a couple more bizarre toppings choices - ick, red onion and unmelted cheddar cheese! - and you have a strong candidate for the season's least special special edition burger. Unless by "special" you underhandedly mean "retarded," and in that case, this thing is unquestionably the specialist thing I've ate all summer, and that's coming from a motherfucker who just ate a two pound ice cream sorbet shaped like a watermelon. 

Freddy's Hatch Green Chile Double Steakburger!

As one of those "off-brands" that can't decide whether or not it's slightly upmarket fast food a'la Steak 'N Shake or a genuine, faux-prestige burger joint a'la Red Robin, it's pretty easy to forget Freddy's Frozen Custards and Steakburgers exists sometimes. And that's a shame, because some of the stuff the restaurant trots out, like this LTO Hatch Green Chile Double Steakburger, is actually pretty good. As the name implies, this is one spicy motherfucker, with a ton of grilled onions and diced jalapenos doused atop the patty, thus ensuring a most painful shat the next time your assbone meets toilet lid. But thankfully, this mustard soaked seasonal delight is so yummy going down that you won't even mind the fact it turns your asshole into a flamethrower 12 hours later. If they're still selling these suckers around your parts, do yourself a favor and give these things a try - but for fuck's sake, make sure you've got some 2-ply T.P. waiting for you at home.

Sonic's Ultimate Dunked Garlic Parmesan Chicken Sandwich!

Well, you can't say Sonic didn't at least partially deliver what they promised here. This sandwich came with what is EASILY the biggest chicken patty I've ever eaten in my life. We're talking a slab of deep-fried poultry easily the same circumference as a saucer plate, or maybe even a really small Frisbee. While the patty wasn't as flavorful as the usual Chick-Fil-A patty, it was definitely a step up from what you'd get at McDonald's or Burger King, for sure. As for the Garlic Parmesan part (they also sold buffalo sauce and bourbon barbecue doused iterations of the same sammich), they basically just dumped a fuck-ton of Italian dressing all over the lettuce then grated some Parmesan cheese and said "eh, good enough." The brioche bun was oilier than a motherfucker, and it was nigh impossible to take a bite without at least four or five splotches of garlic juice getting all over the place. Still, it was a damned filling and unexpectedly flavorful little LTO burger; now I'd LOVE to see what the chain can do with their own Chicken Parmesan sandwich.

Arby's Bourbon BBQ Triple Stack!

Yeah, I know we already took a look at one of Arby's seasonal offerings, but this thing was already on my camera roll and really, why waste such primo footage? Again, we can argue until the cows come home as to whether this quad-meated sandwich technically meets the criteria for a burger, but the way I see it, as long as it's dead something wedged in-between two sesame seeded buns and there's cheese all over it, by golly, it ought to count as a burger. Even now I'm not entirely sure what all was in that thing, but I think it was brisket, slivers of steak, mulched up turkey and brown sugar bacon. Oh, and there were some fried onion bits and cheddar cheese in there, too, and - of course - the whole damn thing was drenched in a savory, sugary bourbon-flavored barbecue sauce. And perhaps the most amazing thing about the item? Despite basically being an entire barnyard dumped in between two buns, it only registered 760 calories. Oh, and 2,470 milligrams of salt, which is only about 1,000 more than the FDA says is safe for daily human consumption.

Hardee's Charbroiled Hawaiian Chicken Sandwich!

And we conclude with the only LTO burger of summer 2017 it would make any sense to conclude with - Hardee's Charbroiled Hawaiian Chicken Sandwich, which is clearly the most idiosyncratically summery of any of the burgers we've taken a gander at in this article. This sandwich could only be released during summer, when the temps are north of 80 degrees at 7 in the morning and just walking around feels like a synthwave song. We're talking charbroiled chicken breast, we're talking a goddamn chunk of grilled pineapple on top of that and fuckin' half a bottle of teriyaki sauce dumped on top of that. Any other time of the year such a product would be deemed too ludicrous for consideration, but when it's boiling hot outside and sweat is dripping off your balls and the only sport that's on TV is baseball, all of a sudden spending millions to market and mass-produce a chicken-pineapple-and-teriyaki-sauce burger makes all the sense in the world. For better or for worse, this was the unofficial burger of summer 2017, with every bite tasting like Charlottesville, Mayweather vs. McGregor and the solar eclipse while "Stay" loops endlessly in the background. And in a way, that disjointed jumble of ingredients is an almost perfect metaphor for the season that was. We began with James Comey getting shitcanned and ended with Houston getting turned into Atlantis, and in the middle? We had the Hardee's Charbroiled Hawaiian Chicken Sandwich, which I'll always remember eating in slow-motion while Coldplay and the Chainsmokers' "Something Just Like This" blaring in the ocean breeze. Not only do I have no problems labeling this sandwich the official LTO burger of summer 2017, I have half a mind to go on ahead and declare it the official physical embodiment of summer 2017 itself. Like a long lost lover, we'll never forget you, Hardee's Charbroiled Hawaiian Chicken Sandwich - and all I can say is "thanks for the memories, but fuck you in the ass for ruining my only GOOD pair of khaki Dockers, you teriyaki-drippin' cocksucker."

