food | Cookies + Sangria

Every Thanksgiving has one: the participant who just doesn’t care. If you’re thinking “I don’t know, I haven’t really cared enough to notice who that would be,” then it’s you, buddy. It’s you. It’s hard to have a dismissive attitude toward a holiday that’s based around gratitude and food, but these folks manage. Asked to bring a dish to pass, they’ll bring, at worst, a literal empty dish, and at best, one of the following items.

Obviously if you’re bringing one of these because you were asked to, because it’s your tradition, or because of financial or dietary reasons, I’d never judge you. But if that isn’t the case, please realize that nobody is picturing you traipsing through the supermarket squealing “Oh, goody! I’ll bring the canned cranberry sauce – what a treat!” We picture you tossing the jar into a basket on the way to dinner, with a shrug and a resigned “Eh, screw it.” And if you don’t literally say “eh, screw it,” these foods will do it for you:

Can-Shaped Cranberry Sauce

If you’re supposed to bring the cranberry sauce, and you serve a can-shaped loaf of congealed cran-slop, it better be a joke. Like, maybe your friend group thinks it’s funny when food takes the shape of its packaging, or maybe your family always made fun of your grandma’s canned cranberry sauce – which presumably she brought because she was drunk or hated all of you. Okay. Fine.

But really, if you have been trusted with cranberry sauce, don’t turn it into a joke dish unless you know everyone’s on board — because seriously, can-shaped cran-sauce is the gag gift of Thanksgiving. If everyone’s bringing silly dishes, go for it! It’ll be like a jokey Yankee Swap but with foods instead of dollar-store items. Think hard, though: do you really want the person in charge of meat to bring Spam? Because that’s where things are headed when you serve canned cran.

Instant Mashed Potatoes

In college, the dining hall publicly posted comments and complaints. Despite our youthful desire to send in some sort of filthy comment, my friend ended up writing a wholly serious question: “What with the instants?”

Again, I ask to you: what with the instants? At their most basic, mashed potatoes are as easy as it gets: boil, add some kind of dairy or dairy-equivalent, mash. There’s really no need for instants, which by the way look like soap flakes. I think they probably taste like soap flakes too – but I can’t be sure, because I don’t know any little boys from the 1920s who got soap in their mouths because they sassed their parents.

Burned Canned Crescent Rolls

If Thanksgiving Dinner is high school, the turkey is the homecoming queen or head jock, the stuffing is the cool indie kid who knows all the good music but doesn’t play the popularity game, and the rolls are that kid who you see in the yearbook Senior year and say “wait… does he go here?” It’s no surprise that a lot of us don’t bother with homemade rolls, or even ones from a good bakery.

Rolls are clearly a low-tier Thanksgiving food, and usually Pillsbury’s will do just fine. But if your job was to handle the rolls, and all you can produce is burned crescent rolls, you really didn’t try hard. I think that about 3/5 of food-related arguments on Thanksgiving include the phrase “ALL you had to do was the ROLLS.” Another 1/5 will contain the related complaint: “We gave you ONE thing. ONE.” The other 1/5 are usually weird family stuff that you should probably deal with.

Spaghetti

No no no no. There was I guess a “campaign” a while ago to make spaghetti carbonara the official Thanksgiving food. Yeah. That’s about as much of a campaign as when the Yippies ran a pig for presidential office in the 60s. Not gonna happen. I think pasta is fine on Thanksgiving – as a vegetarian, it gives me a nice main dish. But you know, don’t we have enough carbs? As long as some dumb-dumb didn’t burn the rolls?

What it comes down to is, if there’s going to be pasta it should at least require a reasonable amount of effort. My grandma used to make lasagna every year. Lasagna is fine. Stuffed shells are fine. Spaghetti is NOT fine unless someone brought a toddler who’s going through a spaghetti-only phase or something.

Frozen Corn, Defrosted

A lot of people feel like you’re supposed to serve some kind of a “vegetable” on Thanksgiving. Me, I like my dinner to be a food version of trash fiction: 50 Shades Of Brown. Even these vegetable folks usually pay lip service to the whole well-rounded diet thing by defrosting a pack of frozen corn. I suppose defrosting the corn yourself isn’t quite as bad as handing your host a bag of frozen corn and asking them to do it, so there’s that. To make it more like the first Thanksgiving, you can call the corn “maize” and steal it from your neighbors.

