Not that we have a true universality of food. Not till you can get witchetty grubs at McDonald's. (Though given that company's acquisition of outlets -- Pret a Manger, Chipotle -- that it carefully avoids being publicly associated with, Sheila's Grubs may be on the way to a food court near you.)

They are rock-bottom outlets for cheap packaged food: Obscure regional brands, flavors and varieties of national brands that didn't make it in the market, and gray-area items like cereal that is still within its freshness date but has an outdated promo item (e.g., a Christmas music CD, Secrets of Atlantis toy).

In the Portland area, the "Grocery Outlet" chain fills this ecological niche.

I mention Used Food stores here because they often have foreign food items: Mexican cereal, SE Asian canned fish, strange Latin American juices, & etc.

The other point is that they don't describe themselves as "used food," they have names like "Bill's Discount Supermarket."

Well, okay, I can imagine there might be sites devoted to -discussions- of this phenomenon -- who would have guessed that the -Wunderkammer- of the future would be constructed in HTML? -- but perhaps this is merely a thingumma waiting for the right Bob.

Hey, wait a minute. I -am- a pre-Web saurian. Darn limbic systems, you can't count on them for anything.

I'll keep an eye out for weird chips.

The kind of soaps you find in Grocery Outlet includes strange foreign brands (MISTAH SPARKARU!) and "failed" varieties of name-brand soap. Like potpourri Lava, or the controversial Orange version of Irish Spring.

ALL-ONE! ALL-ONE! ESSENE BIRTH CONTROL!

www.junglejims.com

Which brings me to my real point. P. N-H is seeking all bizarre forms of potato chip, but what about chip-substitutes, like the aforementioned Bisli? It's addictive, and gleefully artificial.

Want me to ask?

Kate

I would be more than happy to exchange a box of random British chips for a random assortment of peanut butter cups, Sweet Tarts, etc. If Patrick's interested, my e-mail's dorothyr@spies.com.

see:

www.canoe.ca/CNEWSWeirdNews0205/28_arafat-ap.html

I haven't tried the Baked Bean variety but I may have to. Pickled onion is another Brit fave, and those rank just below T-Bone steak in my book.

(I'm serious about swapping care packages, btw - as an ex-pat graduate student, I can't afford to go home often, and I love getting mail from Back Home.)

As far as recent stuff around here, the Kim Milling Grocery, which carries many Korean and other Asian delicacies, had a snack called "Two Cops" that was part corn, part wheat (I could be wrong about the wheat), and looks like Crispix, only it's sweetened with vanilla flavor. Maybe even vanillin flavor, these days. It came with a plastic hologram (embossed so that the thicknesses of plastic make it look like a photo when you hold it up to light) of a member of a hot Korean pop group called God. So the package I first saw was promising "Two Cops with God!" The wrapper's in a drawer at work, along with a package of calcium stearate "Y2Kandy" chips, dating from Guess When.

Peek Freans Lembas
Walker's Spicy Bar-B-Rog Flavour Crisps
Cadbury's Old Rivendell Bar
and of course Weetaorx

Desperate UK Marketing PLC (a division of Saatchi & Gladstone) offer The Lord of the Rings Collection:

To which I have to say that the confectioners, Bassett's, are offering packs of fruit gum-type sweets in the shape of One Rings, leaves of Lorien, something hobbit-related and other things that I now forget. I was disappointed to discover that there was more than One Ring in each packet, but only mildly surprised to discover that all of them tasted cheap and vile. I haven't had so much 'fun' since I ate the horse-radish flavoured Harry Potter jellybean.

MKS

Baked bean flavour bread? That had passed me by, and I think on the whole I'm glad that it did. An office I once inherited had (for complex reasons) stacks of reference books on "food science" - detailed chemical properties of flavourings and preservatives etc. It's been branded on my brain ever since how little contact "Chicken flavour crisps" will have had with real chicken. However, the upside of that is that a veggie friend of mine will occasionally eat bacon flavour crisps which, he assures me, contain no meat at all but satisfy his cravings for bacon sandwiches.