Dear Mr. Yuns

I have long thought that there exists no better fried cornmeal snack concoction with which to contemplate our shared reality than your fine product, Funyuns. Consider the humble Funyun: a weirdly thick and tall toroid of extruded and fried corn batter, which is then rolled in MSG and salt and onion powder and MSG, and then is claimed to be a tasty snack. And yet, despite the simple recipe, the mysteries behind the Funyun are manifold. Who are they for? Why do they exist? What were you possibly thinking when you made them?
Often, when I contemplate snack products, I wonder what particular cocktail of drugs the creators and/or marketers were imbibing when they created them, and I’ll admit that I did in fact ask that question about you, sir. But the longer I thought about the humble Funyun – and this “NEW!” product of yours, the Spicy Queso Funyun – the more I realized that you, sir, must be the most stone cold sober man on earth.
Funyuns could only come to exist in a specific spectrum of midcentury mesoamerican food preparation. They are both incredibly outlandish, and not outlandish at all. They are meant to evoke a humble onion ring from a fast food joint, and they also bear zero relationship to a delicious onion ring. They can only be the product of a man with an extruder and a dream. Give a stoner the same extruder, and he’s gonna invent a “maple” cereal with cereal-bit leaf shapes that would make cops suspicious. Give a speedfreak an extruder, and he’s gonna inventos Cheetos. Give a psychedelic-head an extruder, and he’ll wander off, leaving it behind and not remembering he had one until after finishing his PhD in ethnopsychopharmacy.
No, sir, you don’t fit any of these categories; just as Funyuns themselves don’t really fit any categories: they pretend to be food, but they aren’t food, yet they’re made of food ingredients. What they actually remind me of the most are “futuristic” elements from 1950s sci-fi books and movies, where people no longer eat, but instead take food pills for all their nourishment. And this, sir, makes me wonder: before you invented Funyuns, were you a failed science fiction author? Perhaps a junior member of the Futurians, kicked out of the first WorldCon with your friends who went on to become famous authors and publishers, while you kept churning out your stories with food pills that John W. Campbell, that bastard, just kept rejecting from the hallowed pages of Astounding Magazine? Did you eventually slink back to your family farm in Michigan, a literary failure, carrying nothing with you but the clothes on your back, a secondhand extruder, and a dream that even if they rejected your fiction with food pills, one day No One Would Ever Laugh At You Again? Did you spend your nights after tending the corn and the cows in the farm basement tinkering with ingredients that, even if they started as food, would one day be extruded, packaged, and sold as a food-based product that contained no actual nutrition?
One of the other questions I ask about Funyuns all the time – well, maybe not all the time, but as often as I think about Funyuns, which admittedly isn’t very often – is: who are Funyuns for? There are a lot of unsatisfactory answers to this question, similar to other questions about Funyuns, such as: why do they even exist in the first place? We started to ask these questions earlier, and the stock answers to them aren’t particularly satisfying. “Capitalism,” you could say. “Anyone who wants to buy them,” you could say. These are facile, unengaging, joyless answers.
No, sir, I think that the answer to “who are Funyuns for?” is both simple and profound. They are, sir, for you. You, Mr. Yuns, are the alpha and the omega of Funyuns. You created them, and you are their ultimate consumer. Sure, some people buy them, for some reason, but that’s not why they exist; they exist as your ultimate revenge on a reading public that would never give you your break, they exist to refute the world’s rejection of your art, they exist less as a product and more as the fevered scream of I AM, I WAS, AND I AM YET TO BE of your tortured soul’s yearning to be acknowledged.
Alas, if only life could be that simple. This vision of yours worked well enough for the longest time, but then the bills start piling up, the brakes on your F150 need replacing, shareholders start looking for more value to extract, and you became faced with a fickle public who are looking for the next new thing, and I suppose it became clear that your beloved Funyuns would have to change with the times.
In the face of these challenges, your ideological purity – Funyuns taste like onions! – had to fall, and so you cast your mind about to figure out what flavors would go well with your nutritionless corn toroids… and lord I don’t know if it was the first thing you thought of or the last, but somehow, from the depths of your mimeographed midcentury church cookbook from Britt, Iowa mind you settled on Spicy Queso.
Obviously, this flavor combination makes no sense; but then just as obviously, Funyuns are effectively a blank canvas that any flavor Futurian can spray artificial flavor dust across like Jackson Pollock painting a garage floor. Again, I fully believe you were stone cold sober when you came up with this flavor combination, sir, because just like the base product, these are both entirely outlandish and not outlandish at all. I tried to temper my expectations by trying to figure out where you might have experienced the queso in question, and what I settled on was “queso made by a Mexican restaurant owned by white people somewhere in the map quadrilateral anchored by Greeley, Colorado, Hastings, Nebraska, Cedar Falls, Iowa, and Sioux City, South Dakota.”
With that in mind, I finally opened this bag of Spicy Queso Funyuns and took a deep sniff… and was greeted by the unmistakable smell of dusty Velveeta. Normally, I would have been disappointed, because that’s not a great smell! But by triangulating your most likely region to have experienced queso, and by lowering my expectations through my defined geofence, I guess it smells almost exactly like what I expected?
The next question is, of course, the taste. And I have to say, sir, they taste almost identical to their nutritional content: nonexistent. I think they’re best described as a cross between rinsed-off Utz cheese balls and biodegradable packing peanuts. But wait, who’s that pounding on my door? Oh shit it’s Marx and Engels – “A SPECTRE IS HAUNTING FUNYUNS – THE SPECTRE OF JALAPENOS!” that’s nice Karl, go sit down over there for a sec please while I finish this letter, that’s a good boy, have a biscuit. I’m sorry, Mr. Yuns, but I don’t think this counts as spicy. I don’t even think the British would call these spicy. The Russians might. But the British probably wouldn’t.
Part of me thinks I should be disappointed in these, sir, and from a taste standpoint, I most certainly am – they’re not bad, per se, they’re just… unnecessary. They’re definitely not an improvement on your bog-standard Funyuns, they’re not spicy, and they’re not even particularly queso-y, there’s a ghost of cheese dust and a specter of jalapeno, and I’m guessing you saved most of your onion powder and MSG for your classic Funyuns because there ain’t much of that either.
But I’m actually not disappointed, sir. I’m instead impressed that you stood firm and kept as much of your artistic integrity as you could in the face of shareholder value extraction, and made an extruded corn flour product that hit all your bright lines: it looks like onion rings, but isn’t onions; it smells like Velveeta but doesn’t taste like it; it looks like food, but contains no nutrition; and it’s outlandish, but not that outlandish.
Sir, your Spicy Queso Funyuns are a snack food fail, but an artistic vision win, and in these debased times, isn’t that the level of success we’re all chasing?
Sincerely,
Alex Parise