To a kid there is nothing more crucial to a school lunch bag than the snack. Make the wrong sandwich, put in the wrong juice, fine. But screw up the snack by choosing one of the following and you not only ruin a meal but also an entire day.
Gummi Fears
Inspired by the bizarre tastes of Bernie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans from “Harry Potter,” the makers of Gummi Bears introduced a new candy that when chewed would cause the child to experience their greatest fear as if it were actually happening. Unfortunately, within days school playgrounds were reporting a 10,000% jump in high-pitched screaming, fetal-balling and calls for “MOMMY!” while kids gathered at the top of the slide, firing wildly with pellet guns at imaginary monsters.
Blind Box Treats
Will it be a cupcake? A fruit roll up? The jerky of some animal not deemed legally fit for consumption by the FDA, the EPA, and even “Survivor” gross food competitions? With each Blind Box Treat you didn’t know what you got until you opened it up…although there was a 98% you were going to get one particular snack given the food company’s heavy investment in prunes and peanut butter and their desire to get rid of both inventories at once. Add to the fact that most Blind Box Treats were sold on un-refrigerated shelves at toy and comic book stores and you have a snack that only the most disturbed collectors purchased.
Bakeables
From the makers of Lunchables came this concept in which kids would be given all the ingredients they needed to pour, mix, whisk and bake their own dessert while sitting in the school cafeteria. The problem was while other students were simply unwrapping their Twinkies of Yodels, the Bakeables kids were trying to create a makeshift sifter from a Mountain Dew can and an old compass, hoping a school vending machine sold the vanilla extract the packs never came with but required, and begging the lunch lady to use their ovens. In the end the child often had to skip class due to the extra time needed to make a chocolate ganache for their walnut torte, ultimately leading the kid to be left back another year
Why Not Another Burger?
Hoping to sell twice as many hamburgers to each child, one company decided to simply turn their patties into desserts by putting a cherry on top, adding some chocolate chips or simply writing the words “THIS IS A DESSERT” in marker across the top bun. While sales initially proved brisk, school dieticians soon discovered that kids were now eating two lunches each day, along with a sweet for later, causing a dramatic spike in childhood obesity as well as a national average of “1/2” for pull-ups in the President’s Physical Fitness Test.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Chips
In a wild miscalculation about how popular an R-rated movie about murder, mayhem and Scandinavia would be with elementary school kids, the film studio released snack chips featuring the pierced Goth protagonist on the front and a very disturbing clue inside that would help children locate the snack’s missing mascot. Those who did buy the chips soon found themselves both physically and emotionally ill, unable to even look at another bag of snacks for weeks.
Unrolled Fruit
These snacks were flying off supermarket shelves until kids realized they were actually a sneaky way for parents to get them to eat real fruit, at which point they threw them out and bought Nabisco’s new Oreo-Stuffed Chips Ahoy cookies instead.
What's your least favorite lunch snack? Let us know in the comments!
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