Sausage in a Pancake.

This blog didn't start out to be anything other than a collection of eating experiences from restaurants, grand and humble, from our neighbourhood. I certainly didn't see this as a sort of "amuse bouche" blog that just provides entre-like links to a lot of other people's work and is little more than an aggregation service.

However, today I feel compelled to offer you the following link to an article about convenience food in the US, using the product "Jimmy Dean's Pancake and Sausage on a Stick" (also seen here with chocolate chips) as its centrepiece.

Photo source here, thanks to littleREDelf

You can learn a lot about a culture by looking at the products (and food) that have proved popular over time (including the now decade-old pancake and sausage on a stick!) and those that didn't quite make the cut. Cheese-filled hot dogs and microwavable bread might have failed, but they have nothing on the extraordinary "IncrEdibles..."

"...a late '90s convenience food product. Packaged in cardboard tubes and available in flavors such as Macaroni & Cheese and Scrambled Eggs with Cheese & Sausage, IncrEdibles featured a stick at the bottom of the cardboard tube, so after you heated them up in the microwave, you could simply push into your mouth without utensils."

OK, so they failed, but clearly somebody (manufacturers, marketers etc) thought humanity had sunk to this pathetic and disgusting state. Now, it's easy to mock (and fun, too!), but clearly there is something pretty fucked up about this corner of the world if IncrEdulous IncrEdibles were contemplated for a nanomoment longer than anyone could say, "ewwwwww."

Yes, I love a good pizza and a Chinese take-away every now and then. Yes, I'll eat a homogeneous frankfurt and enjoy it. I'll always have a pie at the footy and sometimes I'll have oven chips at home. But Sausage in a Pancake? Madam, I may not have much self-respect, but I have just enough to say, "no thank you, I'd rather mince my own head and feed it to the cat."