Summertime, and the living is easy... Or is it? With rising temperatures and rising fuel prices combining to crank up the energy bills, and all the costs associated with new hot-weather wardrobes, summer travel, and beach parking or swimming-pool access, sweaty consumers are likely to be feeling the financial pinch of the sunny season. Which is why the ever-helpful A.V. Club has once again scouted the nation's dollar stores for another roundup of the best and most terrifying of dangerously cheap eats. These refreshing beach-or-pool-ready dollar snacks are light, portable, and picnic-worthy, to the degree that they're worthy of human consumption at all.
Artificially Flavored Fruity Ice Pops
They don't make frozen treats more generic than Artificially Flavored Fruity Ice Pops, which come 20 for 50 cents. Packaged in a plain yellow plastic bag (which announces "Containing No Fruit Juice" on both sides, in large letters, as though it were a selling point), the individual Ice Pops consist of long, rubbery tubes of thin plastic filled with colored water. Once frozen, they can be snapped in half at the midpoint, pried out of their sleeves, and eaten—at the risk of frostbite from the handle-free frozen surface and sugar shock from the actual product.
Scariest-sounding ingredient: Artificially Flavored Fruity Ice Pops are mostly corn syrup, water, and dye, but the manufacturers found room for both "Sodium Benzoate" and "Potassium Sorbate."
Worth the price? Possibly for use as the marital aid which they so closely resemble.
Baskin Robbins Marshmallow Ice Cream Cones
Through some miracle of olfactory science, this little bag of cutely shaped marshmallows actually smells like a Baskin Robbins: cool and sugary, with undertones of minimum wage. But those in the mood for the full B-R experience will need to get in the car. These marshmallows look like ice-cream cones, but they taste like marshmallows.
Scariest-sounding ingredient: Nothing too bad—just sugar, corn syrup, and a rainbow of food coloring.
Worth the price? If you like adorable food, absolutely.
Cheese Zip
Nothing says "cheap" like a cut-rate knockoff of Cheez Whiz, which was a bargain-basement version of a real food to begin with. This aerosol cheese-in-a-can comes out of the dispenser looking and tasting like sticky, foamy nacho Velveeta. Any resemblance to actual cheese is entirely coincidental. However, judging from the stars-and-stripes packaging, the product is as American as baseball, hot dogs, and Mom's spray-on apple-pie-in-a-tube.
Scariest-sounding ingredient: "Guar Gum."
Worth the price? Probably depends on how much actual foam cheese can be extracted from a can, and whether it's eaten, or used as a budget-conscious Silly String substitute.
- Comments