Three Inanely Easy Ways to Upset a Gourmand

1. Offer the victim Donut Pie. Yeah, the one that begins with a couple dozen glazed donut holes and devolves into an orgy of butter, eggs, sugar, cinnamon, sprinkles, and drizzled icing. Forgetting the 1100 empty calories per slice, I’ll torpedo this creation on “flavor crimes against humanity” charges. What happened to Key lime, rhubarb, and similarly unobtrusive flavor profiles? They obviously don’t have the pizzazz our nation of health dunces craves.

2. Offer the gourmand an omelet à la Effron, made of pigeon eggs and earthworms. While Running Wild host Bear Grylls has made an art of drinking one’s own urine, there is a limit even to a masochistic survivalist’s capacity for gastronomic discomfiture. Save the stomach-churning recipe for someone without the wiles to know that those imbibed earthworms will replicate in the stomach and birth aliens. As any fourth-grade How to Eat Fried Worms reader knows, nightcrawlers are the way to go.

3. Order the Taco Bell Doritos Locos Taco Supreme. Okay Taco Bell, not only did you spit on the humble taco with your reduced-fat sour cream and seasoned mystery meat concoction, but you wrapped the thing in an oversized Dorito.

You have drowned out whatever earthy, pseudo Mexican flavor a 10-year-shelf-life crunchy tortilla has and replaced it with copious amounts of salt, emulsifier, red 40, blue 1, yellow 5, and disodium insinuate. Bottom line: any dish that leaves a flourescent glow on your fingers—and on which a squeeze of lime detracts from the explosion of lab-formulated flavors—corrodes the palate and the soul, and must go.

Photos: DOMESTIC REBEL, TACO BELL