1711 Tasteless is More

What is it with the fast food purveyors recently? They're on a quest to outdo each other to be more bizarre, dedicated to shocking and shaking up our palates.
Like Jack in the Box's Bacon Milk Shake. Tase my tastebuds, Bro. Or the Taco Bell Dorito Loco Taco, a taco shell made out of flavored Doritos. So you can have a taco-flavored Dorito surrounding an actual taco. Artificial Flavor Armageddon.
Or the new Papa Murphy's cheeseburger pizza. It has a ketchup and mustard sauce, ground beef nuggets and bacon bits, onions, cheese, and even pickles. Yep, you heard me, dill pickle slices festoon the pizza like green pepperoni.
Greened pepperoni, how's that for an appetizing look?
And yes I tried it. It really did taste like a bacon cheeseburger with pickles. But it didn't feel like a cheeseburger with pickles. Unless you're used to eating a cheeseburger open-faced on a really chewy bun. The mouth feel was way off. And that's key to how we enjoy food. We don't just like food because of taste, we like it because of context. In this case, they needed to not think out of the bun.
Like the new hot dog-flavored potato chips from 7-Eleven. They really do taste like hot dogs with mustard. But they don't feel like hot dogs with mustard. They feel like chips. And frankly, the idea of a hot dog flavored chip is a little over the top for even a flavored chip fanatic like me. Like the cheeseburger pizza, it's not about flavor. It's about format.
Now if they could make a hot dog flavored Dorito, turn it into a taco shell and wrap it around a real hot dog...
Or, I know, a hot dog and sauerkraut pizza....
America ya gotta love it.