Eight years ago I wrote up a visit I took to the burger joint Harvey’s, reviewing a meal deal that was $5.99. Flash forward to 2025 and my coupon for the same meal deal was $8.99. That’s actually not too bad in terms of the inflation in fast food prices that’s been widely reported. And by “widely reported” I mean the thousands of YouTube videos complaining about it.

I thought the price was reasonable, but this was with a coupon. I also paid for it with a gift card a friend had given me for looking after their house while they were away. As it turned out, I had $11 remaining on the gift card and with tax the meal deal came to a little over $10. So, not wanting to leave any money on the card, I figured I’d get an extra order of small fries and pay the balance with the extra dollar and change I had in my pocket.

Didn’t happen! Without the coupon, do you know what a small container of fries cost? $4.35 with tax! And we’re talking about a little box with maybe 20 fries in it. I said no to that. But it made me realize what people have been complaining about. I went online and checked out what I would have paid for the same items without a coupon. It came to $14.67 before tax. The kilter is the fountain drink, which was $3.09. But then fountain drinks have always been a scam, at restaurants or cinemas or wherever you get them. So in total it came to around $17 with tax. For not nearly enough food to satisfy an adult human. As I said in my review back in 2017, I could easily eat three of these and still be hungry.

At least I now understood then what all the fuss was about. I was left wondering how these places stay in business. I guess a lot of the chains are feeling the stress, but I still see people visiting them, and sometimes they’re even getting their orders delivered. This economy doesn’t make sense to me.

Birthdays come and go. And so do birthday cakes. But when the people at my condo get together to celebrate a birthday there are always these amazing cakes made by one super cake-maker. Here are a couple of her recent ones. And keep in mind these are much bigger than they look in the pictures. Those are full-size plates and the cakes fed a table of six or seven with half the cake left over. I should also say that you can eat the flowers, but you’re not supposed to.

I was a bit disappointed in this cake. Couldn’t they have fit another couple of icing flowers and some more sprinkles on top?

I can’t figure this out. First off: what is a promise? Is it anything like a guarantee? Probably not. Second: how do they define “fresh”? Past the expiry or best-before date? Visibly starting to go bad? Unfit for human consumption? Third: if something is not fresh, should they even be giving it away for free? Shouldn’t they be getting rid of it? Lots of times you can get stuff at the grocery store for 50% off because it’s getting old, and in some cases (like bread) stale and even moldy. Clearly it’s been marked down because it’s no longer fresh, or at least as fresh as it should be. Can I take it to the cashier and demand I get it for free?

Index

Good ingredients make good food? I think that’s what they’re saying. Who comes up with this stuff?

Index

Tim Hortons Apple Fritter Cereal

Overview: An iconic Canadian brand enters the breakfast cereal market with a Post crossover of one of their best-loved donuts. At least I’m calling their apple fritters a donut because they’re baked. But some people would argue the point.

Label: Well, this really is the story isn’t it? The day before posting this review there was a story on the CBC website headlined “Bowled over: Why some Canadians are feeling duped by their breakfast cereal.” The big sticking point with labels on breakfast cereal is, and always has been, whether they include the milk you put on it with the total. Now some companies do you the courtesy of stating if the nutritional values are including milk, and in the case of this box of Apple Fritter cereal they have two columns, with and without a half cup of skim milk (yeah, as if I have any skim milk in my house). However, a lot of cereal packaging does not, which might confuse some people, especially if they’re expecting a big whack of protein. The other bit of misleading information that’s often included has to do with the presence of real fruit in fruit cereals. That can be trickier. I mean, this box says there are “no artificial flavours,” which didn’t make any sense to me. According to the ingredients listed there aren’t any apples in it so . . .

I guess it depends how you define artificial and natural. I take it these words have a technical or legal meaning, but I’m not sure what it is.

Since I always add fruit to my breakfast cereal and I sure wasn’t expecting anything healthy out of the box for a cereal based on apple fritters, this didn’t bother me. But what did was that comparing labels for different cereals is so hard. This is because they are all based on the nutritional values per one cup of cereal. But one cup is 32 grams of Apple Crisp, 43 grams of Honey Bunches of Oats, 55 grams of Shreddies, and a whopping 102 grams of Honey Nut Harvest Crunch (these are all drawn from what I have in my cereal cupboard currently). So if you want to compare them you have to get out a calculator.

