There is a vend­ing machine down­stairs, recently installed, that con­tains a vari­ety of dirt cheap refrig­er­ated lunch prod­ucts. They all look com­pletely gross. So, since I’m the kind of guy who eats hot dog fla­vored potato chips just because they’re there, I’ve deter­mined to eat one of each thing in that vend­ing machine. Today I had BIG AZ Bubba Twins chili cheese dogs.

BIG AZ Bubba Twins are made by Pierre Foods in Cincin­nati, Ohio. It appears that sev­eral of the items in the vend­ing machine are made by Pierre Foods. If this is the case, it does not bode well for my tum tum.

For $2.05 you get 8.5 ounces of “food” in two rel­a­tively hot dog shaped chunks. I hes­i­tate to call them food or even hot dogs because they resem­ble noth­ing so much as two cho­les­terol logs wrapped in preser­v­a­tive. I find this some­what at odds with Pierre Food’s pro­mo­tional copy on this item.

Bubba Twins tips the scales with two FULL-​SIZE sand­wiches in one pack­age! Twin hot dogs are topped with zesty chili and shred­ded cheese.. Pack­aged in fun, col­or­ful pack­ag­ing and fea­tur­ing a Dou­ble Money Back Guarantee.

The Dou­ble Money Back guar­an­tee was my first clue to just how bad these dogs were going to be. Yea, ver­ily, behold the wis­dom of Tommy Boy:

Tommy: Let’s think about this for a sec, Ted, why do they put a guar­an­tee on a box? Hmm, very inter­est­ing.
Ted: I’m lis­ten­ing.
Tommy: Here’s how I see it. A guy puts a guar­an­tee on the box ’cause he wants you to fell all warm and toasty inside.
Ted: Yeah, makes a man feel good.
Tommy: ‘Course it does. Ya think if you leave that box under your pil­low at night, the Guar­an­tee Fairy might come by and leave a quar­ter.
Ted: What’s your point?
Tommy: The point is, how do you know the Guar­an­tee Fairy isn’t a crazy glue snif­fer? “Build­ing model air­planes” says the lit­tle fairy, but we’re not buy­ing it. Next thing you know, there’s money miss­ing off the dresser and your daughter’s knocked up, I seen it a hun­dred times.
Ted: But why do they put a guar­an­tee on the box then?
Tommy: Because they know all they solda ya was a guar­an­teed piece of shit. That’s all it is. Hey, if you want me to take a dump in a box and mark it guar­an­teed, I will. I got spare time. But for right now, for your sake, for your daughter’s sake, ya might wanna think about buy­ing a qual­ity item from me.

The next warn­ing sign was the utter lack of any nutri­tional infor­ma­tion on the pack­ag­ing, and upon fur­ther reconais­sance, the web­site. I can only assume there is no nutri­tional infor­ma­tion, because there is no nutri­tion to be found in BIG AZ Bubba Twin Chili Cheese Dogs. It is now time to cite Good Omens:

“CHOW™ con­tained spun, plaited, and woven pro­tein mol­e­cules, capped and coded, care­fully designed to be ignored by even the most rav­en­ous diges­tive tract enzymes; no-​cal sweet­en­ers; min­eral oils replac­ing veg­etable oils; fibrous mate­ri­als, col­or­ings, and fla­vor­ings. The end result was a food­stuff almost indis­tin­guish­able from any other except for two things. Firstly, the price, which was slightly higher, and sec­ondly, the nutri­tional con­tent, which was roughly equiv­a­lent to that of a Sony Walk­man. […] MEALS™ was CHOW™ with added sugar and fat. The the­ory was that if you ate enough MEALS™ you would a) get very fat, and b) die of malnutrition.

Another dis­turb­ing “mis­take” is the bro­ken large image of the BIG AZ Bubba Twins on the Pierre Foods site. Why don’t they want us to know more about their “food”?

To cook the dogs you nuke ‘em for 90 sec­onds. Fast food. After tak­ing them out of the microwave I was sad­dened to see that the plas­tic tray they were sit­ting in [and were sup­posed to be microwaved in] had par­tially melted into the dog. The aroma of the cooked item recalls that of a gas sta­tion bath­room after a large trucker has just crapped out a day’s worth of free truck stop hot dogs. The con­sis­tency of the chili dog was like eat­ing a rub­ber dog bone wrapped in a urine-​soaked sponge. The first bite makes the gorge rise, and sub­se­quent bites take the con­sumer on a whirl­wind tour of gas­tro­nom­i­cal hate-​crimes. One is reminded of the bomb­ing of Dres­den as small chunks of chili fla­vored MSG drop into the stom­ach, the diges­tive gur­gling sound is rem­i­nis­cent of the Labyrinth’s Bog of Eter­nal Stench and its effect on the breath recalls the glory days of Agent Orange. It is the sec­ond to worst hot dog I’ve ever had.

I am con­sid­er­ing call­ing up this Pierre fel­low to demand my $4.10 refund, if they want me to return the unused por­tion to them, I’ll just wait another half hour or so until it comes out the other end. I doubt they’ll be able to tell the difference.