Sending a Big Box of America

An Overseas Artist Friend
In my day job, I work in educational video and have often had the pleasure to feature the artwork of Dutch-English archaeological illustrator Kelvin Wilson.   Kelvin has the diligence and intellectual curiosity of an archaeologist, but the soul of a fine painter.  Sometimes when I look at his work, I think he must have picked up a few genes from Rembrandt.

Hidden within this image is a motherlode of historical information: the herding of animals that formed the Amourites' livelihood, the city on the Euphrates in the distance encroaching on pastoralism, the dress of the herders.  But you could be indifferent to history and still feel your eyes moisten at the sweep of the wind, the glow of the fire, and the mournful, muted sunset.

When Kelvin and I aren't collaborating professionally, we're just friends.   We comment on world events, on art, on each other's respective Netherlandish and American lives, trying to be sanguine, solemn, and insouciant, as appropriate, about the parade passing before us in the 21st century.  Kelvin is kind enough to follow the Food Kingdom blog as well, and shared a thought about this via Facebook messaging:

Surely, dear reader, you can see where this is going....

And so our merry game of trading snacks was afoot and, faced with difficult choices on, as Bob Seger once sang, what to leave in and what to leave out, I had to answer the essential question.

What Does America Taste Like?

In today's globalized society, truly local tastes are getting hard to come by.  You can buy Green Tea KitKats from East Asia at your local international market, along with lychee gummi bears and 10 pound blocks of frozen anchovies.  Without prodding Kelvin with questions on what was and wasn't available in the Netherlands, I searched both my memory and intuition as to what snack foods were, in all probability, safely confined to this side of the pond and either difficult or impossible to get in Kelvin's town of Ridderkerk.  To see what was chosen, let's look inside our Big Box of America.

In all its stomach-churning, tooth-assaulting glory, starting at top left, we have. Little Debbie Oatmeal Creme Pies, Chocodile Twinkies, Sea Salt Caramel Cupcakes, Slim Jims, Little Debbie Nutty Bars, Orchard Skittles, Birthday Cake Oreos, Cinnamon Roll Oreos, Razzles, Take 5, Junior Mints, Red Velvet Oreos, Cracker Jacks, Pizza Combos, Utz Crab Chips, Classic Skittles, Berry Skittles, Sweet and Sour Skittles, Payday

Introducing Little Debbie: Little Debbie Oatmeal Creme Pies and Nutty Bars were included for the counterintuitive reason that they are not a prestige brand.  In fact, the Little Debbie phenomenon shines a light on the class issues that do exist in America, even if not so strongly as in the UK.  Growing up at school, the rich kids got Hostess Snack Cakes in their lunch, but the poorer kids had to settle for Little Debbie, a budget brand that, because it was dirt-cheap, I assumed to be of poor quality.  But a 16-year-old punk kid with 35 cents of spending money in his pocket at the convenience store can't afford to be picky when he wants a snack and I slowly experimented with trying out the entire Little Debbie catalog.  Shock and surprise, they're delicious and still the best bargain around.   Kelvin, when you bite into your first Nutty Bar, you'll be sharing in a rite of passage with millions of kids that want something sweet, even if they may not have a lot of change with which to buy it.

Slim Jim: With its associations with professional wrestling, hungry big rig truckers, and swaggering American carnivore culture, this spicy meat snack was a no-brainer to throw in our box.

Red Velvet, Birthday Cake, and Cinnamon Roll Oreos: The delicacies that started it all, these were included so that Kelvin and his kids could "taste along" with the blog.

Hostess Sea Salt Caramel Cupcakes: As one of the favorites of the past month, and emblematic of a trend that's probably not so huge in Europe as in the States, these moist salty-sweet treats with the super-long shelf life had to go in.

Hostess Chocodiles: Everyone knows about the Twinkie.  That preservative-packed sugar and fat bomb is infamously synonymous with hideous visions of the artificial and the mass-produced, even as it's a beloved favorite of many American children.  Less well-known is the Twinkie's chocolate-coated cousin, the Chocodile.  The chocolate adds a whole new dimension and it ought to be better known here in America, never mind overseas.

Utz Crab Chips: Utz is a smallish regional company based in Pennsylvania and they proudly claim that their potato chips are not even available nationwide, the better to emphasize that freshness demands a small delivery radius.  Their slogan is "You've got UTZ, too bad for the rest of the world", so these are definitely not to be found in Europe.  Further, the chips are "Crab Flavor" which means they're seasoned with Old Bay-style spice, the default spice blend that Maryland residents will often sprinkle on their steamed crabs and include in other crab dishes.

Four Flavors of Skittles: Kelvin's son Lucas is a big Skittles fan, so in go all four currently extant flavors, ready for combining in novel blends.  With their day-glo colors and sunshiny flavors, I like to believe that Skittles reflect what's left of American optimism.

A peanut-based bounty, the weird candy-gum Razzles, and Combos, the pretzel nuggets packed with spreadable cheese.  Orange not included, that's for my lunch.

