  Careful. It's poison. Okay, it's not really poison, but you'd probably have to drink oil to flush this shit out, and that's poison. Swanson, producers of some of the world's fattiest TV dinners, is seeking to take over the breakfast market with a new line of microwaveable morning meals. It's called the 'Hungry Man All Day Breakfast,' and it's threatening to turn people into manatees. Now you may think I'm being overly obvious here - everyone knows TV dinners are bad for you, right? This is true, but Swanson's new breakfast takes it to a level which previously could only be achieved by eating entire alternate universes made only of prosciutto. I'm being totally serious - I'm obsessed with reading those stupid nutritional labels on everything in the supermarket, and to date, I've never seen anything quite so decidedly heart-killing than Swanson's Hungry Man Breakfast. Don't believe me? Check it out...  Holy shit. Holy holy HOLY shit. 64 grams of fat, 2,090 milligrams of sodium, and enough cholesterol to kill anything that's ever lived. The 'justification' is that you're supposed to eat shitty food in the morning, as it supplies you with a suitable amount of energy to get through the day. Unfortunately, Swanson's supplying you with enough 'energy' to get through a week, and even if the only other thing you ate after this breakfast was oxygen, there's still a relatively high chance that your ass will grow hands and tie your intestines in knots to prevent this shit from ever passing through. Really, really awful stuff. Don't get me wrong, eating this would be acceptable for certain types of people. I guess football players could get away with it. Plus, if you're already 400+ pounds with no foreseeable future as a human being who doesn't resemble a monster truck, you may as well throw caution to the wind and chow down. Fill your bowl full of jelly with a tray full of dead animals and chicken miscarriages. But for people who can safely walk on the second floor? You may wanna stick to the Pop Tarts. Admittedly, we all do it sometimes. You've got your fast food chains, your diner specials - sometimes, it's hard to resist the breakfast that kills. Swanson has heightened the danger levels in a big way, though. The uninformed and the very hungry are being given the opportunity to stock their freezers with this crap and eat it day after bloated, miserable day. I can't say for sure just how bad eating Swanson's Hungry Man Breakfast is when done sporadically, but I'm fairly certain that eating it for a week straight would invariably cause your innards to swell to the point that they crack your ribs right through your skin and onto the floor. The irony here? Other, even fatter people are just gonna run into the room and eat all the ribs you spilled. I know, I'm exaggerating things a little. People eat junk all the time, it's all about knowing how to moderate. I'm just a little thrown off here - I've never seen a company who uses the 'percentages based on a 2,000 calorie diet' chart actually admit that one serving of their stuff tallies in with 231% of your daily cholesterol allotment. If there exists a saving grace, the Hungry Man meal absolutely must be the best-tasting, magnificent food on the planet. I wasn't willing to find out the hard way, but let's explore the meal's appearance so we can try to gage how well it tastes.  When I took this massive beastly breakfast out of its box, I swear to God, the theme from 2001 was sung downward from the clouds. This was a lot of food. And to be honest, I don't think the variety of food represented here was ever meant to be cooked together in one plate. The different edibles all seemed to mesh together into one large ball of terror, and I hard a hard time figuring out if the stuff staring up at me was breakfast or leftover puppy afterbirth the mothering dog down the block forgot to lick up. Usually, whenever something is cooked in this apartment, a fleet of cats line up waiting to see if they can snatch a freebie. As the breakfast became hotter and greasier, they all suddenly appeared from their mystery spots to see what they could con out of me. I smirked to the floor before throwing down the box chart featuring the sadistic nutritional facts about what was being cooked. Two of them did that screechy cat-scream thing, while the other two jetted right through the side wall, leaving two comical cat-shaped holes not unlike those typically found in Roadrunner cartoons. I know you don't believe that my cats can read, but they did the same exact thing when I threw Courtney Love's Vanity Fair issue down at them a few years ago. They're smart cats. Smart enough to avoid Swanson's and stick to the many roaches that stalk the halls of my frighteningly filthy abode. A stench lifted from the microwave - it was like nothing I've smelled before. It was the kind of odor that had me preparing to lift the wallet off the four-week-old corpse I was about to find. But this stench! This stench was no corpse! This stench was breakfast!  