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Mighties Kiwis Are Fucking Terrifying

The same people who brought you Cuties oranges thought they had created they next adorable fruit mascot. What they created instead was the ultimate experience in supermarket horror.

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@Jimbo___X

You may ask yourself what inspires a man to write an entire article about the mascot for a plastic tub of kiwis. The answer - as often the case in life - starts off innocuously, then transmogrifies into bone-chilling terror.

It was a rather routine weekday afternoon. I was just ambling aimlessly down the aisles at Kroger, trying to determine who I wanted to fuck more: Joanna Gaines from Fixer Upper or Jedediah Bila from The View. With no apparent solution in sight, I mindlessly waltzed out of the off-brand soda aisle and into the fresh produce section.

And it was there I stumbled upon it ... one of the most horrifying discoveries of my adult life.

Now, odds are, you don't think about kiwis that much - if it all, for that matter. In fact, I'm guessing 98 percent of the people reading this have never eaten one in their lives. No matter how hard Big Agriculture tries to convince us otherwise, they're always destined to be a "C-fruit," like kumquats or a starfruit. Their appeal will be niche at best, and any efforts to take the things "mainstream" are destined to falter.

But that didn't stop Sun Pacific from making a - well, woefully misguided - attempt to do precisely that. If you've never heard of the company before, they're a Pasadena-based fruit producer/distributor that handles all the usual stuff - grapes, lemons, tomatoes (and yes, tomatoes are fruits because they have seeds in 'em, you unlearned motherfuckers.) Their big seller is a brand of Clementine oranges called Cuties, which has a double-fisted marketing hook; the products themselves are super-duper easy to open (apparently, getting through traditional orange rinds was a bigger consumer deterrent than I would have assumed) and, of course, their brand image is downright adorable. You've got this super cherubic anthropomorphic orange zipping itself out of its rind - it's simple, it's clean, it's cute and it does a great job highlighting the product's primary branding hook (you know, that they're easy to open and shit.) It looks very smooth on stickers and as four-foot tall cutout displays and is so easy on the eyes you really could imagine it doubling as a Florida minor league baseball team logo. In short, it's a marvelous way to market a product that, quite frankly, has otherwise limited appeal to the fat-ass utopia that is modern America.

So Sun Pacific decided to go the same route with its brand of kiwis. You know how they call their oranges Cuties? Well, they decided to call their kiwis Mighties, with the sub-marketing moniker "the amazing furry fruit."

Alright, everything sounds pretty good in theory, right? Well, all that shit goes out the window when you see what the official Mightis Kiwis mascot looks like ...

Holy goddamn shit, is that thing spooky or what? It's like something out of Five Nights at Freddy's, or the cartoon sequence in Twilight Zone: The Movie - a highly unsettling mixture of the absurdly adorable and the absurdly threatening. An anthropomorphic orange doesn't really look like anything other than an orange with eyeballs and a smile, but this anthropomorphic kiwi looks like some sort of long extinct megafauna. 

Three things immediately jump out at me here. First, the furry texture on the mascot makes it look WAY too much like its a living creature. It looks less like a fruit than it does a really, really spherical bear or beaver, and that just feels all kind of icky. Secondly, who in the hell thought it was a good idea to replace the cartoon character's teeth with a slice of exposed kiwi meat? Depending on which angle you choose, it either looks like the mascot has an emerald-colored whale baleen plate - perfect for devouring krill and other creatures without even having to bother chewing them - or it looks like the monster has extreme gingivitis, lost all its teeth and now has to make do with its gross, mushy green gums. And I don't know about you, but the idea of being gummed to death by a monster seems even more ghoulish than being torn asunder by razor sharp incisors. And then there's that spoon. Look carefully, folks - the mascot is standing atop a pile of freshly scooped kiwis. Since he's holding a feasible murder instrument in his/her/its hand, what kind of conclusion would you naturally leap to? Hell, maybe it's even weirder and the cartoon character used the spoon to scoop its own face off, like that one dude did in Hannibal. Regardless, you really can't draw anything but bad vibes from the packaging, but I assure you, that's just the beginning of the horror. 

