Dear Mr. Flip

I don’t know if you remember the nineties, but it was a time chock full of some really irritating bullshit. No, I don’t mean to talk about nonsense like “only 90s kids will remember pogs or Nirvana or idk jorts.” I’m talking about the birth of neoliberalism and techno-utopian wankery - shit like Leyden and Schwartz’ “The Long Boom,” Fukuyama’s “The End of History,” and Thomas Friedman’s entire fucking career. We live in a world shaped by these “thinkers” and “futurists” – who, like you, are so blinded by the spectacle of progress that they hand-wave away things like “global warming” or “inequality” or “quality food.”

You, sir, might wonder what The Long Boom has to do with Ranch and/or Bleu Cheese Whipped Cream. I’d argue that both this long-term neoliberal political trend and your disgusting product are not only intertwined, but actually inextricably linked. See here: you can take Thomas Friedman, The Long Boom, and The End of History, and distill them all down into two salient points:

• Unfettered capitalism (which in their models is synonymous with representative democracy) is always good, and
• Disruptive innovation is always a social benefit.

To any normal person reading these sorts of techno-libertarian neolib utopian wet dream screeds, the authors always sound either horribly misinformed, willfully ignorant, and/or completely off their crackers. But you, sir, I imagine, you got yourself one of Mr. Vitamix’s blenders, threw copies of The World Is Flat and the July ‘97 issue of Wired magazine in there with some milk and protein powder, and slurped the resulting puree down every day for breakfast until your brain worms hatched and came up with the BILLION DOLLAR IDEA of bleu cheese flavored whipped cream.

As you may have determined by now, sir, I am not an adherent to these bullshit, body-politic-poisoning ideas; I tend to consider them late capitalism and a bad thing, instead of innovative and a good thing. Nonetheless, as a respected food critic, I feel the need to bear witness to the downfall of our society through trying and reviewing every single product like this – well, let it be said, there really aren’t any other products like this, thank all the gods – and so, I ran down to my local outpost of Mr. Target’s emporium –

Wait. We can do better. I know you’re one of Mr. Friedman’s adherents, so let’s try that again.

After devouring my VENEZUELAN arepas at the GERMAN brewpub on Portland’s East side, I said farewell to the rest of my HOMEBREW CLUB board members and jumped into my AMERICAN 2000 Jeep Wrangler (that’s made of parts sourced from CHINA and COLOMBIA) and started the engine fueled by SAUDI ARABIAN gas that was refined in WASHINGTON and drove to Mr. Target’s EMPORIUM filled with goods from OREGON and JAPAN and CHINA and bought these DISRUPTIVE cans of savory whipped cream flavored with FRENCH bleu cheese and CALIFORNIAN ranch dressing then helped my friend carry his new kegerator named after a GREEK god down to his basement apartment then ordered ASIAN fried chicken wings from grubhub which were delivered 45 minutes later! The WORLD is FLAT!

Now, sir, I’m about to say some relatively unkind things to you about your products, but I want you to know that I really wanted to give you a fair shake here - I’ve actually made savory whipped cream before, and it turned out fine. Heavy cream, white pepper, cilantro, and lime zest all whipped together and dolloped atop grilled shrimp is a dish I’ve made several times, and it’s really quite nice. There’s nothing inherently wrong with savory whipped cream, and your products could have been good, and I actually rather wish they’d been. But instead, you crammed your brain full of neoliberal ideas and now your cans spray pressurized shits of foamed horror.

The first big question that I had about what these products would be was: will they be whipped cream, or more like EZ-Cheez? I was pretty sure that they’d be whipped cream, but opinion amongst my friends was split about 50/50 on what the texture would be. Your advertising makes it look more like soft-serve than whipped cream, so the discourse had something to base itself on; once I looked at the ingredients, I was pretty sure it would be whipped-cream like, but I still wasn’t sure. From the very first squirt, it was clear: this is whipped cream. I will not be putting it on cheesecake.

I tried your products two ways, sir - first a little dollop on the finger, and then more liberal foaming action on chicken wing drumettes. I was taken aback by the Ranch Dressing flavored whipped cream, which was acidic and horrible, and actually sent my body into coughing fits. The thing is, sir, at this point I was seized with horror, because conceptually the Ranch Dressing flavor was almost certainly going to be better than the Bleu Fucking Cheese flavor and it couldn’t be that much worse could it I mean it wasn’t going to be good but if I think any more about it I won’t be able to try it and then I sprayed that yellow greasy fire retardant looking nonsense on my finger and shoved it in my mouth and dear sweet jesus what the fuck and then I retched into my trash can for a solid minute.

Sir. Sir.

Sir.

The bleu cheese whipped cream was so bad I actually checked the expiration date on the package to see if I’d bought something that had spoiled - no dice. It expires in mid-November, almost exactly six weeks from now. It really was just that bad.

