11 Baffling Single-Serving Products You Won't Believe Exist
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Felix Clay
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- October 09, 2014
I ran afoul of something terrible the other day out shopping for Slurpees and Slurpee knockoffs (I can't afford to shop at 7-Eleven) and it was this -- a single cob of corn, precooked and wrapped in plastic, ready for you to eat like you're some kind of majestic, convenience-store hillbilly caught between civilization and farming your own asshole right on the subway. I was utterly and completely blown away and reminded of an individually wrapped pickle I had once seen, which you'll be happy to note was in the cooler right next to the corn.
Is this the world we live in? Single-serving corn? Single pickles? You probably remember Fight Club, and if so, applaud yourself, for it's an awesome movie and one you should watch regularly. If not, well, I hesitate to use the word "abomination," but since you brought it up, yes, you're an abomination. Tyler Durden laments the single-serving world we live in, and it seems like it's worse than Chuck Palahniuk ever imagined. Or maybe Chuck eats single-serving corn all the time, I don't know.
11 Corn
Look at it. It's a single cob of corn that someone already cooked. The label says "ready to eat" right on it. Like you're just going to walk around downtown with this cob in your mitt, chewing the kernels off like a latter-day squirrel-man, not a care in the world except for how you can get that sweet, sweet indigestible cellulose into your belly.
Who Buys This?
The utterly mad. I have no doubt that this is a perfectly legitimate cob of corn. I bet it is tasty and juicy and full of all that corny shit you corn-lovers can't get enough of. But why the fuck did you buy it from the cold case next to the knockoff Slurpee-machine at a ghetto 7-Eleven clone? No one needs corn on the road. Literally no one. In the history of mankind, none of the billions of souls that have existed would have had their day inconvenienced in any way by a lack of a corncob being available at a convenience store.
The fact this exists makes me think it's part of some diabolical plot by an otherworldly intelligence or demonic force that so loathes mankind it thought up the most innocuously asinine thing it could imagine just to prove to its overlords that we as a species are lazy and stupid enough to fall for any manner of half-assed cull. If they'll buy corn at a convenience store, they'll do any stupid thing. Let's just eliminate them all now.
10 Pickles
Are these even weird anymore? I think they are. I refuse to believe that, just because they've existed for a while, they stopped being weird. If that were true, Charles Nelson Reilly would have been the most normal fellow on Match Game. Ask your parents.
This is just a single pickle in a bag, and I don't know why. Did you know you can get a whole jar of pickles for, like, I have no idea. Five dollars? Two dollars? I honestly don't know what pickles cost, but it's not a lot.
Who Buys This?
I feel like this is for old guys in pork pie hats who spend time fishing off of docks. Who else really needs to bite into a big ol' dildo-sized pickle on a whim, anyway? Only a man who hasn't lost everything because he never had anything to begin with. Guys named Saul or Howard or Bernard. Guys who smell like Aqua Velva (and pickle brine) and will wear the same pants for two weeks straight because their other pair looks exactly the same anyway, so who cares, and while we're on the subject, call them trousers. People who wear trousers eat pickles.
9 Bananas
What a slap in the mouth this is. The supermarket owner who first did this is one ballsy bastard who deserves to have someone stuff his mailbox full of feces and fireworks. Listen, we all want one banana sometimes, I get that, you get that. A banana is great. But then you just take one from the rest if you need it. Individually wrapped bananas? Dude, nature wrapped the fucking thing before you got there. Why is it in plastic? Who is that helping? That's like Bigfoot putting on a sweater before looking for his forest bride.
Who Buys This?
The deranged.
8 Potatoes
Potatoes are the most delicious thing you can pretend is a vegetable if you're trying to convince someone you eat healthy. Let's be honest, though, hashbrowns and French fries are healthy like Internet comedy writers are sexually incompetent, which is to say they're not, which is to say I'm a pleasure dynamo who likes potatoes.
The issue here is the same as the banana one. Why would you wrap that potato? It's got skin on it already, dog. Just take it home and cook it. That layer of plastic is just there so that one day it can go out to the ocean and choke a penguin to death.
Who Buys This?
People who don't understand how to potato. Listen, it's pretty easy. You can bake one in the microwave, even. Just poke a few holes in it first. This product preys on the weak, which is to say dudes who live alone and are having a girl over, or sitcom housewives who usually have a servant do the cooking.
7 Wieners
I'm not going to sit here and pretend that I'm too good for wieners. I love wieners. I will choke down a plump, juicy wiener all day long and not even pause for blatantly childish innuendo breaks. But when I get my wieners, I don't get them individually wrapped, because that's preposterous. You can buy them in packs of 12. A solid dozen wieners. Who is the single-wiener format helping, anyway? Is there someone out there who's thinking, "I guess I just need one phallic formed-meat snack right now because I'm not a monster?" No one is thinking that. You're thinking, "That Kobayashi fella can eat 30 of these in a minute. I have to be able to eat a dozen in one sitting."
Who Buys This?
I guess that guy who thinks he doesn't want to be a wiener glutton but still needs to be filled with at least one wiener. Gladstone?
6 Jelly Beans
I feel like this is just the afterthought of a cartoon supervillain. What's a functional way to waste a ton of plastic for no reason whatsoever? Why not wrap jelly beans individually?