Five Peanut-Based Snacks

America is the country of the peanut in many ways.  Jimmy Carter was a peanut farmer, George Washington Carver was an agronomist of diverse talents, but has become known for the ways he used this legume in an ingenious myriad of applications.  It's no surprise, therefore, that so many classic American snacks include the peanut.

1. Cracker Jacks: A combination of salted peanuts and popcorn coated in toffee, this snack has been immortalized in the song "Take Me Out to the Ballgame".  The peanuts are a little harder to access these days since they changed the packaging from a box (still available in a very few places) to a large bag.  The contents are packed so loosely, with so many voids between popped popcorn kernels that the peanuts all fall to the bottom.  Shaking it up helps a little.

2. Baby Ruth: This snack is widely assumed to be named after the great baseball slugger Babe Ruth and some claim that indeed it is while others say it was named after "baby" Ruth Cleveland, daughter of President Grover Cleveland.  Either way, it's a unique taste, blending the peanut with mild chocolate and a mouth-filling, mild, intriguingly flavored nougat.  The parts are roughly the same as the parts of a Snickers bar, and yet the experience of eating it is totally different.

3. Peanut Chews: Kelvin has told me that many American candies are a bit sweet for his European palate, which is why I'll be interested to see what he thinks of these.  With their dark, thin, and not-a-bit-creamy chocolate coating and their almost bittersweet molasses chew surrounding the plentiful peanuts, this is a candy with an adult flavor profile.  They've been around for nearly 100 years too, and so a great exemplar of continuity and tradition.

4. Take 5: Reviewed recently for its updated packaging, this is the one example in the package of a peanut-butter based candy.  There are no special cultural traits to take note of here, it's just a delicious treat.

5. Payday: With its decidedly blue-collar "take this job and shove it" name, what you expect is rugged value, strong texture, and unapologetically assertive taste, and that's what Payday delivers.  Coated with a strong armor of super-salty peanuts that surrounds a caramel and nougat center, this accomplishes what Snickers constantly advertises: hunger satisfaction.  Underrated and under-publicized, I wanted Kelvin to be aware of this one.

Combos: Let's file this under the category of "rather gross to contemplate and even to eat until you kind of get used to it."  To enjoy Combos you have to reconcile yourself to the idea of room-temperature spreadable "cheese" and you have to be able to tolerate what to some is an almost ungodly saltiness. But oh, are these things addictive.  I wouldn't be surprised if Kelvin asked for another package of only Combos.  Pizza flavor is probably the most popular flavor, so in that goes.

At the Post Office, ready to tape up the box!

Razzles: This is a candy (or is it a gum?) that speaks to the kid in all of us.  The concept seems so miraculous to the naive mind; fruity candies that break apart in tiny fragments when you chew them, seemingly ready to dissolve and disappear down the throat when, suddenly they coalesce into a piece of gum, extending their life in the mouth.

Junior Mints: You rarely see people buying these in the drug store, and it's 1950s-style packaging hasn't changed since...well, the 1950s.  But for whatever reason, these slippery, shiny, wax-coated soft mints dominate the candy counter at the movie theaters.  Maybe it's because they so easily slide out of the box, their waxy sheen preventing them from ever melting in your hand, even as they melt so elegantly in your mouth.  Or maybe moviegoers have wanted to have fresh breath for extra-cinematic activities in the balcony.

It Was So Hard to Stop!

Though the logistics and expense of packaging were always theoretically a limiting factor, I confess I got so swept away in the fun of sharing the tastes of a nation that I had a great deal of trouble knowing when to call it quits.  There was always some other unique treat on the next shelf over.  But there's always next year, and so we close the lid on this big box with three final selections that aren't necessarily all that wonderful but are steeped in history and memory.

Those Weird Brown and White Caramels: Do they even have a brand name?  I mean, of course they do, but nobody really knows what it is.  They're just those caramels with the white cream filling (we Americans love our white cream filling, go write a thesis paper about that) that have the unusual texture that results from cutting the caramel with wheat flour.  Yes, really, wheat flour, go read the ingredient list.   The result is something chewy, but not stretchy, a hybrid of caramel and...something else.  Not an item for the export market but something to be experienced.

Smarties: Every Halloween trick-or-treater remembers getting these sweet-tart candies from those cheap houses that were too stingy to hand out the premium brands.  And yet who hasn't cherished lingering over these rolls of chalky sweetness, usually the last candies left after the chocolates and peanut-butter cups have been consumed.  Nostalgia and value guarantee that Smarties will never die.

Necco Wafers: The persistence of these hard, crumbly, bland discs is a little harder for me to understand, but as one of America's oldest candies (or at least they sure taste like it) they had to be included, a present-day time capsule tying together the past and the present and catapulting the package across the Atlantic where a curious and friendly soul awaits, anticipating surprises and delights.  Enjoy, my friend!

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