I suppose we might as well try to give the Mighties kiwis a fair trial in the grocery store court of law. IF you can overlook the unbridled horror of the wide-eyed, mush-mouthed monster mascot, I guess you could consider the fruits themselves pretty enjoyable. We'll get to the taste of the things in just a bit, but first, how about we let the producers of Mighties give us their best elevator pitch as to why we should all shove these hairy green testicle looking motherfuckers down our respective gullets? 

Well, the marketing language is pretty straightforward. Per whoever signed off the packaging lingo, these here kiwis have more potassium than bananas, more vitamin C than oranges (jeez, way to cannibalize your market share, dinguses!) more vitamin E and K than avocados (I guess that explains the aesthetic resemblance) and more fiber than, and I quote, "the leading cereal brand," which the eye test would lead you to assume is Corn Flakes. Granted, that's a 1:1 serving-to-serving comparison, which is a little misleading, since these guys consider two kiwis a full serving and most cereal brands consider three spoonfuls of their stuff a full serving, but you know what? Nobody reads this site for my musings on the inconsistencies of nutritional labeling data, so onward we go with the obscure references and curse words.

Apparently, "kiwi" is one of those weird words that represents both its own singular and plural form. But I'm going to keep calling them kiwis, because I can, gahdammit. Interestingly, I noticed the brand has really gone above and beyond to abstain from referring to their product as basic-ass kiwis, which I guess is a pretty decent advertising ploy. No, we don't sell kiwis, any old motherfucker can do that, we sell MIGHTIES, you no-count son-of-a-bitch, it's a fuckin' SUPER FRUIT and if you don't like it to hell with 'ya. Which, uh, I guess would be a pretty ineffective marketing campaign literally, but INDIRECTLY, we know that's PRECISELY what this hyper-confrontational packaging WANTS to tell us. Anyhoo, the nutritional info speaks for itself, I guess: each kiwi is only about 45 calories, which makes it a great snack for dieters, anorexics, and dieters who don't know they're anorexics. Also, just one of these fuckers has 115 percent of your daily recommended allowance of vitamin C, which makes me wonder if its possible to O.D. on it. Which, according to the Mayo Clinic, actually IS possible, only instead of killing you by shutting down your liver functions, it just makes you shit a lot. Well, nobody loses there, I reckon.

And now, we come to the fruits themselves. They say sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words, and I reckon this one says at least 1,001. There's really no genteel way to put it; the things look just like giant beaver testicles. They're brown, they're furry and at first glance, I would assume these things to be about a million and a half different things before "an edible fruit with a lot of vitamins and shit in it." If you saw these things in bunches just growing out in the wild, I'm guessing most folks would think they were sleeping hedgehogs or something. Regardless, these things are pretty much the LEAST edible looking things ever, and to say that slightly works against the product is kinda' like saying 9/11 was bad publicity for the Muslim folks. 

But hey, at least they DID manage to slap a couple of collectible, tradable stickers on them! In addition to the soccer playing beaver testicle on the left and the cannibalistic gingivitis monster on the right eating his own skin for breakfast, I found a couple of other ones in my two pound plastic tub of kiwis. There's a baseball themed one, and another of an anthro-kiwi holding a green flag in one hand and what appears to be a pickax in the other. Yeah, your guess is as good as mine as to what the hell that one's supposed to be about. 

Surprisingly, just slapping a mini-sticker on the things does very little to negate the intrinsically unappealing aesthetic qualities of the kiwis. I mean, even with a happy cartoon character's beaming face on it, that really doesn't do anything to make it look any less like a hairy brown monkey testicle. Yeah, I get the basic idea that the fruit itself is kinda' like a miniature coconut crossbred with a lime, but nobody's ever mistaken a coconut or a lime for a balled up sleeping otter or the severed sex organs of miscellaneous mammals. Jeez, what I wouldn't have given to have been in the boardroom meeting when these guys discussed ways to work around the fact the products they've been paid to advertise look like orangutan testes... 

I swear, the more you stare at the thing, the more horrifying it gets. Just look at the formless, faceless abyss. You know, you really don't have to have too much of an imagination to envision these things as the little tumbleweed space rats from the Critters movies, or maybe even one of those intergalactic space eggs from Alien that has the vagina-faced scorpion mouth-rapist in 'em. And let's don't pretend that wide-eyed, wide-mouthed cartoon monster in the background doesn't make the whole thing a million times more terrifying, because it totally fuckin' does. 

But the thing that unnerves me most about Mighties, I suppose, is what they look like on the inside. For starters, kiwis take a lot of fucking effort to eat. You can't just bite into 'em like an apple or rip 'em open like a Cutie. You need at least two eating utensils, plus a space that's safe to drip all of that fruit juice everywhere. So basically, you're supposed to cut the things in half, then you scoop 'em out and eat them with a spoon. Sure, all this sounds nice and dandy in theory, but in practice? Hoo boy, the process is a LOT more demanding than any of us prolly expected...

