{"id":19340,"date":"2017-05-20T07:00:49","date_gmt":"2017-05-20T11:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/?p=19340"},"modified":"2020-03-26T03:36:32","modified_gmt":"2020-03-26T07:36:32","slug":"distinctly-canadian-junk-food","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/2017\/05\/20\/distinctly-canadian-junk-food\/","title":{"rendered":"Distinctly Canadian junk food"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Eating<\/a>

Eating the red ones last. Photo: James Morgan<\/p><\/div>\n

Canadians and Americans enjoy a common bond.\u00a0 They like junk food, and often too much of it, according to health professionals.\u00a0 But within that sugar and fat-filled bond, there are differences.\u00a0 Canadians get to enjoy junk food Americans can\u2019t easily get.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s start with chocolate bars, usually called candy bars<\/em> in the US.\u00a0 We have Smarties in Canada.\u00a0 They\u2019re like M&M\u2019s but flatter and sweeter.\u00a0 The bright colors and how they rattle around in their box make them popular with children.\u00a0 They ran memorable advertising campaigns in the 1980s too.\u00a0 \u201cWhen you eat your Smarties do you eat the red ones last?\u201d was the popular jingle.\u00a0 The addition of blue-colored Smarties was also a big event.\u00a0 There\u2019s also Coffee Crisp.\u00a0 It\u2019s a coffee flavored wafer chocolate bar.\u00a0 Ironically, I always eat mine with a cup of tea.\u00a0 \u201cMakes a nice, light snack\u201d is the longtime slogan, printed on the package and used in advertising.\u00a0 There was also a series of television commercials in the 1990s that would show a person making coffee for someone else.\u00a0 The person making the coffee would ask \u201cHow do you like your coffee?\u201d and the other person would just answer; \u201cCrisp.\u201d<\/p>\n

US federal law prohibits one Canadian junk food item from entering the country.\u00a0 The Kinder Surprise is a hollow chocolate egg.\u00a0 Inside is a small toy that has to be assembled.\u00a0 The Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act bans any food product from the US that contain \u201cnon-nutritive\u201d objects.\u00a0 Well, plastic toys are non-nutritive.\u00a0 Americans have been detained at the border and threatened with fines ranging from $300 to $2,500 per chocolate egg for trying to bring Kinder Surprises into the US.<\/a><\/a><\/p>\n

\"Kinder<\/a>

Kinder Surprise egg. The wildcat toy was inside. Not allowed in America! Photo: James Morgan<\/p><\/div>\n

Ketchup-flavored potato chips are unique to Canada.\u00a0 They\u2019re hard to find in the US.\u00a0 Hostess, now Lay\u2019s, started producing them in the 1970s.\u00a0 Another Canada-only snack food is Hawkins Cheezies.\u00a0 These are the original corn cheese snacks, made in a non-descript factory in Belleville Ontario (west of Kingston). \u00a0Hawkins even owns the rights to the Cheezies name. Using a process the Hawkins people call extrusion, the crunchy sticks of malted corn are covered with a bright orange natural cheddar flavoring.\u00a0 Ironically, this all-Canadian product was first made in Dayton, Ohio and then Chicago in the late 1940s.\u00a0 W.T. Hawkins took over the company and moved it to Tweed, Ontario in 1949, and then down the road to Belleville in 1956.<\/p>\n

Little Debbie and her cakes are popular in the US, but they\u2019ve only been available in Canada for about 20 years.\u00a0 We\u2019ve had the Jos. Louis and the rest of the plastic-wrapped offerings from the Quebec-based Vachon bakery for decades.\u00a0 The Jos. Louis is a two-layer red velvet cake, about four inches in diameter.\u00a0 In between the layers is creamy frosting.\u00a0 The entire cake is covered in chocolate.\u00a0 The cake was named after Joseph and Louis, two brothers in the Vachon family, not Joe Louis the boxer.\u00a0 There\u2019s also a white cake version called the May West.<\/p>\n

It’s no secret that Canadians and Americans eat too much of things that are not good for them.\u00a0 But, Canadians have a few different items when it comes to enjoying junk food.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Canadians and Americans enjoy a common bond.\u00a0 They like junk food, and often too much […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":112,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[880,17077,1301],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19340"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/112"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19340"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19340\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21985,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19340\/revisions\/21985"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19340"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19340"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19340"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}