Have you ever seen someone eat a single jelly bean? I guarantee if you have seen it, you have seen the same person commit a compassionless homicide. There's nothing human in eating one jelly bean, ergo there's nothing human in wrapping them individually. Wrap them in 10-packs if you have to be smug, but one at a time is just diabolical and infuriating.
Who Buys This?
Maybe someone with OCD, like a Howard Hughes type, so he can eat one hermetically sealed bean, then shit it into a jar and keep that jar in a vacuum-sealed room next to his humanitarian awards.
5 Bread
To the best of my knowledge, you can't get bread that's not in loaf form originally. Like, it literally has to start in a loaf of some kind, be it round or square or our traditional and preferred chubby dong shape. You then slice the bread and enjoy it however you like. The process of bagging the entire loaf makes sense and is easy to understand. The process of taking a single slice of bread, which by itself is about as useless as an individually wrapped tit on a bull, is best described as fucking stupid. The least you could do is seal two pieces of bread together to allow for a sandwich. What's the deal with a single slice? Is this a prison-dispensary sort of thing? Standard-issue gulag supplies? I can't imagine.
Who Buys This?
People for whom sandwiches are too crippling to deal with on a day-to-day basis. Those folded-sandwich types, you know who they are: weirdos who put peanut butter on half the bread and then fold it because their parents never looked them in the eye except when they punished them.
4 Peanut Butter
Someone invented peanut butter singles to go with your shitty bread single. The foodies among you may be quick to point out that peanut butter, being a spread, sure as shit would be hard to single portion, wouldn't it? I don't mean those little packets you get in restaurants, do I? Oh no, those I understand. These are peanut butter slices that resemble individual cheese slices in an unsettling and brown way. These exist, I assume, to save you the potential carpal tunnel explosion you were going to get from spreading peanut butter the old-fashioned way.
Who Buys This?
Compulsive masturbators? I don't know who needs to keep their wrists so pristine they can't be bothered to spread something onto bread. I understand when you're super wealthy you hire people to do it: Adam Tod Brown has a guy who puts prune paste on all his crackers, but that's different. This is just lazy.
3 Ice
I believe the company that started this is out of business now, but they at least tried it, so they get included here. They were selling sealed, disposable ice cube trays full of Tasmanian spring water. Peel off the top, fill your glass, toss out the tray. In the world of wasteful product packaging, I don't think anything ever achieved such lofty heights when you consider how easily you can make ice on your own without any packaging. In fact, ice is so easy to make, it will happen on your lawn if it's winter and you piss in a mug and put it out there. Anything that can happen naturally on your lawn with a mug full of piss does not require a disposable tray plus Tasmanian spring water and a peel-back layer on top.
I'm not suggesting you use piss ice for anything, incidentally. I'm just saying this is a pretty easy product to master, so let's not get ridiculous with ourselves.
Who Buys This?
Not the Inuit, I imagine.
2 Sliced Ham
This product came from France, but maybe they have them all over the world. Maybe hungry pork enthusiasts from all corners of the globe wake up thinking, "Sure could use a single, rolled-up slice of salty pig meat just now," and tear one of these open and do god knows what with it. Is this for sandwiches? Are you just eating the ham as it is? There's no logical reason to not just eat a roll of ham, but I've never done it, seen it done, or even been motivated to do it in that way before. It seems incomplete.
I once knew a guy who suggested you could microwave a slice of ham for 10 seconds and use it as a reasonably realistic-feeling wank sleeve. So that's a thought.
Who Buys This?
Aside from compulsive masturbators, maybe just really eager meat enthusiasts. The kind of people who need a quick pork injection on the subway or in the middle of a meeting. Basically, no one real.
1 Hard-Boiled Eggs
I'm an egg kind of guy. Remember when people were against eggs due to cholesterol concerns? Me neither, I was a kid, but I ate eggs. I still do. The very idea of a Scotch egg, an egg wrapped in meat and deep fried, is brilliant to me. I like egg salad, even, despite pretending all through school that I didn't because egg salad and tuna salad were the stinky foods that normal kids didn't eat. But at home I so did. Eggs Benedict, deviled eggs, Cobb salad, sign me up. That said, I've never bought a single hard-boiled egg in a bag from a store, and I suspect I never will.
As with most items on this list, there's nothing inherently wrong with the food itself. It's just that you're being creepy and intrusive now. Who peeled that hard-boiled egg? Some sweaty man in an undershirt? Some guy who just goes by a nickname like Pinky or Stitches or Underboob and no one knows his real name? And when it's hot out, he has a towel he uses to wipe down his armpits, just right in front of anyone, without a care in the world? And he always has stubble no matter how often he shaves? And he eats canned meat right out of the can? And he has these long, long-ass fingernails with stuff under them that's not black but, like, a reddish-browny-yellow, like this weird ochre shade, and who knows what it is or how long it's been there? And those fuckin' fingers peeled my egg and then put it in the bag? Fuck you, they did. Fuck you, fuck that egg.
Who Buys This?
I don't even want to know. Victims, really. Innocent egg fans who never even stopped to think what the fuck Pinky has under those nails of his.
For more from Felix, check out 5 Obnoxious Things Restaurants Need to Stop Doing and 4 Situations When You're Totally Supposed to Lie.
Spread the knowledge of these terrible single-serving nightmares, click the Facebook 'share' button below.
And to further expand your noggin, check out Cracked's De-Textbook: The Stuff You Didn't Know About the Stuff You Thought You Knew.
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