I hope you can see all that glistening fruit jizz, because these kiwis are just soaking in it. Seriously, as soon as you halve the things, a good three or four ounces of extremely acidic juice starts dripping out of it, just like the blood of them insect monsters in Aliens. Even better, the goop is a bright green hue, pretty much the same color as the Ah-nold chasing monster's in Predator. Additionally, I can't be the only person just mildly concerned that there's so many fucking seeds in this thing, am I? Most oranges have what, one or two? Well, this one has about two to three dozen per kiwi, and of course they all look like sentient black parasites just champing at the bit to take up residence in your lower intestines like in The Thing. Go ahead, take a good, long look and just TELL me you can't envision some sort of flesh-eating alien chimera living inside one of these things. Because you can't, and we all know it.

Shit, just take a look at the remnants of this discarded kiwi rind. As soon as you spoon out all of the fruit, all you're left with is a hairy outer shell with a super waxy interior that looks just like a gigantic booger cocoon. I've got a pretty strong stomach, but the more I look at that thing the sicker I get. It just looks so unnatural and artificial, like some sort of lab-made womb for half-vegetable people; sorry, but there's no way I can be anything OTHER than suspicious when chowing down on something that voluntarily chooses to live in something that looks like that. Sheesh. 

Now, as an objective food reviewer, I did think the Mighties tasted pretty good. They're not too tart and they're not really sugary, so basically, it's what happens when you cross-pollinate a lemon with an avocado. It's mushy but not too bland and spicy without being too acidic, which is a real boon to people like me with penchants for really, really flavorless things. So, yes, as a routine munchie or quick snack, these things are quite decent. But as aesthetic commercial goods, though? Folks, you may never agree to put anything in your mouth as terrifying as these motherfuckers ever again ... 

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I Tried Starbucks' Unicorn Frappuccino!

Fleeting thoughts on the mega-limited-time-only Starbucks beverage you've probably already forgotten about ...

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@Jimbo___X

Sometimes, you just experience something so ephemeral that even as it happens in front of you it feels like something nostalgic from 20 years ago. I got that sensation when I tried Burger King's infamous "Halloween Burger," when I tried Pizza Hut's ill-received "Hot Dog Bites Pizza" and I definitely felt it when I tried Hardee's "Most American Thickburger." And - without question - I felt those odd pangs of insta-nostalgia as soon as I wrapped my lips around Starbucks' hyper-limited-time-only Unicorn Frappuccino.

By the time this thing has been posted, the heavily-hyped Unicorn Frappuccino has been out of Starbucks stores for nearly a full month. Most chains only carried the LTO beverage for about a week, and a much publicized ingredients shortage meant that many Starbucks across the States couldn't even make it for customers at all. So it's one of those things you had a super limited amount of time to try, and if you missed out on it - well, this is one of those things you may never, EVER get to slurp upon ever again. 

Of course I acknowledge the whole damn thing is just a crass marketing ploy by Starbucks - a feverish, marketing-engineered cultural phenomenon basically tailor-made for the "I've gotta' Instagram everything" crowd. It's outlandish and gaudy and weird simply for the sake of being weird, but really, what's so bad about that? Like that one girl in drama class with pink hair that always wears neon blue lipstick, this shit is supposed to try too hard, and that's kinda' its charm.

Aesthetically, at least, the Unicorn Frappuccino is pretty easy to describe.The thing is Barney the Dinosaur-purple, with a Smurf-blue squiggle running around it. The top of the beverage is basically a giant dollop of whipped creme, with a smattering of ultra-tart, sour raspberry artificial flavoring as adornments. So yeah, just in terms of pure visuals, it's basically what happens when you blend that gay Teletubby over ice and coffee and hawk it for $5 a cup.

Now, the taste, on the other hand, requires a little bit more insight. According to the official Starbucks website, the primary taste of the beverage is supposed to be mango, but personally, I just didn't see it (well, more like taste it, but you know what I'm trying to say here.) Yeah, I know they say it's supposed to have a dominant passion fruit taste, but really, the "pink powder" add-in is what really runs this particular show. Now, the official 'bucks website says the stuff is made out of a bizarre combination of artificial flavors (including cherry, sweet potato and even radish!) but deep down, we all know what kinda' make-believe fruit flavor the chain is really shoving down our throats - it's fucking raspberry. Don't give me none of that mess about the "blue drizzle" having white chocolate mocha sauce in it, this thing more or less tastes identical to a raspberry-flavored Slush Puppy, only sludgier and with more of a chunky, dairy-taste and consistency. Now, per Starbucks' own marketing materials, the beverage itself is supposed to change colors when you rotate the drink, but I didn't see that many revolving hues. Oddly enough, that little blue streak thingy remains almost perfectly consistent as you drink the motherfucker, and while it does taste noticeably thicker and pulpier than the rest of the drink, it doesn't really taste that divergent from the main raspberry-slush flavoring.

