I've often considered my life to be a testament to futility and I've always attempted to offset this galling state of affairs by eating creative and often unhealthy foods.
At university the goal was to mix as many of the cafeteria (which should probably be quarantined) dishes into one and to see how many shades of slop-repulsion I could create.
The food there was often so horrific that the different colours - which often ranged from orange to green - often didn't mix together leaving what, in the culinary world, amounts to often nothing more than a veritable palette of often interesting colours. Often.
However, these meals were artificial in that they were often constructed by stitching together a variety of foodstuff elements that really had no business being together. They were in essence horrors of my own design.
It's only recently that I've become a vegetarian that I've started to eat normal food. In response to this my mother brought home "Zoglo's Vegetarian Choice".
If I were to guess why my mother picked up this particular product it would be the announcement of the front of the packaging which proudly states "It looks like meat ...it tastes like meat ...but it isn't meat".
I'm not sure what this tells you, my loyal listeners, but, as far as I am concerned, things that aren't made of meat have no business tasting like meat. It goes against God and at least three of the Ten Commandments.
To Zoglo's credit, the vegetarian burgers tasted less like meat and more like the debris that was left over after Moses carved out the aforementioned Ten Commandments.
This means that Zoglo probably won't go to hell even though he probably should.
I think that I first realised that I was dealing with something a little out of the ordinary when I read the cooking instructions on the back of the packet. It mentions in bold text that it "can be microwaved" and yet offers no instructions on how they should be microwaved. It fails to mention how for long it is to be microwaved and at what setting. Microwaved.
More disturbing is that included in the cooking instructions are the directions one would follow if they decided to toast their vegetarian burgers. It literally tells you that you can stick the burgers into a pop-up toaster and cook them that way. I'm pretty sure that that's unnatural.
To be fair to the glorified Frankenstein's that created these vegetarian monstrosities I can only say that, while they didn't taste like meat, they weren't completely inedible.
We could probably get them for false advertising but they probably have a number of signed statements taken from a series of focus groups where people (probably people with no tongues) actually testified that these things do taste like meat.
No, if I were to have a guess as to what it tastes like I would say that it was more like rubbing my mouth with an assortment of dry spices and, possibly, twigs.
Again this is not the most disgusting thing that I've ever eaten although I did tell my mother to never, on pain of death (probably mine), buy it again.
Apparently they're also really healthy. They have no cholesterol, preservatives, additives or MSG. Also, at the back, there is "The Soglowek Promise", which states that only the finest ingredients and carefully selected herbs and spices are used.
I don't know what a "Soglowek" is. I think Soglowek is the company that manufactures Zoglo's Vegetarian Burgers but if that is true then my review won't make sense because I personified Zoglo and somehow made him solely responsible for the existence of these burgers. As such, I propose that for the sake of continuity we do not mention Soglowek again.
Soglowek's vegetarian products can also be consumed as: schnitzels; kebabs; links (golf?)/sausages; vegetable patties; beef and chicken patties; and nuggets.
I can't imagine why my mother thought that this would make a satisfying meal. My guess is that she is getting tired of having to deal with a vegetarian and she wants me dead.
She probably got tired of leaving little hints around the house that she wants me dead (Yes, mother, I understand what the shoelaces tied into little nooses are meant to signify) and what better way to get rid of me that to poison me with "Zoglo's Dead Vegetarian Son Choice"?
Reviewed on Wednesday, 5 March 2003