I’ll be honest, sir, the worst part of this product of yours is the texture. Well, one of the worst parts. Normal whipped cream has a texture that is surprisingly dry. Both of these products were greasy, slimy, oleaginous – presumably from the added buttermilk, but maybe not? I didn’t recognize the sodium hexametaphosphate called out on the ingredients list, and wikipedia says its typically used as an emulsifier, which is I assume it’s purpose here, but I have a chemistry degree and I looked at that completely bonkers ring structure, and it looks polar and slippery as a hagfish to me, maybe you leaned a little hard on the hexametaphosphate button when you meant to lean on oh god any other button? It could absolutely be the diacetyl that you add as “natural butter flavor” - that crap definitely can leave an Exxon Valdez-like oil slick on your tongue. It’s hard to say! Regardless of what ingredient causes the slick slipperiness, I’m pretty sure I could use this to grease engine bearings, because it’s just that unpleasant. I licked your product off my finger over an hour ago and I still feel like I want to scrub my hands with that orange-pumice cleanser one generally only uses after a day of small engine repair.

As far as the flavor goes… well, what I can say for both of them is that I ate a dry chicken wing, and then two chicken wings with one whip each. The wings with whipped cream were both absolutely and positively vile. The plain wing was just a wing. Your products, sir, actively made my chicken wings worse. I don’t usually feel too bad eating meat, but in this case, I mourned for the poor chicken who gave its ability to fly, because that poor bird didn’t deserve this.

As far as the ranch version goes, once you get past the absolutely objectionable texture, it is at least recognizable as ranch. Weirdly artificial and extremely acidic ranch, but it does taste like ranch dressing. It’s not an improvement on even Mr. Hidden’s ranch dressing in any way - let alone homemade ranch dressing - but I guess it’s ranch flavored. It leans a little too heavily on the black pepper, the diacetyl, and the aforementioned acidity, and could definitely use more dill, but it’s ranch. Bad ranch, but still ranch.

The bleu cheese, on the other hand. Whew. I guess it kinda tastes like bleu cheese? At least, it tastes like bleu cheese, if bleu cheese’s production process involved being sunk in a muriatic acid bath and then being gently aged in a sealed, half-full dumpster that was vacuum pumped clear of atmosphere, then backfilled with a thousand Taco Bell farts, and finally left in the sun for the month of August to ripen. Interestingly, that’s pretty close to what’s going to happen to the rest of the can of this product, which – as you might be able to tell – I do not care much for.

Part of me wonders, sir - have you stopped to consider what might happen to a teenager who decided to do whippits from one of these cans? I’m not actually concerned with teens doing whippits - they’re barely even real drugs, and nitrous doesn’t really have that many long-term neurological effects, but I’m worried about teens doing whippits from these cans. These products are acidic and they are pungent. I fear for the long term damage to Our Precious Childrens’ nasal passages by these cans of Lovecraftian horror, and that they may wreak such chaos on their noses that they have to start huffing more and more dangerous chemicals, not in the pursuit of the next high, but in the pursuit of ever smelling anything again, and then who knows what damage they may do to their brains, just trying to recover from a single Ranch whippit?

Now, you might be wondering about why I spent the first part of this letter talking about neoliberal faux-intellectual quackery, sir. Now is when we bring it all together! When it comes right down to it, sir, these savory whipped cream products of yours can only exist in an environment like the one described in the two above bullet points. These products are “innovative” - at least in that they’re fairly unique, I’ve certainly never seen savory whipped cream for sale on a greengrocer’s shelf before. They’re also “disruptive” in that you’ll certainly sell some of them to hapless consumers for the novelty value, though without a legally-backed Ranch Taxi industry to undercut, you’ll have real trouble pulling off the VC finance-backed Uber strategy of undercutting existing dip industries. And finally, these products could not be developed except in a capitalist framework that was being underwritten by extremely low interest rates and giant pools of money sloshing out of venture capitalists’ pockets, waiting to be mopped off the floor by cretinous inventors - and I think it’s worth noting that your product was released just six months before Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, which wasn’t the first, nor the last, but was the most visible collapse of the end of the free money era. Now that that era is ended, I don’t imagine you’ll be getting the capital to develop Mr. Olive’s Garden Garlic-Parmesan Whipped Cream Bread Topping anytime soon.

What’s most telling, sir, is that in the same year you released these absolutely unnecessary – excuse me, innovative and disruptive – products, one of the authors of The Long Boom, Peter Leyden, released another longread that basically said “even though a bunch of the predictions I made in The Long Boom were wrong, that only just means I was actually right, and here’s why the next twenty-five years are going to also be a Long Boom, and also purple crayons taste the best.” We all know when ideas are bad, we all know when ideas are poisonous, and we all know when they haven’t worked out, and I assume both you, Mr. Flip, and Mr. Leyden are the same… except unlike the rest of us, you’re playing the cowboys in Brokeback Mountain, staring failed neoliberal utopian ideas and policies in the face, and saying “I just can’t quit you.”

In summary: Thomas Friedman’s world may be flat, but your products, sir, are the absolute nadir of the technocrat neoliberal capitalist utopian wank curve.

Sincerely,

Alex Parise