Well, thar she blows. Eggs, pancakes, sausage, bacon, and home fries. Lots of them. Caesar's fills their Sunday buffets with less food than this. It didn't take me long to realize that the stuff wasn't really all that palatable, but for the benefit of those who've never had the chance to witness this rare creature firsthand, I'll give you a food-by-food genetic breakdown of this most dastardly compound. Be warned, the pictures are of a graphic nature and I can't be held responsible for associating what we see to either vomit or dog shit. The associations are easily made and I've gotta play by the rules.  The two home fries are each roughly the size of a football, and much mushier than you'd expect. It's not the kind of 'mushy' that'd usually just mean I didn't cook 'em long enough - it's the kind of 'mushy' that strikes fear into the hearts of even the bravest, because even to the very first touch, nobody wouldn't realize that there's something other than potatoes in there. According to the ingredients, it might be 'dihydrogen pyrophosphate.' I think 'semen-dipped maggots' is more likely, but for all we know, 'dihydrogen pyrophosphate' might just be technical jargon for semen-dipped maggots. I pressed one of the home fries' middles with my finger, which led to it oozing out some kind of clear creme in a most grisly fashion. It couldn't have just been water, because water never stained my kitchen countertop before. Little did I know -- the worst was yet to come. Compared to some of the other foodstuffs I was about to peel off this unholy tray, the potatoes seem like vitamins. Semen-dipped vitamins.  I think the company line says that we're looking at bacon up above, but I can't seem to shake the idea that Swanson is trying to feed people horse scabs. You might consider me redundant for calling bacon 'greasy,' but the description has never been more warranted. In fact, the bacon is so greasy that the air in my kitchen started feeling moist and humid, as if the bacon was acting as some kind of organic air purifier that rebels by spewing poisonous pig gas into the room instead. I apologize for my unfamiliar tone in this article; the fumes really started to fuck with my head. Some of the bacon was opaque enough to serve as pieces of a church's stained glass manger, while others were absolutely transparent enough to serve as windows in the little tiny dollhouse I'm about to make out of the Hungry Man pancakes. It's kinda sad that a pig had to die for me to take that picture up there. Next time I do a mock oink, it'll be with a heavy heart.  There's nothing inherently wrong with the pancakes other than their rather dubious choice in company. I've really got nothing at all to say about them. I like my paragraphs to at least look impressive on the skim-through, so I'd really hate to have to end this one so soon. My hope is that you're not really reading the article, moreover just scanning through while looking at the pictures and judging how good the article must be based on the general length of the paragraphs you skip. If that's the case, it affords me the chance to type totally off-topic, random words just for the sake of making this bitch seem lengthy. I mean, goldfish lamp wallpaper skeleton in my Bavarian Star or what? Flowers mirror computer Smurfs every time Moses flies playing cards in or around Paris. Oh, now to make a paragraph-ending sentence that makes the rest appear like it was consequential. That bacon was really greasy! The next food we're going to take a look at was my favorite of the bunch. Sausage has a new face, and it's not unlike the current face of what dogs leave on your front lawn.  Makes you wonder if Swanson's assembly line includes a few specially trained apes who run around the belt shitting in the trays at timed intervals. And tear down my theory all you want - ape shit probably isn't any more disgusting to eat than whatever these sausages are composed of. I think it's safe to say that we're not getting any of the more choice cuts with these. This company is even less wasteful than the fabled Native Americans of yesteryear. Even the Indians stopped before using the rim of flesh trimming the buffalo's exhaust pipe. Swanson had no misgivings. Swanson never has any misgivings. They're totally misgivingless. I think they need a few misgivings. They could start with excluding the forty pounds of fake eggs from future microwaveable breakfast meals...  The consistency is more like pound cake, the aroma is more like Petland's rabbit section. I'm a little bias because I fear eggs in general, but I've certainly seen enough of them to know that these eggs have some serious issues. I'd like to sit down with the eggs - I'd like to discuss these issues with them. I feel I can offer some newfound hope to these poor eggs, which even while next to sausagey dog shit, still manage to look creepy. I wish the eggs would listen to me, talk to me, but my prayers fall on deaf ears. I still pity the eggs despite their noncommunication, because but for a slight twist of fate, they could've clucked and eaten seeds. Now they live in my lid-shut trash can, a realm as dark as their unforgiving hearts. They will never see the light of day again, and shant be reheated. The eggs are gone forever now, and I salute their poor mother. Poor mother, I salute. I really hope I haven't inadvertently eaten you along the way.  Well, there's the meal in its entirety. Quite a sight, huh? I like how the sausages on top of the home fries combine to look like an edible tank. Unfortunately, that's about all I like about this Hungry Man Breakfast. Sorry, Swanson. |