Gamer Grub is a concept snack designed for people to eat while they're playing computer games, presumably to avoid the considerable trauma of standing up and going to the kitchen, or overtaxing the opposable thumb by grasping food.
The resealable packs are intended to be poured into the mouth without getting hands greasy or averting eyes from World of Little Planet Kart or whatever these gamers do with their lives. It’s also nutritionally enriched with vitamins and 'neurotransmitters', which sounds like a load of old bollocks to me.
Gamer Grub: PB&J flavour
‘PB&J’ flavour is ‘peanut butter and jelly’. The pieces are: peanuts, ‘sweet bread’ (a sort of crumbly biscuit), dried strawberries, strawberry jelly roundels and peanut butter chips.
This is quite good. There are fewer fruit bits of either kind and the ‘jelly’ is tough, more like dried fruit/fruit gum. But it manages to get the near-exact flavour of a PB&J sandwich in dog kibble form.
Which is the issue, really. Who wants to reduce nutrition to a ready-mixed selection of tasty chunks? Who in the world doesn't think there's something wrong with their lives if they can't find the time or the will to make a frickin sandwich?
It's also far too fatty, too sugary and too salty - don't 'gamers' get enough of this from their breakfast Cheetos?
Gamer Grub: Pizza flavour
PB&J's savoury cousin. Here we find a major design flaw. Eat this without crumbs? This is the crumbliest thing on god’s clean
earth. Far crumblier than crumble. Altogether now - shriek in best Marjorie Dawes style: "DUST! Howmanycaloriesin DUST?"
Consisting chiefly of cracker-like items and powdered flavouring, this snack turns into a face-engulfing particle cloud if poured from the pack with anything but buttock-clenching attention. Oops, Mario just crashed / got eaten by a massive donkey / failed to leap over that fire lake / misnegotiated with the chief gnome. Shame.
In fact, the pack design itself (a wide ziplock at the top) means you have
to shape it carefully with your hand to prevent the snack going all over
your face, lap and laptop. A real design flaw.
This mix contains ‘cheese curls, tomato almonds, sesame sticks, pita chips,
fried onions and pizza cashews.’ There’s very little distinction
between the elements. The oniony bits (when I finally found them among
the sawdust detritus at the bottom of the pack) are a little onionier,
and the nuts distinctly nuttier but overall there’s an overwhelming
Dorito taste of salty artificial flavouring. For me, this is one of
those junk food tastes forbidden in childhood and still exciting – but as Jean
Brodie said: “For those who like that sort of thing, that is
the sort of thing they like.”
Combined with my recent consumption of Le Whif, I'm left wondering: are these products of a golden age of innovation and freedom of expression, the most exciting thing since - and I mean this literally - sliced bread?
Or a dystopian vision of a future in which I want no part, a moral and aesthetic degeneration of which the world has not seen the like since - well, it's a toss toss-up between pre-Revolutionary France or the launch of Big Brother? You decide.
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