Beef Stick Queen

I’ve been feeling uninteresting as of late and like all the listless of a certain age, the yearn to retain my youth calls from the distance.

I was looking back at old posts featuring such a different phase of life but also the same friends who just celebrated turning forty. Then I see The Sandman comic laying open on the table in my old smoking porch while Season 2 of the adapted show slaps me in the face from the Netflix home screen, and I have to spiral into moral quandary over another bad man ruining the very art that made the truth not so hard to believe once revealed. Maybe moving forward isn’t always the worst.

Back to the chicken. Well, the Costco chicken, that is. Hard to pass up at $4.99, I had to have one to hang upon the hook incorporated into the cart’s design for this very purpose. I have come to describe this chicken as “flavorless” which may be off-putting for some, but for me it is but a canvas. A beautiful canvas that is breached by some curious fingers angling for a taste while hovering over the sink.

Old World Meats Original Snack Stick

Ratings are based arbitrarily on appearance, experience, texture and taste with occasional influence from what I perceive to be a screamin’ deal.

I came upon the Old World Meats Snack Stick in a domed convenience store on the edge of Bayfield, WI during a downpour. Unimpressed with most of the offerings, I felt obligated to make a purchase and chose a stick from close in proximity.

The stick itself was the common red of many such treats and suggests, at the very least, an aggressively average offering. At first bite, the Old world Meats entrant elicits a nice collagen dependent “snap” that only comes from a natural casing. The following meaty texture is consistent with what I would have expected following the gentle resistance—not overly coarse but also not smooth, as is Slim Jim.

Tastewise, it’s inoffensive. Mildly peppery, it features a relatively gentle spice that’s followed by a hint of sweetness and a slight fattiness from the beef and pork combo. It’s good, but there’s something missing. Probably MSG, which is not featured in its short and readable ingredients list.

The packaging design itself is very old world, less the EZ Peel wrap that I am very much a fan of. Brown and gold are a fitting color palette from a smaller brand based out of Duluth, MN and reflects the good experience I won’t be thinking much about until I spot these sticks in the wild again sometime.

I’m watching the first episode of Friends and suspect Ross’s hair gel foreshadowed the fragile masculinity that freed him to interfere with a future in Paris. The Ted Mosbys and other soppy sacks that filled our screens with crispy locks, evasive posture, and terrible sartorial choices supplanted any notion of charm with a sulphuric shrug. That’s not to say the Old World Meats Original Snack Stick is the Xander Harris of beef stick good guy-edness, but I would have another one of these over accepting a date with one of them, one hundred percent of the time.