Into All That

I think it was Chris Rock who pointed out that you know we (‘we’ in this case being Americans) have too much food when we have time to develop alergies to it: “You think anyone in Rwanda’s got a flippity flappin¹ lactose intolerance?” Which I mention after seeing this CNN report not yet available on YouTube, so you’ll have to click it and promise to come back:

Cheesus video, courtesy of badastronomy.com & CNN

One of my coworkers, watching the video with sound off asked what the big deal was with someone finding a Cheeto shaped like Osama bin Laden. Which got me thinking about the whole gestalt that goes into finding familiar faces in mass-produced foodstuffs. And, lest it not go without saying, the exquisite manufacuting genius that makes such foodstuffs possible at all. It’s one thing to make 35,000,000 million chicken nuggets that look exactly the same — any rookie could do that. But making 1 chicken nugget in 35,000,000 look exactly like Oscar the Grouch? That takes some craft.

Take, for example, this cornflake that recently sold on eBay for $1,350 due to it’s excruciating similarity to the geopolitical border of Vermont. Umm, I mean, Illinois:

Or this rogues gallery of potato chips that look like Nefertiti, Marilyn Monroe, Abe Lincoln, and a veritable Brady Bunch of B-list historical personages. And I have to admit complete dismay that Goolging “Food that looks like Elvis” gave a paltry 340,000 responses, and that foodthatlookslikeelvis.com² wasn’t among them.

¹Yes, I applied a Rock/Flanders translation filter there for the children frequenting this blog for their daily fix of conspiracy and paranoia.
²Having just registered it, I asure you it will be soon enough.