Which brings us to the speckles of artificially flavored sour grape. No, I mean literal sour grapes, not the figurative kind that almost everybody interprets incorrectly. Up top the Unicorn Frappuccino has a pretty big splotch of what I think is supposed to be sour raspberry (or maybe even sour blueberry) but really, it tastes more like super tarty artificial grapes than anything else. And rest assured, this shit IS STRONG. Think about the most potent Warhead or Sour Patch Kid you've ever eaten, and I guarantee you the syrup Starbucks used on this thing is at least 100 times more potent. Because I ain't got no gumption, I decided to lick the liquid residue off the top of my cup and I almost went into convulsions - this shit isn't just sour, it's a-mouthful-of-Sour-Patch-Kids-mixed-with-lemon-juice sour. Strangely enough, all that industrial strength sour juice doesn't really meddle with the overall beverage flavor as much as you think it would. Granted, it gives the raspberry slush a noticeable sour blueberry aftertaste, and once you get down to the last clump of mushy creme at the bottom of the cup it does taste remarkably like standard sour cream, but somehow, someway, it doesn't turn the beverage as a whole into an undrinkable, taste-bud-torturing elixir.

So, on the whole, I really can't complain too much about the overall product. Its aesthetics get a solid A for effort in my book, and the super fruity/kinda' sour milkshake consistency and flavor is definitely unlike anything you've probably ever tried at the franchise. Nutrition-wise, I reckon you already know what you're getting into here. At 410 calories a cup, it's pretty much on par with most of Starbucks' other event drinks, with about 10 grams worth of saturated fat lurking in the plastic container just waiting to make you fat, too. Probably the craziest thing about the beverage as a whole, I suppose, is the amount of sugar inside the frappuccino - an astounding 59 grams. That comes out to about 15 tablespoons of sugar, which yeah, is prolly about as bad for you as it sounds.

At the end of the day, it's a bit difficult determining the import of the Unicorn Frappuccino on contemporary pop culture/consumer culture history. Seeing as how the thing was literally only around for seven days, its general influence is pretty minimal, but considering how crazy everybody went for it when it was available at stores, you really can't write it off as an inconsequential relic of 2017, neither. The beverage was indeed a true First World consumer phenomenon, something so ubiquitous within the social media sphere that it was practically impossible to not be aware of the product's existence even if you never saw a single ad for it. I guess in the long haul the real importance of the Unicorn Frappuccino lies within the way it was marketed; eschewing traditional advertising methods, they just dropped they shit in stores for a week and let the Instagram-Uber-Alles novelty culture do all the heavy lifting for them. And needless to say, that approach just plain worked. The thing sold like gangbusters, everybody on Facebook was talking about it and posting pictures of it online and even if you don't like Starbucks or coffee in general, there's no way you couldn't have heard about it. Love or hate Starbucks, few companies out there know how to make "event foods" work, and even fewer know how to captivate (if not capitalize) on the post-Myspace cultural hivemind.

And come on - are you really going to bitch and complain about people showing off photos of food that looks like something the Lost Boys in Hook would've had for breakfast? I think not, America. I think fuckin' not.

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The New Taco Bell Boss Wraps ... REVIEWED!

Are you man enough to chow down on two of the biggest honkin' burritos ever mass-manufactured by a fast food company? NO YOU ARE NOT. Maybe.

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@Jimbo__X

LIKE A BOSS. I don't even know what that means, nor do I even know where the phrase originates from, to be honest. Sure, I could hit up the Urban Dictionary, but you know what? After putting down two of the largest Taco Bell products released in recent memory, I don't feel like doing shit. Except not moving and letting the cheese coagulate in my arteries. 

Indeed, it's been quite some time since I last did a review of Taco Bell produce. Is it just me, or does the Bell seem to be cutting back on the sheer volume of novelty foodstuffs being churned out? That, and it seems like they are pushing these experimental items for a longer duration of time - I swear, they were hawking those damn "Daredevil" Loaded Grillers that look and taste nearly identical for at least three months. 

Which brings us to the newfangled Boss Wraps. I suppose the best way to describe them would be like crunch wraps, except WAY bigger and with way more stuff jammed inside 'em. As in, a whole dadgum hard shell tortilla, just hanging out inside the flour tortilla exterior shell like some sort of Tex-Mex stowaway. 