Green Been Casserole

Let’s be clear. This dish says “screw it” to complicated recipes. It says “screw it” to health. It says “screw it” to pretension. However, it says a resounding “hell yes!” to deliciousness. Yeah, we all know you didn’t have to slave over the green been casserole – but we all love you for your lack of effort. Of course, I’m talking about the kind made of frozen beans, canned soup, and freeze-dried “onions” (“astronaut onions,” if you will). By far the best – and dare I say, an essential – lazy Thanksgiving dish. This dish is why someday I’ll finally get that “sodium 4ever” tattoo, or maybe a salt shaker inside of a heart, and just hope that I’m never in a situation where I want to be buried in a Jewish cemetery. I’d forego that for this dish.

The phrase “diet foods” is really a misnomer, and we all know it. These aren’t foods that you eat while trying to lose weight — at least, not for everybody. Instead, these are lower-calorie approximations of real foods. In college, finding these foods was like a hobby. It was probably the only hobby I’ve had that was even a little useful, actually. Considering a typical college Saturday would find me getting a diner breakfast sandwich at noon, snacking on Goldfish crackers while watching afternoon tv, getting Chinese for dinner, drinking until 2 a.m., then getting pizza and garlic knots — well, a few aspartame-laden cancer puddings probably offset things. Having the rapid-fire metabolism of a 19-year-old didn’t hurt, either.

So, yeah, diet foods are not really foods for being on a “diet.” And — well — they’re not really foods in the traditional sense. They’re factory produced food-equivalents. These are the worst of them:

Shirataki Noodles

One of my friends used to go to this website where they’d give you low-cal approximations of actual foods. Instead of pasta, they recommended these zero-calorie noodles. That’s right, ZERO! You know what else you can eat for zero calories? Air and water, both of which would be better than these. It’s no accident that “shirataki noodles” is a perfect anagram of “akin shit-loosed air” (or “one kilo sad shit-air” if you’re eating a whole lot).

You knew you were in for it when you read the caveat: “these may produce a slight fishy odor.” Know how smell and taste are connected? They tasted like fish noodles, too. If you boiled one of those curly phone cords after soaking it in a bucket of mackerel, it would taste like shirataki noodles.

Better’n Peanut Butter

What could be better than peanut butter?! I don’t know. Probably not this shitty spread that was made of like 50% crushed peanuts and 50% crushed hopes and dreams. Maybe, if I weren’t expecting this to be a little bit like peanut butter, it would have been okay. Maybe if my expectations were more on-point, it wouldn’t have tasted like peanut butter cut with plain gelatin and desperation. Just call this Creamy Self-Loathing Spread instead, and I’d be all over it.

Handi-Snacks Sugar Free Gelatin Dessert

If you have strep throat, and don’t think you deserve real Jell-O, and have a coupon or something, then I guess it’s okay to buy this. Otherwise, skip it. I actually like sugar-free Jell-O, but there’s something about the off-brand that you don’t have to refrigerate that’s just terrifying. The texture is jiggly and gummy all at once. I imagine if you added a Kool-Aid packet to that 90s toy where you could suspend an undersea diorama in a tiny tank, it would taste like this.

Diet Bread

At 45 calories a slice, it’s better not to think about this as bread in a traditional sense. After all, it does taste like reconstituted sawdust. It’s more of a vehicle — a vehicle to make it easier to swallow egg salad, sliced turkey, or your self-esteem.

Wegmans CoCo Lite Pop Cakes

Please don’t take this as me saying anything against Wegmans. I love them so. And, well, it is pretty fun watching these cakes pop out of the machine in the store! I’m sure there’s even a topping that makes these 20-cal disks taste good. I just haven’t found it yet. If you’ve been looking for a frisbee-sized communion wafer, then this is the snack for you! So if you want to pretend that you’re an elf or fairy receiving the Eucharist, you should probably buy these.

Low Fat Cream Cheese

If you like yourself enough to buy bagels, but hate yourself enough to buy low fat cream cheese, I don’t think I can help you. Or, maybe I can. Just go with neufchatel instead! I think it might be lower-cal than regular cream cheese, AND it doesn’t taste like cream cheese made with the way baby formula smells.

Light ‘n Fit Yogurt

This product’s ad slogan is “Eat Light ‘n Fit – Be Light and Fit!”. Sorry, no. Light ‘n Fit is about as likely to make you BE light and fit as it is to make you be yogurt. Just buy the Fage or Siggis. A friend said that yogurt tastes the way bad breath smells, and generally I disagree, but that’s the most apt descriptor of Light ‘n Fit I can think of.

Lest you think I sit around eating chemical-based food equivalents, let me set you straight. All of these purchases were a one-off after I realized how awful they were, and I really do eat a lot of whole grains and fresh veggies and quality vegetarian protein.

But, let’s be honest, I’m also drinking a giant bottle of Crystal Lite as I write this. I’m pretty sure it’s washing my insides in cancer. What can I say, old habits die hard.