A crime against consumers...

I was reading a blog today, and came across an inline ad:

Which got me to thinking... 

When I was growing up, triscuits were not a popular snack food. My sisters and I were devotees of the

So much so, that when we went on family trips, one of us would be appointed as the "Wheat Thin Sheriff" to arbitrate any disagreements over the apportionment of the aforementioned snack (you may be surprised at the lengths that we would go to, but you have likely never had to endure the unbridled excitement of a car trip from Seattle to Idaho in the heat of summer).

There was usually a box of Triscuits along as well, which we were happy let remain in the front seat between our parents. Triscuits are, after all, just an attempt to take shredded wheat breakfast cereal and pass it off as a snack, and were markedly inferior to wheat thins.

Not to mention the name, an obvious play on the word "biscuit" (that traditional American snack food), but what does the "tri" mean? And is there a "Tetrascuit" under lock and key in a top-secret Nabisco research lab?

Anyway, for a long time, I actively avoided them.

And then I got older, and found that a) Triscuits are okay to eat, but not a great snack and therefore 2) I can eat 4 or 5 and be done with them.  Which is a good thing when you want a good snack and don't want to eat a whole box of:

Then one day while shopping, I noticed the Triscuit Rosemary and Olive oil flavor.

I am generally skeptical of new flavors for old favorites, on the theory that the primary flavors of good snack foods are (in order) salt, oil, <some sort of starch>, but I bought a box anyway.

Only to find that Nabisco had overdone my second criteria. Not only could I eat 4 or 5 and be satisfied, I could eat 4 or 5 and never want to eat any more, smell them, or even see the box. They were, to put it simply, a crime against consumers - something that managed to combine ingredients I liked to create a thoroughly unappetizing result.

A couple of months later, I saw a familiar box sitting on the table next to the couch. I sat down, turned on the TV, reached into the box, and pulled out an "original flavor" (ie no flavor) Triscuit. Or so I thought in the dim illumination. It turns out that my lovely wife had not purchased original flavor triscuits, but had instead bought a different flavor that she thought was pretty good:

I disagreed with her assessment. Chedar cheese triscuits are not "pretty good", they are the kind of food that should say "serving size: 1 box" on the side. If I ever die from nutritional insufficiency, you can be pretty sure that you will find me on the couch with the TV on and a laptop toasting my legs, surrounded by a pile of empty cheddar triscuit boxes.

Foods like this should be illegal.