As you can see from the above photo, these things are big and bulky. With the naked eye, you can pick up all of the chunky bulges of steak and if you have a really keen eye for fast food Mexican, you might even be able to spot the subterranean sour cream pool on the right-hand wrap.

These being grilled steak offerings, of course, they are a bit pricier than the average Taco Bell selection. The two permutations of Boss Wrap cost five smackers plus taxes, but considering their overall girth - and the high quotient of interior stuffings - that's a fairly reasonable price. And as a man who can eat a LOT of Taco Bell, let me be the first to tell you - two of these sumbitches in one sitting are MORE than enough to fill you up.

As for your options, you've got two paths to choose from. On one end, you've got the Fully Loaded Boss Wrap, which is one of the few Taco Bell items to include a guacamole as a primary ingredient. The other is the Steak and Potato Boss Wrap, which contains ... well, if you can't figure this one out, I'd reckon that's an automatic drug test. 

Let's begin with the Fully Loaded variation, shall we? As the name suggests, it has quite a bit of material wedged inside it, including:

• Guac (as stated before, a real rarity for the franchise)
• Sour cream
• Three cheese Mexican blend
• Diced tomatoes (they say it's pico, but it's not really pico)
• Lettuce (I think it's an Iceberg double blend) 
• A nice chipotle sauce (which doesn't really show up in the photo)
• Steak (a shocker, I know)
• A motherfucking hard shell tortilla (sorry, I have a hard time getting over that)

It actually took me way longer than it should have to figure out the "proper" way to eat this thing. You see, you don't nibble on it longways like a crunch wrap, you have to literally roll this bastard up like a newspaper and chew on it as if you were eating a XXL burrito. Considering the size of this beast, that's not exactly the most intuitive feeling in the world; and yes, you know shit starts flowing out of it as soon as you take the first bite. That said, it was nonetheless a yummy product, with the three sauces - guac, sour cream and proprietary chipotle - all coalescing into a remarkable confluence of flavors (chuacour cream, I nicknamed it.) As for the rest of the mix? The steak is adequately juicy and chewy, but it's most certainly not the high-quality fajita beef you'd get at a "real" Mexican eatery. The cheeses kind of tasted different (but not really) and - pardon the redundancy - fuck having that hard shell tortilla in there for no reason. 

And here's the Fully Loaded Boss Wrap's running mate, the Steak and Potato Boss Wrap. Gustatorily, this one actually tastes quite a bit different from its cohort, and for good reason: it, uh, has different stuff in it, I guess. As far as the ingredients go, here is a quick rundown:

• Sour cream
• Three cheese Mexican blend
• Little tater tot thingies
• Pieces of bacon (which are probably just pieces of Bacon Bits they keep in the back)
• Steak 
• A fuckin' great ranch chipotle sauce I could probably drink as a standalone beverage (more on that later)
• Once again, an utterly needless hard shell tortilla

Now this one, I really liked. Granted, it is a bit of a pell-mell assortment of ingredients, and yes, at first sight, it looks more like the contents of a slop bucket poured inside a tortilla than something you would actually want to eat, but believe it or not, all of it somehow comes together as a particularly zesty fast food offering. There is a nice mouth-feel to the product, with the crispy tots, crunchy pork bits and chewy steak pieces providing a nice confluence of tastes and textures. Here, the hard shell tortilla actually makes some degree of sense, and it completes the other materials quite well. However, the thing really putting this variation over the top has to be the stellar chipotle ranch sauce, which is arguably the best semi-liquid additive Taco Bell has ever produced - yes, even better than the much-ballyhooed Volcano Sauce. All in all, this is just a top-notch, super-filling offering - although, in my humblest o' opinions, the thing would have been even better with shredded chicken instead of shredded steak. Oh well - guess we will just have to wait for the inevitable redux in six months' time, no?

So there you have it, folks. The Boss Wraps are pretty solid, if not a tad overpriced, menu additions to the venerated Taco Bell line-up, that while hardly creative, are at least fairly tasty and filling. If you can only afford one, I'd definitely vouch for the Steak and Potato mix, if only for that superb ranch dressing filling (no hard feelings against the guacamole loaded one, but the hard shell tortilla just ain't gelling there at all.) It's not the best Taco Bell product to come along this year, but it is certainly above-grade; let's just hope its "success" doesn't goad the Bell into hiking up prices for future limited-time-only offerings ... or wedging more hard shell tortillas inside things that don't need them whatsoever.

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The Most American Thickburger!

The fact that it even exists in the first place isn't the only astonishing thing about the new product ... it's also a pretty damn good fast food burger, too. 

