In Praise of Aldi
Yesterday, I referenced the 1918 Spanish Flu as the "last global pandemic" but that's not quite right. As we start discussing how the COVID-19 pandemic will "change everything" about American life, I'm reminded that Asian flu of 1957 killed 116,000 Americans and about 2 million people worldwide. Ten years later, in 1968, one of the most contentious year's in this country's history, the Hong Kong flu took another 100,000 Americans and about 4 million global citizens. I'd never heard of either of them, which is on me, until recently.
I'm not sure the effects of pandemics can be compared (baseball wasn't cancelled for either the Asian or Hong Kong flus, for example) and it does seem that coronavirus is going to change us, even if the statistics end up (hopefully) similar to previous pandemics. Just the same, as prognosticators look outward to what the future holds, I've been looking inward, mainly to the contents of my cupboard.
Quarantine has expanded the number of grocery stores I've visited in a (so far fruitless) search for Clorox wipes and it has made me aware of which stores carry which products and how they compare. For example, the house-brand jalapeño chips at Fareway are better than the Frito-Lay equivalent they are trying to compete with (though they are not as good as Rachel's, a brand that Price Chopper carries). Aldi's house brand Clancy's averages being about 80% as good as their big name counterparts (and are 60% as expensive) but their attempt at Cool Ranch Doritos are god awful. Doritos are so named as a mixture of two Spanish words, "dorado," meaning golden and "oro," meaning gold, then it adds a colloquial flourish of "ito," which means little. If it were really Spanish and not a soulless corporate brand name, it would mean something like "little golden things." Clancy's version of the same should be called "Cartulito's" which would similarly translate to "little cardboard things."
Since we are on the subject of brand names that mean something else in other languages, "lego," in Latin, means "I put together." However, that's not how that company got its name, preferring to name themselves after "Leg godt" a Dutch phrase that means "play well." In Poland, people eat chocolate Fart Bars, Iranians wash their dishes with a product called Barf, and Ghanaians enjoy bottle after bottle fo Pee Cola. Reader, I assure you that if all these products tasted like their unfortunate English words, they still wouldn't be worse than those knock-off Cool Ranch Doritos from Aldi.
Aldi's Doritos can't be helped but there is a special curiosity of people who take good-tasting products and intentionally make them taste worse. I've spent a certain amount of time this quarantine eating S'mores Pop Tarts which means I've spent a certain amount of time staring at the S'mores Pop Tarts box while waiting for the toaster. On the side of box, the marketing copy reads "Crazy good no matter how you love 'em: straight from the foil, toasted, stacked, frozen." I have heard of people spreading butter on a toasted Pop Tart which seems like overkill but follows a certain amount of flavor logic, I have never heard of anyone freezing their Pop Tarts. I tried this and found that freezing the Pop Tart makes the gooey inside chewy and brittle. A Google search (by the way, did you know that Bing means "disease" in Mandarin? In English, it means "unpopular search engine) of the term "frozen pop tart" brings up a 15-year-old thread on a forum for gamers where a user that is obviously a Kellogg's plant says he likes them frozen to the general silence of the rest of the thread. This makes me think that this is a made-up way of eating Pop Tarts, created by a copywriter who wanted to list four ways of eating her product. The first person to announce that they enjoy Pop Tarts in this way gets a shoutout in tomorrow's newsletter (but may lose some of my respect).