Words Mean Things
My spiral down into a dark rabbit hole of the meaninglessness of modern words started when a YouTuber described a product as a "ready-to-eat meal kit." I paused the ad read, squinted at my laptop, and mentally rewound the sentence that had just unspooled. The nonsense was hypnotic. To snap out of my mesmer, I wrote down the definitions of the words that I had just heard so carelessly smashed together.
A "meal kit" is a collection of ingredients, a recipe, and an overly ambitious preparation time you will never achieve.
A pre-packaged meal you bung in the microwave and serve is a "ready meal".
So what in living fuck was a "ready-to-eat meal kit"?
By a technical fluke, it is possible for those with more appetite than discernment to consider a meal kit "ready-to-eat", and by that I do mean me on one of those desperate days where it doesn't matter that the centre of the mac and cheese is still frozen, as long as it is ingestible. I can picture, drunk, bored, or starving, ripping open the cheery packaging of a box that has lingered in the lukewarm atmosphere of the lobby for eight hours before being brought upstairs, seeing the optimistic preparation time needed to turn raw ingredients into a recognisable meal, and instead of following instructions, choosing the violent shortcut of stuffing the pre-shredded cheese and packaged tortillas into my mouth alongside clumps of torn-off lettuce. Early in our relationship, my spouse asked me to wash a bunch of carrots, and for efficiency's sake I held them under the shower. Hunger makes me lazy and feral. It inspires my lizard brain to think laterally, usually resulting in a quick, wildly undercooked "meal", consumed hastily while crouched behind the counters so, much like the French men who eat songbirds with their heads beneath a napkin, neither man nor god can witness my sins. My own pathological behaviour aside, a "ready-to-eat meal kit" is an oxymoron: either it's ready to eat, or it's a kit from which to build a meal, two concepts that are (or at least, ethically speaking, should) be irreconcilable opposites. Yet it wasn't the first time I had felt this feverish, prickly anger over word salad. It wasn't even the first time it was related to food.
Garbled Words for Garbage Food
"Words mean things!"
Deconstructing the linguistic nonsense of fast food advertising is one of my favourite aspects of Munch Squad, especially when Justin McElroy lets out his strangled exasperation at the copy. Words mean things! Except when you're advertising food that barely qualifies, in which case both common decency and common sense go out the window. I am in equal parts a fervent hater of corporate slop and a devotee to the absurd, so this segment on the podcast My Brother, My Brother, and Me scratches a very particular itch that lies between anger and joy. Culinary nightmares rendered in fast food—sorry, "quick service" restaurants—are forced to dance and sing like reanimated corpses under the spotlight of talented, bored copywriters across America, whose mangling of language is somehow grotesque and elegant at once. Asked to put lipstick on a pig, marketing professionals have taken to stretching the bounds of the English language to semi-Dadaist extremes in order to sell increasingly warped food concepts that would probably catch a stern side-eye from the FDA if they weren't fleeting novelty items that exited menus almost as quickly as they arrived. These strange mayflies include fried chicken Mother's Day bouquets; spaghetti baked into a deep-dish pie; and sloppy breadstick sandwiches that Olive Garden suggests you share with loved ones, presumably not in public. They say every story has already been told, and as a writer, the idea fills me with a sad fatigue; but these menu items (I will refrain from the libel of calling them "food") ignite in me a hope that there are yet new narrative frontiers to explore. Would I ever dare eat one of these gruesome art installations? My morbid curiosity and IBS are still debating this one. I imagine impulsivity will have the final vote. But back to the copy! For this is what I find most delicious and insidiously vile about freak foods: their press releases.
I trawled through the archives to find some of the more egregious examples of what I now think of as ultra-processed English: words and sentences one could not reasonably create in a typical home setting, but which rely on factory automation and specialised, patented techniques to assemble. The main feature connecting each press release is a warped perspective on, or total suspension of, reality, either with statements that directly contradict the world I thought I had a modest grasp on, or imply disturbing machinations behind the countertops of chain restaurants. Einstein Bros offer "party bagels", the brand's nom de plume for an item formerly known to the English-speaking world as "donuts", and promise that the eggs on their actual bagels are "freshly cracked", as opposed to poured from a gallon jug in the back. Elsewhere, Sonic's Fritos Chili Cheese Jr. Burger (a mouthful in title alone) boasts "melty" cheese, suggesting a liminal state between solid and entirely melted, a grammar choice that forces the beholder to conceive of the cheese in unstoppable motion, constantly oozing onto the "100-percent beef patty" (a reassurance that has me side-eyeing the contents of the rest of the menu), held together in a "soft bakery bun", as though most chains outsource their rock-hard bread rolls from dumpsters.