As soon as I heard about the Most American Thickburger, I simply had to be there for its day one launch. This wasn't just a new fast food item release, it was the veritable zenith of fast food excess; unless McDonalds starts selling Turducken around the holidays, there's just no way any burger joint can outdo what Hardee's and Carl's Jr. has done here.

Of course, the 1,000 calorie-plus abomination is really nothing more than a shameless publicity stunt. In this, the era of Sriracha Quesaritas and Dr. Pepper bubblegum and suburban-white-girl-flavored Oreos, the Most American Thickburger -- henceforward referred to as the "thickburger" -- stands out as the final punchline to a cruel, commercialized joke that's been running rampant since the late 2000s.

This isn't food designed to be eaten, it is food designed to be ridiculed and absorbed in a smarmy, ironic manner. The marketing angle for the burger isn't the burger itself, it's the sublime absurdity of the product even being thought of; it's like some big, fat, post-modern, self-reflexive commentary on the general excess of American spending habits and the unconscionable guiltlessness of corporate marketing practices. Instead of shying away from the fact that high-calorie slop of the like is literally killing people en masse, the advertising wehrmacht behind this thing is openly mocking both the inherent unhealthiness of its literal bread and butter (and ketchup, iceberg lettuce and probably safe-for-consumption beef) and the unbelievably tasteless (and reckless) palates of the American fast food consumer.

The release around Memorial Day is no coincidence. The entire shtick behind the marketing of the product (and indeed, the very product itself) is a self-deprecating ode to American overconsumption, a gimmick that scornfully embraces the grandiose ridiculousness of both American patriotism and American waistlines. The thickburger really is the ultimate post-911 social commentary; we now live in an ecosphere so detached and so devoid of existential meaning that corporate entities can come out and call its consumers fat-ass, nationalistic slobs in their own advertisements and instead of being offended, the general public embraces it like some sort of loving Don Rickles zinger. Welcome to the new world order, folks: we are literally eating contempt and disdain of the common man for dinner.

Before we even get into the burger itself, the packaging alone is probably enough to be considered a hate-filled critique of fast food culture. The carry-out bag proclaims "eat like you mean it" in a bold, aggressive font that almost feels like it weighs 300 pounds and wears a CPAP mask at night. The strangely confrontational motto almost seems like one of the blunt advertisements of "Idiocracy" carried over into the real-world ... or even more unsettling, one of the Reptilian 1-percent mind-control coded messages from "They Live." And to think ... those pus-faced alien totalitarians wouldn't even have to make their threats subliminal to be effective in the wonderland of 21st century marketing.

As something of an homage/deconstruction of the old "Made in the USA" iconography, the thickburger paper container also comes with a special sticker proclaiming that, yes, it is indeed quite "American." I am not totally sure if this is something that is being done coast-to-coast or if it's just the brilliant, lone actions of my local Hardee's, but it's such fantastic, unintentional commentary. That same emblem thousands upon thousands of our fellow countrymen have died for, relegated to a piece of sticky art, plastered on a greasy cardboard cube so high-school-aged cashiers won't confuse it for a chicken sandwich. And of course, after we're done ingesting our monstrous hamburger? We just toss Old Glory into the refuse bin, where it takes up residence alongside discarded, half-eaten milkshakes and cigarette butts. God bless these United States, no?

Odds are, if you stumbled across this blog, you already know what a Most American Thickburger is. Alas, for those in South Africa and the former Soviet bloc states that somehow get redirected here after trying to figure out why American college students are so dense and why "Daikatana" on the Game Boy is so fucking great, here's the gist of it.

In America, there is a fast food chain called Hardee's. Actually, that's just one of its names; on the east coast, the franchise goes by that moniker, but on the west coast, it's called Carl's Jr. Now, one minute on the Wikipedia would probably explain in full why the corporation uses two distinct operating titles, but just taking a wild guess, I'd say that's probably to save money on taxes or something. And if that's not confusing enough? The parent corporation also has two extra Mexican restaurants, called the Red Burrito and the Green Burrito, stapled onto some of its Hardee's/Carl's Jr. locations.

If you've ever read "Fast Food Nation," you know the story of how Hardee's came to be. While today it is not really considered one of the heavier hitters of the U.S. fast food racket, it's probably a top ten franchisee. Again, I could look up factual data to confirm or disprove my guesstimations, but how has time to fact-check when Google let's you play "Pac-Man" on its virtual maps? That's right, not a single damn one of us.

