It's Sunday, and college students across the nation are hard at work. No studying here. Just an all-out effort to keep one's butt planted firmly on the couch. Phone rings? They'll call back tomorrow. Homework? Maybe after the Packer game. Shower? Never. Only one thing can rouse us: hunger.
But fear not—the packaged food industry has come to the rescue of our collective sloth. Grocery aisles are filling with products that move beyond the simplicity of Easy Mac and into the realm of ""Look what we can sell to you languid losers."" A pantry stocked with these idiot-proof foods insures absolute minimal energy expenditure.
We'll start with a classic: microwave bacon. Sure, sizzling pork fat on the stove top can be dangerous and laborious, but do you realize you're paying six times more for your nuked artery-clogger?
To round out your no-frills breakfast, you can also now enjoy Shake ‘N Pour pancakes from Bisquick. No longer will we labor with the complexity of ""Just add water"" pancake mix. This product comes in a neat single-serving bottle. Dump the water in, shake and pour into the pan. Honestly, if you need this much help with the mixing process, how the hell are you ever going to flip the things?
Other products further eliminate the mind-boggling task of adding one ingredient to another and possibly mixing them. Oatmeal Crunch spices up mushy instant oatmeal (a lazy food in itself) with granola bits. They stole this idea from YoCrunch, the yogurt that comes with the granola packet on top. I'm thankful for these products—lifting a full box of granola is an activity better fit for the SERF than the kitchen.
One of the all-time greats of quick bites is the Pop Tart. Those good folks at Kellogg's recently introduced a ""new"" version of this on-the-go snack. For twice the price of a regular Pop Tart, we can now enjoy a Go Tart, essentially a candy -bar-shaped Pop Tart which can be eaten ""on the go."" Is this something that can't be done with a regular Pop Tart? Apparently Kellogg's has yet to realize college students stopped toasting Pop Tarts long ago.
On a lazy day, even thinking about exercise is sheer blasphemy. So instead of heading to the gym, we can crack open a 100 Calorie Pack of our favorite snack—fitness in a box. Problem is, you'll just end up eating the whole box anyway. Worse yet, you'll probably work up a sweat ripping open each petite bag of Doritos.
In the same line are Quaker's 90-calorie granola bars. That clever Quaker pulled another rabbit from his oversized hat. He figured out how to make his bars both lo-cal and lo-fat: He shrunk them. The ""healthy"" versions weigh two ounces less than the regular bars. Best yet, these mini-bars quell the unbearable strain of lifting a full-size bar to our mouths.
But what if your lazy derriere craves a hot dog? It sounds yummy, but the hot dog assembly could leave you too exhausted to enjoy your creation. No worries, just grab some Fast Franks. The hot dogs, neatly seated in ""Bakery Fresh"" buns, come in individual microwave-ready packages. Just pop one in for 20 seconds and you've got yourself a deliciously soggy meal. Don't even think about ruining your inactivity with arduous ketchup bottle squeezing.
I really do appreciate these brilliantly simple morsels. But all of them involve the grueling act of chewing—we're talking hundreds of backbreaking calories here. That's why I've decided to take my worthlessness to a whole new level: I am now hooked up to a continuous IV drip of nutritive fluids. Now if I could just get some beer in this thing...
If you would like Jay to microwave a meal for you, send him an e-mail at storey@wisc.edu.
