Jimmy Dean asks, Do You Feel The Glow Yet?

Jimmy Dean’s Pancakes and Sausage on a Stick- Artificially Blueberry Flavored

“Now your favorite breakfast foods are even easier to eat. We wrapped a delicious sausage inside a sweet blueberry pancake, and put it on a stick to make it portable.”*

Jimmy Dean’s product description

Let me start my telling you that sausage is not my friend.  I don’t care for it, never have and more than likely never will.  In fact, the smell of sausage cooking gives me the dry heaves.  Even thinking about smelling sausage now, makes my stomach somersault.  But I digress.

I did not choose to pick on this product because of my sausage issues; the reasons are obvious aren’t they? But for those of you that can’t see why  Jimmy Dean’s Pancakes and Sausage on a Stick –Artificially Blueberry Flavored gives me Goosebumps, let me just say, “Wow! Are you kidding me?”

So, where do I begin?  In defense of the frozen food product developers, who knows what they were up against? Maybe one of their bosses said, “You know, we need to make a hand held breakfast product.  I just heard that portable is the next sliced bread.  But do not deviate from our core competency, we are known for our sausage.  Oh and by the way, whatever  antioxidants are, throw a few in for good measure.”

So maybe the creative session went something like this:

” Well, if we start with our sausage product, and they want it to be a portable hand held breakfast item, the sausage will be hot and greasy so we will need to include a napkin.”

“No, a napkin is not edible.  We should wrap the sausage in an absorbent edible material.”

“I’ve got it, a pancake.  Yes, pancakes and sausage go together.”

“Brilliant! Oh, but what about the antioxidant crap?”

“I know, we will mix in some blueberries.”

“What? Blueberries are too expensive?”

“Don’t worry, we will just add some artificial blueberry like ingredient and we will be golden.”

“Perfect! Consumers are stupid.  They won’t know the difference.”

And out of a session like this  the Jimmy Dean’s Pancakes and Sausage on a Stick- Artificially Blueberry Flavored, could have been born.

Ok. Why pancakes, plural.  Is there more than one pancake wrapped around the sausage?  I mean how could you tell?  It is all preformed in a uniform coating.  We don’t say “Corns Dog”, do we?

The “on a stick” is important though, right? But what if I poke my eye out with the stick while eating this breakfast concoction on the run?  Is there a warning statement on the package that says I could seriously injure myself or others if I were to be in an accident while consuming my breakfast on a stick?  And wouldn’t that greasy sausage retain the heat from the microwave wrapped in its insulated pancake blanket?  Couldn’t I burn my tongue biting into that nuked sausage?

As if these aren’t enough reasons to scare the crap out of you, wait until you get a load of the ingredient statement and the nutrition facts.   I defy you to find blueberries mentioned anywhere in the ingredients.  Who cares if 110 calories out of the 230 per stick are from fat!  There is no evil Trans Fat, and there is no fiber either. And hey, why not get the USDA to approve this ingenious product to be served in schools. We learned from Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution that our school children can’t use knives and forks anyway so why not serve their food on a stick?  The nutrition?  Who bloody cares, it is no worse than a processed amalgamated poultry nugget.

To wrap up, no pun intended, I don’t know if this product could look or be more sickening. No wait, yes it could.  There is another item in this product line, the Jimmy Dean’s Pancakes and Sausage on a Stick with Chocolate Chips!

Thankfully this product is no longer on the market.

The company’s web-site asks “Do you Feel the Glow Yet?”  That is a little spooky is it not?  Do they mean from the release of energy as your stomach attempts to calculate the nuclear half life of the waste you just threw its way?

May I suggest black coffee and a fine Greek yogurt instead?