Reid About It

Random thoughts while waiting in line at the deli counter...

• 11 Different Kinds of Ham: It's all made from the same pig. Once you get it on bread and cover it with mustard and cheese, will even the most discerning pallet be able to decide which is sugar-baked honey ham, and which one is light glazed smoked ham? If you're going to have ham for lunch, just pick a brand and eat it. Don't try and sexy up a simple foodstuff. It's a snack, it's not the DaVinci Code.
• Ham & Cheese Loaf: How lazy can we get? If you've reached the point where you'll pay extra to have a stranger assemble your ham and your cheese to make your sandwich, maybe you could use the exercise of constructing the snack yourself.
• Liver Loaf: Incomprehensible that this product would be on the market. The single most maligned food on the planet, and they try and make it more attractive by making it look like ham surrounded by a thick layer of lard.
• Souse Loaf: What the Hell is this? What kind of animal is "souse"? Is it a biped? Is it dangerous? And what's so important about letting us know there's "gelatin added"?
• Cotto Salami: Not sure what "cotto" is. Why couldn't they just say "Salami with green crap floating in it"? On second thought, maybe that's not the best marketing ploy. See? I'm always willing to listen to a better idea.
• Smokin' Chipotle Turkey: Ah, chipotle, the white whale of foods. We needed to make up a new kind of food to get everybody interested again, so we came up with "chipotle". Before that, it was "angus," and "tilapia." Nobody grew up fishing for tilapia. Nobody had even heard of tilapia until about a year ago, and now you can't get through Luby's without somebody throwing one on your plate.
• Luncheon Loaf: This is truly scary. No one really knows what this is. It's pretty vague. It's like when McDonalds offers you a "Fillet O'Fish", and since it's only two bucks, nobody ever stops to ask just exactly what kind of "fish" they're eating. Same thing with Luncheon Loaf. To begin with, "luncheons" are never pleasant. Lunch is a meal. A "luncheon" is a social gathering, where people pretend they always get dressed up to eat at eleven in the morning, and are forced to try and make a meal out of salad and finger sandwiches while some uninteresting speaker drones on about some charity project that could easily be attained if everyone in the room would simply donate their money to the cause instead of spending it on awful meals like the one they're eating. They would never serve "luncheon loaf" at an actual luncheon.