So, uh, anyway, Hardee's. Their big claim to fame is this thing called a thickburger, which is allegedly fatter, plumper and juicier than your standard McDonalds or Burger King offering. I am not sure if such is truly the case, but it probably is -- the last time it was at each of those restaurant, the patty I received was about as flimsy as a sliver of store-branded bologna. The burgers are a bit pricier than the average offering, and considering the staggering volume of the Most American Thickburger, the $5.49 MSRP seems pretty understandable.

As stated earlier, if you got here, you most likely know what this thing is all about. Alas, for those of you not in the know, I'll just let the product visually introduce itself...

That's right, amigos y amigas -- it's a split hot dog wiener on top of a cheeseburger patty on top of lettuce and tomato on top of potato chips, with ketchup smeared on both buns. That sounds revolting/incredible/delicious enough on its own, but take this into consideration, folks -- the pictures above and below are actually the smaller of two different Most American Thickburger variations the restaurants are hawking.

The social scientists we are, however, how about we take a look at the product more in-depth, why don't we?

Layer one is a catsup-coated hot dog. To the untrained eye, it may look like two wieners, but it is actually just a wiener halved down the middle. I mean, do you really think a restaurant would have the audacity to release a product with two hot dogs resting atop a hamburger patty? Get real, folks.

Layer two is your standard American-cheese coated hamburger patty. For an extra dollar, they will actually throw on another patty for you, in case you just goddamn demand two hamburger patties to go along with your hot-dog and potato chip sandwich. I am not sure if they will throw in another wiener for you, though ... next time I am around one of the restaurants, that is something I will be sure to bring up to the store manager.

Beneath the beef, we've got your hippie-liberal-vegetarian nonsense, in the form of tomato slices, onions and iceberg lettuce. There's really not much to say here, so let's just travel to the final layer, which consists of a vegetable we actually give a shit about ...

That's right, fellas, this thing concludes with some extra-crispy Lays kettle potato chips, which is capped off by some pickle slices and about half a bottle of Heinz squeezings. Keep in mind, readers, that this isn't just a random screencap of the bottom of a compost pile ... this is actually the shit Hardee's is jamming between two buns and selling to people for actual money. How in the bluest of hells stuff like this got past the FDA is simply beyond me, folks.

You know, you never really notice just how gross the stuff we eat is until we look at it up-close. For example, is the above a picture of the final layer of the Most American Thickburger, or is it an up-close biopsy photo I scammed off a medical website? The fact that you even have to second-guess yourself tells you so many things about modernity that quite frankly, we just don't want to have to acknowledge.

All of that said, as conceptually disgusting as the Most American Thickburger may sound, the product itself -- as much as I loathe myself for typing this -- is actually, shockingly decent-tasting. You would assume that what is virtually an entire picnic lunch between two buns would taste about as pleasing as prune juice frozen yogurt, but somehow, this thing actually tasted fairly yummy. Logistics, as to be expected, were a problem. As huge as the burger was, I had a hard time actually fitting the thing in my mouth for a first bite, and it was hard to snag a piece without watching about four pounds of lettuce fall out of the side. Needless to say, this is an extraordinarily greasy burger, which was so soppy I actually had to eat it with a cloth towel underneath me, lest ketchup-coated chunks of wiener rain down upon my carpet. 

Is this "great eating" by any stretch of the imagination? Absolutely not. However, as a stand-alone experiential product (there's no way anyone should be allowed to eat more than one of these in a human lifetime), it ain't too shabby. As strange as it may sound, it actually tasted a little bit crispier and more verdant than most fast food burgers, which is most definitely not the thing you would expect to say about a hot-dog-potato-chip burger. Additionally, it really wasn't as salty as you would think it would be, and the mish-mash of textures and flavors really didn't clash at all. 

You know, it is not often that a fast food product gives you something philosophical to think about when you eat it. Sure, the theory of the burger may be utterly repugnant, but think of it this way: what's the difference between eating this burger and eating a big plate of the individual components of said burger? Ultimately, they all wind up being a jumble of chewed up mush awaiting an acid bath in your tummy, so who cares if you eat the ingredients as stand-alone offerings or as one mass-marketed clusterfuck of a sammich? Really, this product is just as much a critique of our cultural perspectives on eating as it is a criticism of our collective consumer penchants for more. Yeah, it's gross and over-the-top and indicative of our further deterioration as a social body, but at the same time, we can't help but enjoy what we're being served. 

The Most American Thickburger, then, is perhaps the ultimate decadent and degenerative foodstuff for a society hellbent on becoming more decadent and degenerative than any culture before it. We've no wars to wage, no gods to worship and no empires to build ... but goddamnit, we have hamburgers with hot dogs and potato chips inside them. I'm pretty sure our grandfathers would have preferred having that to fighting Hitler and Hirohito, wouldn't they?

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