"food bar" news and stories

Earlier this month, Erich did a personal taste test review of several of his favorite food bars. He included the Odwalla Food Bar, and said that he likes it.

Well, I have to disagree with his positive assessment of the Odwalla Food Bar. I tried the Superfood, which I knew from the get-go that I wasn't going to love because it's called "Superfood!" Nonetheless, Odwalla has a reputation for making fruits and vegetables taste pretty good as drinks, so I tried it anyway. As chewy as it was, I would have expected a moistness to it, but it was very very dry. I had to drink water with every bite. I think I'd rather "spend" 240 calories on something that tastes a little better.

The 230-calorie Cranberry C Monster was better, only because I could actually recognize the cranberries in the bar. Again, it was chewy, slightly sticky, yet still fairly dry. Because it is sticky, you have to eat it out of the wrapper, which means it makes a lot of "crinkle crinkle" noise, as opposed to removing the entire bar from the wrapper.

Both bars, however, were not as overly sweet as some other bars, and definitely has a lots of vitamins and other "good" stuff."

Let's face it, all you food-loving, regular meal-eating types reading this site, you are the lucky ones. Most of you are blessed with a stove, maybe some ingredients in your cabinet, a bottle of wine half drunk atop your fridge. But if you're a city guy like me, always on the hustle for a dollar, always one dime short of a cup of coffee, always standing out in the rain in front of a hot food story, watching through rainy windows, then it's all about how to stay full and focused on the street, to not pass out while racing from one job interview to another, how to keep your nutrition at a full gallop while never actually sitting down. 

So God created the food bar! 

I'm sure to the average foodie these things are pox, a blight on nutrition and the gourmand's worst nightmare, but to us who dreamt as children of a future where we could eat candy bars for dinner, the nutrients in chocolate-flavored soy logs, are our life's blood; they keep our blood full of something other than caffeine and nicotine and urban despair. Trapped like jungle rats in a maze of dead-eyed salesman and bloodthirsty wall-streeters on their way to steakhouses and unemployment lines, we duck into the 42nd street bodega and grab our fix to go.

Here are some of the personal favorites: