Rickey Reviews Odd Food Left in the Second Floor Staff Kitchen

Every now and then, someone at Rickey’s office will leave food in the staff kitchen with the intention of giving it away gratis. Generally, this food is either: bizarre, rotten, unhealthy, or all of the above. Rickey, being the curious individual that he is, will often take aforementioned food back to his office and examine it to see if it qualifies as a suitable mid-afternoon snack. Yesterday, a tiny plastic cup in the second floor staff kitchen caught Rickey’s eye. Colored red and labeled only “JELLY,” Rickey deemed this gelatinous oddity to be worth a closer look. Below are Rickey’s field notes on the matter.

Interesting: neither the product’s manufacturer nor distributor are listed on the jelly cup. Alarm bells are stating to jingle in Rickey’s mind.

The label does however clearly state: CONTAINS NO KONJAC. What exactly is this konjac they speak of? A Saturday morning cartoon supervillan? Is it good that Rickey is not ingesting any, or bad that he’s getting enough in his daily diet?

A Wiki search reveals that Asians use this konjac ingredient frequently in cooking. And the FDA issued a full-blown ban on it in 2002. Uh oh. Evidently there was a show on this on Oprah a while ago involving paramedics trying to save children that had choked on konjac. The paramedics would use an instrument that sort of vacuums the konjac out of the wind pipe. Sometimes however, the konjac sticks to the walls of the windpipe and so there is nothing paramedics can do to save a choking child once they ingest it. Klaxon sirens are now sounding in Rickey’s head.

But hey, at least the folks manufacturing this product wised up and removed the konjac from their product. So everything’s hunky-dory, right? Not quite. The ingredients in this highly suspect snack only heighten Rickey’s concerns. The contents are:

1) R.O. Pure Water (sholy shit, just how bad does water need to be to require reverse osmosis?)
2) Fructose (mmm, healthy!)
3) Sugar (what, the fructose wasn’t enough?)
4) Coconut (well hey, at least that’s a natural ingredient)
5) Seaweed Extract (ewwwww, what the fuck?)
6) Acidulants (hooray for additives!)
7) Natural Lychee Flavor (sorry, but there’s nothing natural about a fruit that comes from the soapberry family)

Feeling just barely brave enough to sample this seemingly lethal children’s snack, Rickey peels off the plastic top and gingerly licks it. Hm, tastes kind of like mop water. Sickly sweet, and there’s something else in there too… …a slight after-taste of what Rickey imagines horse semen must taste like. Awesome.

Now convinced that the experience cannot possibly get any worse, Rickey pinches the bottom of the cup, and tilts his head back to force the gelatinous mop water into his mouth. Oh god. If Beelzebub were to mandate that the damned take jello shots in the fiery abyss, we imagine this is kind of what they’d taste like. An entire afternoon of work productivity has been lost and Rickey must now unleash hell in the first floor men’s bathroom.

Rickey’s not entirely sure precisely which Asian country this awful food hails from (to prevent a full-scale nuclear strike, the label wisely doesn’t identify that information). But once Rickey finds out, he’ll definitely be writing a few letters to his congressman. And a big shout out to the sadistic bastard in his office who tried to poison Rickey today. It’ll take more than that to keep Rickey down.