I’m buying groceries like every gentleman does, weaving around the shoe-dragging knuckleheads in my local Tesco Express as if I’m filming an escape scene from The Walking Dead when something catches my attention. Brightly packaged and placed directly in my eye line sat a row of Uncle Ben’s Rice Time pots; ‘Sweet & Sour’ the label read. I grabbed it ham-fistedly and snaked my way to the cashier whom I suspected was dead and had been propped up by broomsticks judging by the lack of any movement and the smell.

Upon my return home, I placed the little guy on my kitchen counter and briefly studied it before tearing it apart to peer at its innards. The package consisted of two plastic pots of sustenance which when combined will give you a delicious meal such as shown on their packaging. Expect no. See below.

I have a bowl the same, if not shallower than the one that grinning asshole Uncle Ben has yet my meal looked as if a cat had angrily shat it out. I heated up this soulless dish of distorted truths and cautiously proceeded (to, it transpires, a plane of hatred and anguish I never knew existed).
By this point, I was nearing death due to starvation and I do like a sweet and sour rice meal from time to time so I hacked into the rice as if I were mining a gold vein and glooped a glob of the neon sludge on top and went for it…

Had it not been my apartment, I would’ve hurled that bowl of undying sorrow through a window. After only two bites, my face went in on itself as if I had eaten a small black hole – everything about it ignited fuses of anger I never knew I had. Again, I had been woefully disappointed and deceived.

Chunks of pineapple sliced in size to easily pass through brick walls, the filmy skin of red peppers, and slivers of carrots were frozen in time within this thick, oil spill of a sauce that separated the vegetable and fruit bonanza-like row boats in the ocean. The rice was seemly replaced with little hate nuggets of warm plastic shavings, perfect for heating up and molding into slugs for a shotgun. The whole thing tasted how I imagine eating a deadly chemical factory tastes like; I even singled out each distressed ingredient to try and experience some kind of natural taste. My efforts were futile and my life has been shortened dramatically…if not by the horridness I ingested, then definitely by the time I have lost eating it.