Investigating Lunchables' Alarming New Desire To Mess With My Mouth

[Currently Avoiding: Work]



For my entire K-12 public school career, I was a brown-bagger. While other kids lined up in the school cafeteria for wondrous $1.25 meals of macaroni and cheese, chocolate milk, chicken nuggets, and other lukewarm fat-kid-food delicacies, I dined enviously on my boring home-prepared sack lunch formula: ham sandwich, apple, juice box, and small treat. My jealousy peaked on pizza days, when those very fortunate school lunch kids were treated to the legendary rectangular pizza slices, topped with that curiously rigid layer of white cheese which could be easily removed as a single piece. Pizza for lunch?? To me it was an unfathomable luxury. After all, my family was hardly wealthy, and my frugal mother saw absolutely no reason to waste money on unhealthy school lunches when she was more than happy to prepare a sensible alternative for me every morning. So when the mighty Lunchables arrived in stores, and were marketed to children as being mysteriously more fun than regular lunch, it was beyond perplexing to my mother why I would persistently beg her to buy them for me, when she could easily and economically prepare the very same ingredients herself.

In case you live under a rock, Lunchables are little pre-made lunch packs which include crackers, slices of cheese, and slices of turkey or ham. At least, that's what they originally contained. Later, juice and candy were added, and in recent years the Lunchables line has expanded to include grotesque-looking tacos, chicken fingers, mini hot-dogs, and other high-fat snack foods that children really don't need.

I don't know what it was that made Lunchables so appealing to me. Perhaps it was how neatly arranged and packaged everything was, with the individual components of your eventual cracker sandwich stacked flawlessly within their own compartments. Or maybe it was the amazing perfect circles of slimy lunch meat - a shape that assured you nature took no part in their creation. Perhaps it was the delicious, high-fat cheese slices, brought to you by the crowned kings of processed foods, Kraft. Kraft's flagship cheese is so far away from being actual cheese that the box labels it "Kraft Pasteurized Prepared American Cheese Product." Whatever the case, I was somehow convinced that Lunchables were in all ways superior to any cracker-cheese-meat combination my mother could prepare, so when she occasionally gave in and packed them for me in my sack lunch, it seemed almost as exciting as rectangular pizza.

I ate Lunchables regularly, even through high school. By that point most of my peers had come to regard the little lunch packs as the disgusting, over-priced processed garbage that they are, but not me - I still loved them. I also discovered that those perfect circles of slimy lunch meat had mysterious adhesive properties. If thrown directly upward with a good bit of force, they would stick to the cafeteria ceiling and never, ever come down. Whenever I had Lunchables I would add another meat circle to the ceiling, as part of an ongoing art installation / science project which, as far as I know, is still there.

These days I don't eat Lunchables anymore, and I haven't tried their many off-putting new varieties. But the other day at the grocery store I noticed a particularly alarming new twist on the classic Lunchables formula that was simply too bizarre to pass up.



What you see above you is the new Lunchables "Mess With Your Mouth" line of lunch packs. Displaying an admirable dedication to new frontiers of disgusting, unhealthy children's food, Kraft has outdone itself by adding a packet of "Sour Tongue-Teasing Fizz" powder to the package, and directly suggesting that you pour it onto your turkey and cheese cracker stack. Here's a close-up, lest you doubt me:



Think about this very carefully: Kraft wants kids to pour what is essentially sour Pop Rocks onto lunch meat, and eat it. This is not some small notion on the back of the box - it's the foundation of a whole "Mess With Your Mouth" ad campaign, and the entire packaging is dedicated to this seemingly unHoly marriage of sour candy and processed meat. Oh yeah, they also want you to pour sour fizzing powder onto tacos and hamburgers:



Now, I realize children are much more, shall we say, "open minded" about what they'll eat than adults are, and most seemingly-disgusting snack foods are easily excused by being designed for the adventurous palettes of children. But this time, even with a child's interests in mind, it seems like Lunchables has gone way too far. That meat is nasty enough on its own, but with sour candy on top? EWWW. Still... I bought it. I just needed to know.

When I got home, I opened up my Lunchables pack with excited trepidation. The cheese squares and meat circles were as unnaturally perfect as I remembered them, and every bit as artificially delicious. Now accompanying them, though, was the much-hyped new packet of sour fizzing powder:



Determined to try it out exactly as the box demonstrated, I poured the powder out directly onto the turkey of a cracker stack, and it looked like this:



Mmmmm. Appetizing, no? Its appearance has nothing in common with the colorful popping confetti candy shown in the illustration - rather, it looks more like a pile of cocaine on top of wet turkey. But hey, Kraft is devoting a lot of marketing to this concoction, so maybe they know something I don't. Maybe, despite common sense's drastic assertions to the contrary, it's actually delicious. There was only one way to find out. Here's a grotesque close-up of my tongue teasing the powdered turkey before it went down the hatch:



As it turns out, the taste of Ritz cracker, Kraft cheese, Oscar Meyer meat, and third rate Pop Rocks combining in your mouth is every bit as unpleasant as it sounds like it would be, confirming my suspicion that this is the most disgusting and senseless product in grocery stores at the moment. Convinced that someone at Kraft had completely lost their mind with this promotion, I decided to search for answers.

On the Lunchables website I found a whole section devoted to the "Mess With Your Mouth" foods. "Messing with your mouth" is apparently the prerogative of The Lunchables Brigade, an animated crack team of processed food enthusiasts comprised of a white boy, a black boy (complete with dreadlocks to assure you he's black, and glasses to assure you he's not threatening), and an ambiguously brown girl, who conveniently could be either Asian or Latino, depending on your specific needs for ethnic identification.



As demonstrated in this TV ad, The Lunchables Brigade seems convinced that your lunch is far too pleasing in its current form, and will break through your walls and aggressively coat your food with disgusting fizzy powder, thereby effectively messing with your mouth. This approach likely stems from the Kool-Aid Man School Of Food Mascot Tactics, which teaches that the door is simply a far too inconvenient entry point when fun food is urgently needed.

Even more perplexing is the Kraft website, which is advertising some sort of dancing game and makes no real mention of food whatsoever. I suppose it's a half-assed attempt at giving the impression that Kraft is out to get kids active, when of course its true mission is clogging millions of little arteries with its strange adhesive meats.

Okay, it's way past time for me to stop procrastinating with artificial food and get some work done.