When I looked up the greatest example of mechanically deboned phrasing I could remember from the series, though, I stumbled across something entirely unexpected.
It turns out, words still hold power—and the wrong ones can get you in trouble.
Consequences
Back in June 2020, just as the pandemic had us all gasping for a spot of good news, Bang Energy waded into the nightmare with a "punk" new flavour, the 22nd in their line of canned energy drinks: Radical Skadattle. At the time of the press release so eagerly vivisected by Munch Squad, "Radical Skadattle" was the latest offering from this self-proclaimed "revolutionary beverage phenom[enon?]", though its flavour appears to entirely bypass the palette and jack itself directly into the central nervous system:
"The name Radical tells this new flavor is extraordinary, while the SKADATTLE will literally make your tongue rattle! After simply sipping RADICAL SKADATTLE™, you will feel the vibes of beating drums, electric guitars, and rock music flowing through your brains and pulsating through your veins!"
I urge you to read it twice, maybe three times—however many passes it takes to cut through the imagery and see the actual claims to reality being made. This is the vibe coding of the English language, a cluster of concepts that, despite co-opting the word "literally" in the first line, offer no concrete understanding or expectation for the physical product. Am I being offered a seizure or a spiritual awakening? More to the point, what fucking flavour is the pulmonary throb of rock music? Is it made from a tincture of Jimmy Hendrix's guitar strings steeped in nectar? Is it sugar free? Does it interact poorly with prescription medications?
This is language for language's sake, a hollow type of poetry that attempts to invoke the spirit of a live concert, deliberately detaching the press release from the product, leaving a brand name and a handful of dangling adverbs like disconnected wires. The lack of confidence in the drink itself, as with all products described with such oral gymnastics, is telling: there is no promise of flavour, quality, or care. In fact, there are a lot of words used to tiptoe around tangibility, avoiding solid attributes, as if the concept has more value than the food. Isn't it easy to forget, floating in this sloppy word soup, that we're talking about things to eat? Food, one of the most objective material items available for purchase, indeed, the Platonic opposite of an NFT, is abstracted through a word processor and comes out as a pile of disparate sensations, the ingredients tossed into some dark corner to be ignored. Food should offer pleasure, nutrition, relief from hunger, at base. It is one of the most intimate purchases on the common market, one of the few things consumers literally consume. Yet, reading these press releases, disturbing absences come to light. What exactly am I being asked to put in my mouth? Will it fill me with satisfaction or nausea? Is it a meal I can share with friends, and look back on fondly in our twilight years as a moment where we shared collective care for one another?
I'm not a snob; at almost forty, I am still nostalgic for Happy Meals after Saturday library dates with my mum, salty sweet tongue tingles and the bright plastic of a toy I couldn't choke on. Yet I doubt I will find sustenance or succour in any modern fast food monstrosity, the majority of which promise only one thing beyond the quietly confessed ingredients: craveability, aka, addiction. But I don't want to feel the urge for freshly cracked eggs or soft bakery buns pulsating through my aching veins, as I writhe in withdrawal. I want a decent lunch or low-effort dinner with a flavour profile I can parse from ten words on a menu.
Which brings up back to Bang Energy, with its vibrant yet vague copy. When I try to picture the flavour, I can only imagine it has the tingling penny sensation of licking a 9-volt battery. Or should I say, had; Bang Energy went bankrupt 3 years after the birth of Radical Skadattle, sued into oblivion for falsely advertising the inclusion of "Super Creatine", an ingredient that never existed. It turns out that concrete statements are much easier to contest in a legal setting than the vibes of rad-skad drum beats.
I can only hope the rest of the slop food crawls back into the shadows of nightmare after it. Maybe we can't sue over the disappointing reality of a "party bagel", but we sure as hell don't have to swallow it.