Secret Menu: The Freshmen 15

By Tyler Remmel

In any one bite, I might grab a chip-formed carrot, half of an Oreo cookie, some uncooked Ramen noodles and a pork skin. And in that bite, my mouth would scream for more.

Spoiler alert: my stomach isn’t saying the same thing. But I’ll ignore that and keep eating this week’s Secret Menu, code-named “The Freshman Fifteen.”

Essentially, the premise behind this was to create a meal from the Eagles’ Nest that didn’t require any waiting for food. My first thought was to create a Chex-style party bowl of snack foods. And since I always trust my gut (no pun intended), I went for it.

Armed with a large popcorn bowl and $20, I filled my arms with snacks from the Eagles’ Nest. $19.85 later, I walked out with 1.5 kg of the following snacks:

– pork skins

– caramel popcorn

– Ramen noodles

– Oreo cookies

– veggie crisps (health food?)

– Sour Patch Kids

– peanut M&Ms

– regular M&Ms

– gummy worms

– cheddar & bacon potato skins

Preparation for this Secret Menu was much less intricate than my Secret Menu selections in the past (particularly easier than the 15-minute pan[birthday]cake of doom).

Basically, I just took out the bowl, tore apart the packages of everything and dumped it all into the bowl. By sheer luck (or fate), it all fit inside the bowl without any trouble.

I’m not sure how to describe the taste of this snack. It kind of has a little bit of everything—scratch that, it has a lot of everything. But sometimes you get some bacon with caramel, other times you get some sour with Ramen. I’ve found myself grabbing random handfuls and stuffing my face, but it would be even more exhilarating to reach in blindly and stuff your face.

When Forrest Gump said that you never know what you’re going to get, he wasn’t talking about a box of chocolates. He was talking about this.

I will admit, however, that the pork skins don’t really offer a positive contribution. On the contrary, their flavor mixed with either the Sour Patch Kids or the sour gummy worms left a slightly acidic, tinny aftertaste in my mouth. It was almost like a mild version of the taste that you experience when you bite down on a piece of tinfoil.

I don’t know if I’d call this a heart-attack-in-a-bowl, although it probably is. At almost three-quarters of a pound, this bowl contains 45 total snack servings. It has 6,570 calories, 243 grams of fat, 958 grams of carbs and 7,582 milligrams of sodium. That makes all of those nutritional values over three times the recommended daily values.

If there’s any hope for me, it’s that I didn’t eat the whole bowl. I didn’t actually eat much at all. While my mouth was particularly pleased—I give the Freshman Fifteen about a 7 out of 10 for taste and consistency—my stomach didn’t enjoy it nearly as much. After a few handfuls, it felt like something was trying to break through my gut, punching and screaming. Oh, and it feels like a grizzly bear clawed through my hard palate at the top of my mouth.

I should have gotten a soda to go along with it.