Last night I attended a BBQ where I literally was surrounded on all sides by illegal fireworks.  One guy was throwing M80s into heavily traffic.  The booms were enough to make anyone swerve.  Ah, America.

As I mentioned yesterday, Takeru Kobayashi, the famed eating machine, held his own hot dog eating contest at the same time as the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating contest – a Major League Eating competition he has been banned from for the past two years.  Joey Chestnut, the past champion four years running, achieved his fifth title this year, eating 62 dogs in ten minutes.  He did not beat his own world record from 2009 of 68 in ten minutes.

Kobayashi, however, in the non-sponsored event, ate SIXTY NINE (69) dogs to (apprently) break the world record and show the execs at Major League Eating what’s up.  The MLE pres immediately called his stunt a “farce.”  Read more about it here!

The Money Shot

New product alert!  Just saw these and knew they’d be my next blog item – Coconut M&M’s!  I LOVE coconut and would plow through Almond Joys and Mounds with abandon if it was socially acceptable.

(As an aside, this is what I’m really hoping to do with this blog – review the newest wackiest cutting edge junk food as it comes out, with some oldies sprinkled in here or there.  Thanks for sticking with me, everyone.)

Design savvy

A tropical wonderland

Apparently, Coconut M&Ms = tropical theme, as the front packaging reflects.  Female M&M with flower in hair, check.  M&M’s as coconuts in a palm tree, check.  Tiny tropical-like designs on each M&M, check. M&M execs who spent way too much time on this marketing theme, check.

Truth in advertising

M&M’s aren’t f*cking around – they just put out the unhealthy facts in hard ink.  “11% of your daily calories, 30% of your daily saturated fat, and 100% of your daily guilt in one pack of M&M’s, losers.”

I love green!

When you open the package, you are greeted with an assortment of green, white and brown M&M’s. Unlike peanut or PB M&M’s, these are still relatively the same shape as normal M&M’s.

They look like...the same damn old M&M's.

M&M’s, your wrapper promised each piece would have an interesting little tropical icon on it!  These look pretty NON-tropical to me, guys.  Booooooo.

Wait, where's the coconut?

Wait, I checked another one, STILL no coconut!?

I popped five or six into my mouth and chomped down, and was really generally pleased – delicious chocolate with candy shell and a subtle coconut flavor. Was it strong like in Mounds or Almond Joy? No…but still, I did get the sense of coconut.  But then I cracked one, then two, open – where was the coconut???

My first thought, honestly, was maybe they mixed it with the chocolate.  Or maybe it was so fine, I just couldn’t see it.  Then I read the ingredients – and coconut wasn’t one of the listed parts!  WTF, M&M’s??? I think what I was tasting was listed simply as “artificial flavor.”  Disappointing.

I don’t know what I was expecting – to crack open each M&M to find a stream of coconut milk streaming out?  No, but I guess I expected actual coconut to be located somewhere in there.  What a let down.  I won’t be having these again anytime soon.

Sincerely, Junk Food Guy