We Love You So – Where The Wild Things Are – Spike Jonze

The rubrics regarding food have traditionally been things like nutrition, deliciousness, and convenience. Advances in food science over the past fifty years, however, have added a new requirement in innovations: novelty. It is no longer enough for a food to taste good and store well. It must also raise eyebrows, stimulate the imagination and provoke spasms of delight.

These are foods like Go-Gurt, bacon chocolate, liquified cheese in a tube, Cap’n Crunch’s Oops! Choco Donuts cereal, energy bars flavored like carrot cake, and Gatorade in flavors like “Be Tough” and “No Excuses”. If the average grocery store carries 47,000 products, there’s a good chance that you’ll come across at least a few hundred items that will make you say “whoa”. It’s true.

On the higher end of the food spectrum there’s molecular gastronomy. And somewhere in the middle are Grāpple® brand apples, a Willy Wonka-esque product consisting of fresh crunchy apples that are engineered to taste like grapes. Yes. This is not fiction! Grāpple® brand apples launched nationwide in 2004, to the mixed delight and confusion of schoolchildren and novelty food bloggers everywhere. The company describes its product as “similar to biting into a very sweet Fuji apple, and then swishing your mouth with concorde grape juice.”

Being exceedingly curious about such a product, I contacted one of the owners and Head of Marketing and Media Todd Snyder for a quickie questionnaire:

Where did the idea for Grāpple brand apples come from?
The apple industry has been looking for new tastes for many, many years. But the only way of accomplishing this (when thinking ‘inside the box’) was to cross popular or unique apple varieties with other prominent apple varieties. This creates apples which have a tarter taste, sweeter taste, blend of sweet/tart, different textures, colors, etc., but doesn’t combine taste treats of non-apple flavors or products which may very well be outstanding in combination.

Think of the different types of Peanut Butter…crunchy, or creamy — but one day this flavor was combined with Chocolate, and this combination was amazing!

Thus, our R & D department at our family business, C & O Nursery of Wenatchee, Washington, began extensive testing of flavoring apples. While many items (different flavors, different apples), produce different combinations – some very good – the combination of Fuji with Grape was a truly outstanding taste experience — totally unique in the fruit/apple world.

Awesome! How are Grāpple brand apples made?
While there are many steps involved (I can’t go into specifics due to the patent application), the basic process involves bathing a specific type of apple for a specific period of time, under a strict set of other criteria. At no time is the apple injected or punctured in any way.

What’s your favorite way to eat a Grāpple?
Fresh out of the warehouse – nothing finer!

If you could combine the tastes of two other fruits, what would you combine?
I’ll say Pineapple with Coconut – cuz I like Pina Coladas! Great taste without the alcohol.

The McSweeney’s website is, depending on your inclinations, a limitless trove of fun things to read or an intimidating morass of text. The insistently lo-fi layout makes navigation a challenge requiring focus and determination, but at least the rewards are plentiful.

One section to plunder is McSweeney’s Reviews of New Food. The section consists of dozens of reader-submitted pintsize reviews, all compiled on a single page in center-spaced paragraphs that go down more smoothly than a strawberry milkshake.

Among the foods reviewed are cilantro, Jolly Time Kettle Corn, Beanit Butter, Swiss Chard, Elway’s Comeback Crunch, Low-Carb Doritos, Viactive (caramel flavor), Gorp and Hershey’s Pumpkin Spice Kisses (”The shape of a gnome’s hat, wrapped in crinkled foil…depending on ambient lighting, the orange may seem to be the exaggerated peachy flesh tone of a crayon or the cartoonish pallor of a woozy Oompa-Loompa.”)

Read ‘em all and then submit your own.

Brooklyn-based artist Edith Zimmerman is the Tom Friedman of snacks. Working with materials lifted from the veg bin and pantry, she crafts ingenious sculptures and catalogs the results on her blog. The results are instantly enjoyable and devilishly clever. Herewith, a teeny questionnaire with the artist herself:

Why do you work with food?
Because when I see a piece of food art there’s some super straightforward part of my brain that just goes, “that’s a fish made out of lettuce, haha!” or “that’s a cat made out of a carrot, haha!” Also because I’ve seen some really great food art by a bunch of other people and it looked like a lot of fun to make.

What are your favorite things about working with food?
Looking at a piece of food until it reminds me of something. That part is fun. Although sometimes it’s frustrating because everything looks the same to me. Like–nectarine: it looks like a head. Potato: it looks like a head. Grape: it looks like a head. Celery: I could turn that into a head.

Do you nosh your creations after making them?
Sometimes! But usually not. Which I know is a waste, but usually by that point my fingers have been all over them and they’re cut up into weird pieces. But I did chop that scallion praying mantis over a bowl of soup, and I ate the hard-boiled egg for sure.

If you had all the materials of the supermarket at your disposal…what would you make?
A full dinosaur skeleton. Or a human skeleton. I could use parsnips for the bones, probably. Or a full-size vampire that I kept in the closet like he was sleeping standing up. I might make him out of all sorts of things.

Edith’s website is here ¡Andalé!