Dear Col. Chicken

I thought that I was long past trying to get into the heads of every snack food CEO and trying to decipher the rationale behind their whims and fancies, trying to judge the impulses that led to Mad Lord Snapcase-level decisions like Baja Blast Doritos. I thought I’d grown past it, in the biblical sense of “when I was a CEO, I spake like a CEO, but now that I’m grown I have moved past CEOish things.” But then yesterday, a “friend” sent me a “gift,” and then just like Al Pacino… Every time I think I’m out, they pull me back in.

The only problem here is… I’m completely flummoxed. I genuinely have no idea what to make of your “Colonel’s Favorite Fried Chicken, Sweet Corn, and Gravy Jelly Beans.” I try to put myself in your shoes, and think of what you might have been thinking, and fifteen minutes later I emerge from a Zen Buddhist-like fugue state, brain empty of all thoughts and a clean clear tabula rasa for coming up with the next newest, hottest

Sorry, I just went and did it again, didn’t I? Well that’s fifteen minutes I won’t get back.

I know that in reality, Colonel, that CEOs like yourself are pretty much given free rein to do whatever they want, but I am still very surprised that given your vast arrays of VPs, directors, marketing flunkies, flavor scientists, and assorted other minions that this product ever made it to market. I may be getting ahead of myself here, but now that I’ve tried these daisy flavor cutters masquerading as a foodstuff, I can’t imagine who this product was developed for, except maybe people who have had both their sense of smell and all of their taste buds surgically excised. In the parlance of our times: literally, no one asked for this.

In that spirit, I probably would have held off on opening this “gift” up until the weekend, or possibly until the trumpets of the apocalypse blew, but unfortunately I thanked the friend who gave it to me in public. This misstep on my part meant that I had a full Greek chorus of friends egging me on to open it and give these jellybeans a taste. I didn’t much want to, but, peer pressure is peer pressure, and so I succumbed.

My next mistake was opening the bag with the opening pointed towards my face. Immediately upon cutting the bag open an aromafist uppercut sprang from the bag, catching me in the chin and knocking my head back into my office chair. Lordy, I don’t know what you put in these things but I don’t know that I’ve ever experienced a more nasally assaulting candy. And what an assault it was! There’s some confusing fake vanillin, some expected movie theater butter, some fried chicken skin, some used fryer oil, maybe a hint of plum, sweaty locker room (though without any disinfectant, thank god), a touch of white pepper, some clotted cream, and underneath it all dark and foreboding undercurrent of dirty kitchen drain… Though none of that really does the aroma justice. I hate to fall back on calling something indescribable, but really, you have to smell it yourself to believe it. Those various descriptors above combine into a symphony of aromas, though less Stravinski and more Eliot Carter. I actually had to walk away for a while before coming back to it, and when I did come back, I could smell them from a room away, even with the rooms being separated by a tapestry of The Fool card from a tarot deck. 

My cheerleading friends really wanted to know what the gravy beans tasted like, so my next task was to figure out which was which. These little abomination nuggets come in three variations: pink-speckled booger, neon-yellow-orange loogie, and yellow just-woke-up eye crud. None but the eye crud bear any resemblance to what they purport to taste like – visual inspection will not tell you what horror you’re about to consume. I guess that could be considered a feature? Unintelligible presentation choices leading to maximum surprise? Since I couldn’t tell by visual inspection which was which, I shrugged and guessed that the pink speckled horrors were probably gravy, popped one in my mouth, and…

Sir. Sir. Why would you do this. So pink-speckled weren’t gravy, but rather were fried chicken, and… These things taste so bad they gave me a heart murmur. The overwhelming flavor is used, dirty, hot peanut oil, which I suppose you could reconstruct as chicken skin if you really needed to, but oh boy are there other flavors there. I’ve never eaten a bile duct, but I’m pretty sure I just learned what one tastes like. There’s a hint of smoke, and also a hint of active burning, plenty of the sadly expected dirty kitchen drain to go around, and confusingly a hint of artificial butter. This was truly one of the worst things I’ve ever experienced, sir. But hey, there’s two more flavors to go, right? Surely we can only go up from here.

I decided to play it safe and try the eye boogers next, which were probably going to be sweet corn. Considering that all the esters originally came from chemically cracked corn, the flavor and name is pretty redundant, but I figured you couldn’t fuck this one up too bad, and in fact, they’re just fine. They’re mostly artificial butter with a hint of vanilla and lemon, and are marginally inoffensive. You haven’t redeemed yourself for the the horror of the chicken jellybeans, and I definitely haven’t forgiven you for them, but you get a pass on this one. 

That’s enough stalling, I suppose, and as the great Sherlock Holmes once said, once you have eliminated all other possibilities, the orange hocked loogie lookin jellybeans must be the gravy. I gave it a good hard sniff to see if I could discern anything about what I was about to get myself into, but all I got was a vague hint of vanilla and sugar, so, with trepidation popped it in my facehole and…

Holy shit, oh god, how did you make something WORSE than the fried chicken jellybeans? The closest thing I can imagine to the experience of eating these things would be vomiting onto an electrical transformer and huffing the smoke that poured out of it. Maybe toss a bit of used cooking oil on top as an acclerant. My lord this thing was foul. The taste of this jellybean will haunt my dreams even as I realize there’s a hint of geraniums in the aftertaste.

I’m disappointed in you, sir. I figured that at least one of the flavors I picked up would be one of your famous eleven herbs and spices, though I suppose burning bush has been a kitchen secret smuggled out of Egypt by Moses in biblical times, so perhaps that’s one of the mystery spices. I’m even more disappointed that you would make such a horrible product, one that’s more an assault than a tasty snack. But most of all I’m disappointed that you didn’t make a fourth, biscuit flavored jellybean, one that would ****author dissipates into a Zen CEO fugue state****

Sincerely,

Alex Parise