I did my best with the math and was actually a bit surprised to see that Apple Fritter Cereal didn’t come off badly at all. Basically most of these cereals are pretty close in terms of sugar. Shreddies does better with fibre, which Apple Fritter Cereal has almost none of. But the bottom line is that this wasn’t as bad as I was expecting. A lot better for you than an actual Tim Hortons Apple Fritter. Donuts are deadly. With (skim) milk, a bowl of this cereal is 170 calories, with 2-3 grams of fat. An apple fritter donut at Tims is 330 calories with 11 grams of fat. Look, nobody thinks breakfast cereal is good for you. But compared to donuts or a muffin, it’s a lifesaving choice.

Review:

The flipside of this being not as devastating as I was expecting nutritionally is that the taste was quite disappointing. I thought I was going to be blown away by apple cinnamon flavour, but in this regard it doesn’t hold a candle to Apple Cinnamon Cheerios. In fact, I didn’t think there was much taste here at all. In shape and texture, the individual “fritters” closely resemble pieces of Cap’n Crunch, but that’s where the resemblance ends. Say what you want about Cap’n Crunch, but that cereal has zip. This was bland, and not in the least filling. I’m not hating on it or saying it’s inedible, but given that I have a list now of a half-dozen or so go-to breakfast cereals I can’t imagine I’ll try it again.

Price: $2.88 on sale.

Score: 4 / 10

Dangerous Dining

Campbell’s Chunky Spicy Chicken Noodle Soup

Overview: The Andy Warhol classic, updated for a twenty-first century palate. But would it be hot enough for me?

Label: I’ve always hated the Campbell’s Chunky Soup labels. Why? Because each can contains 515 mL (an amount that went down from 540 mL recently due to “shrinkflation”), but the labels give you the nutritional facts per 1 cup, or 250 mL. So you basically have to take all the information on the label and double it, because who ever eats half a tin of soup?

As for what’s in the tin, you probably know the score. Nothing that’s any good for you, and nearly 75% of your daily sodium in one bowl. It’s not good to get so much of your daily recommended dosages from one source, but when it comes to fast food and ready-to-eat meals you can always bank on the sodium being out of the park. As for the ingredients, “seasoned chili pepper” is given pride of place, with a tempting little pic of said peppers, but there’s a dagger after this (†) that notifies you that what they mean is seasoned chili pepper extract. And yes, it took me a while to find where it said “extract.” You’ll be hard pressed to read where it says that.

Review: I think it was Eric Schlosser’s classic Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal that first made me suspicious of soup in cans. Apparently there are chemical labs in New Jersey that design the taste and colour of all the different types. Because without colour being added this stuff is apparently just a grey sludge across the board. Hot dogs are the same way. They have to be dyed red to look like meat. If you see them being made they’re a sort of creamy beige paste. Not very appetizing, but as the saying goes, nobody wants to see the sausage being made.

I thought I’d give this particular flavour a try because it was “New!” I guess they needed to give the old stand-by some extra kick, because when do you eat regular chicken noodle soup anyway? Only when you’re sick. So perhaps the plan was to try to grow the market for it by spicing it up.

Unfortunately there’s not enough kick. It’s not very hot or spicy. In fact, I wouldn’t describe the taste as spicy at all. Instead, eating it only gave me a really unpleasant burning in the throat that I can’t explain. It doesn’t feel hot hot in your mouth, or even tasty in a spicy way. It’s just more like an acidic burn going down. I didn’t enjoy it at all, and it’s not very hearty either. So the chemists in New Jersey (or wherever) can colour me disappointed.

Price: $1.50 on sale.

Score: 4 / 10

Dangerous Dining

This is an index of some of the analyses I’ve done of the not very good, bad, and very bad food I’ve eaten over the years. Reviews of “real” food for non-foodies!

#1: McCain Thin Crust Canadian Pizza
#2: Healthy Choice Gourmet Steamers
#3: Subway Foot-long Cold Cut Sub
#4: Dr. Oetker Ristorante Pizza Vegetale
#5: Snickers Bar
#6: Farmer’s Market Morning Glory Muffins
#7: Bar Burrito Large Grilled Chicken Burrito
#8: Pizza Hut All-You-Can Eat Lunch Buffet
#9: Bellaberry Cherry Cheesecake
#10: Harvey’s Meal Deal
#11: Campbell’s Chunky Spicy Chicken Noodle Soup
#12: Tim Hortons Apple Fritter Cereal