It was also inspected and passed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture EST 8575. Excuse me while I go die.

I met the woman who stocks the vendy. She had just filled it up with concoctions from her cauldron. She was short and squat and pigeon-toed with frizzy grey hair and slightly myopic owl eyes. When I told her that I was going to get something out of the machine, she watched me make my decision. It was obvious that she took great pride in the quality of product she stocks that thing with. This week she added pudding. You can buy a 3 ounce container of pudding for a dollar! Big AZ Bubba Twins have returned as well. She said that she has, unfortunately, had to throw lots out, because, get this, no one has been buying anything. Crikey lady, I wonder why. On the plus side, she did add a dollar coin dispenser to the machine, so next time I pay with a fiver, I won’t get $2.95 in change in nickels.

The burger, of course, what shit as burgers go. As an item from the machine, however, I would definitely buy another one. I am trying to figure out how something that is mostly TVP could supply me with 47% of my RDA in saturated fat. It must have been the cheese, which, post-burger, is now being cut quite often. I’m quite sure that nothing in this sandwich actually came from real plants or animals. It required virtually no mastication, which was good since the “cheese” disintegrated my teeth upon contact. So, basically, other than the fact that it tasted like shit and is currently mounting a simultaneous breach attack on my stomach and colon, it wasn’t that bad.

Link of the day: Joe’s Worthless Baseball Card Collection

I would like to go on the record saying that no item purchased from a vending machine can be legitimately called “gourmet.” Similarly, there is no such thing as a “gourmet” hot dog. The Landshire Supreme Gourmet All Beef Hot Dog was also two days past its expiration date. Much like the Bubba Twins, it has a money-back guarantee, although only a full refund, not double the money back. The packaging encouraged me to visit the Landshire website, but much of it hasn’t been updated since 2002. This leads me to believe that most of their food must date from that time as well. This hot dog was 3.5 ounces and cooks in the microwave for approximately one minute, or however long it takes for the plastic wrapping to melt into the sesame seed bun. The bun itself was about as tough and leathery as a smoker’s lung and the beef in the hot dog probably came from a lockjawed guinea pig. I didn’t find any actual information on this item on the Landshire site, but I did find this picture of a man shoveling shit into his own mouth, which seemed appropriate for both their site and my behavior.

The hot dog’s nutritional content wasn’t that bad, a mere 14g of fat and 560mg of sodium. I’m glad I had a bowl of Kashi this morning. I heartily recommend that none of you folks reading this attempt to ever eat anything out of a refrigerated vending machine.

the Pierre™ Foods Pizza Parlor Meatball Sub seems benign enough. After all, the meatball sub has a long [if slightly disgusting] tradition in America as a favorite accompaniment to guzzling beers and cursing at athletic events. This meatball sub shows the terrible consequences of this hedonistic lifestyle. We manage to kill lots of things with popularity, but now popularity is trying to kill us, through the guise of meatball subbiness.

I probably have no need to tell you this, but the Pierre™ Foods Pizza Parlor Meatball Sub is really bad for you. The pizza sauce/cheese mixture was loose in the bag and looked like flattened bloody turd. The meatballs themselves were also fecal-evocative, but a bit more ursine. Say, grey month-old constipated grizzly shit.

The bun, however, was dangeously sensual. Its gentle curve, smooth texture and wheaty color recalled the weeks I spent in Sweden photographing the bottoms of varioius bikini models and their innocent beach cavortations. I wanted to both eat the bun and preserve its perfection for all of time. Eventually my physical nature asserted itself over my oh-so-scholastic perusal and I heated up the sandwich in the microwave for 70 seconds.

Then I ate it. All of it. Bad idea. It even tasted like bear shit, swedish bikini bun or not. It didn’t exactly make me sick, but my digestive system did go into low gear, my extremities went numb as blood rushed to my stomach like snorkels to a 5 alarm blaze, I got really sleepy and I started to feel like shit of the bear variety.

In closing, don’t eat the Pierre™ Foods Pizza Parlor Meatball Sub. I probably didn’t need to tell you that in the first place though.

Pierre Foods is a member of many industry organizations including:

American Meat Insitute
Canadian Food & Beverage Association
National Association of Truck Stop Operators
and the NRA

and that their

…manufacturing processes are conducted under Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (HACCP) principles and monitoring programs. HACCP in conjunction with a sophisticated microbiological monitoring program of environmental, equipment, and finished product testing provides the assurance for [their] customer that they will receive safe, wholesome, high quality products.

Fully cooking [their] products destroys harmful bacteria and actual flame broiling and searing with a brander gives our charbroiled products a delicious “fresh off the grill” flavor. Graduated superheated air ranges from 1000 F to 300 F providing superior texture and color. The products are Individually Quick Frozen (IQF) to lock in flavor and assure shelf life. All of this ensures a consistent quality product that is sure to satisfy every time.

That last blockquote sounds like something out of an applied nuclear physics lab. All of that effort goes in to each sack of crap that I buy from the vendy. All that work, and it ends in failure every time.

The Pierre Foods Fast Choice® Pizza Charbroil with Cheese is described as a

Seasoned, flamebroiled beef patty topped with Italian pizza sauce and one slice of mozzarella cheese on a sesame seed bun.

I wasn’t quite certain how one would charbroil a pizza, but I should have counted on Pierre Foods to be one step ahead of me in creating a pizza flavored hamburger. This bugger cost me $1.65 and weighed in at 5.2 ounces. The pizza sauce looked like something scraped off the bottom of a dumpster behind the worst Pizza Pan in existence. The mozzarella slice was unseen until it started oozing out of the bun and looked like steaming spunk. The bun had the “full diaper” feeling that every Pierre Foods product seems to have and the sesame seeds could have easily been bee larvae. It tasted like a gravy/pizza flavored cigarette. This is the second worst thing I’ve eaten from the vending machine. And it supplied me with 47% of my RDA of saturated fat. The rest of the nutrition info is here.

Nutrition information is here. I’ll let you read it for yourself. I need to lay down now.

I fear that I am starting to acquire a taste for the Pierre Foods concoctions. Perhaps I shall take a field trip down to Cincinnati one day and visit their fine establishment. My stomach hurts. I’m going to eat my actual lunch now. A brie and tomato sandwich and a golden delicious apple.

They were still better than White Castle sliders though.

Best, Big Mike’s sandwiches are hand made! [On a conveyor belt] You can even order some online. I wouldn’t recommend it though. My Big Mike’s was distributed by V.W.C. Incorporated, out of London, OH. The only thing I could find out about them is that they are government contractors. So who knows what kind of test hormones have been injected into their sammiches…