Mexican Junk Food: Baby Foot

As we have mentioned in previous editions of !Lunes Sabroso!, a walk through the candy isle of a Mexican supermarket is both jaw-dropping and diabetes-inducing. The smell of raw sugar permeates the air, and it can become difficult to focus on one product, as all of the competing packaging cries out for your attention from the shelf.

Today’s Mexican food item, “Baby Foot,” still managed to capture my attention because it combines two of my favorite things: marshmallow-based candy and Suicide Food. (If you haven’t spent time exploring the notion of suicide food, say goodbye to the rest of the afternoon with this collection of promotional artwork where the food is delighted to be food. You’re welcome.) The package illustration of a baby with its foot in its mouth was enough to determine a sale.

I want to call your attention, also, to one more element of this product that is either hopelessly misguided, or brilliant. The packaging actually encourages you to collect the plastic bone that remains after you eat the candy, and, maybe, if you think of it, to string them together and wear them around your neck, like some kind of teenage Mexican cannibal. I want to note that I have not yet been lucky enough to see a teenager here with a collection of bones either around his neck or dangling from a backpack, so I am afraid this particular bit of marketing has not yet caught on.

So by now, it is clear why I purchased this Baby Foot, but the big question is, how does it taste?

The first thing you notice when biting into your Baby Foot is that it is much, much tougher and chewier than you would expect. Picture every marshmallow Peep you have ever eaten in your life, somehow compressed to 1000 times its normal density, by either a hydraulic press, or by Superman’s fist, as demonstrated in Superman III. Actually, did Superman crush the coal into a diamond, or did he use his x-ray vision to see that there was simply already a diamond hidden within an ordinary piece of coal? Also, can we agree that the scene where the SUPERCOMPUTER went crazy at the end, and the villains got sucked in and wrapped in wires, was absolutely terrifying as a child?

Look: I could talk about Superman III all day, and it would be way more interesting than talking about this lump of hardened, crystallized sugar, which is further dipped in even more sugar. It’s far too chewy, far too sickly-strawberry flavored, and I couldn’t even get through more than a couple of bites. The rest of the pink lump went right into the trash, and the fact that I didn’t save the bone for my Baby Foot Bone Collection Necklace means that this particular Mexican delicacy is a total failure.

Tagged as: mexican junk food

About the Author: Malcolm Bedell

My first memories of cooking start in Maine at six years old, when I wore a yellow rainslicker to avoid getting spattered by the bacon I was frying in a skillet. My interest in both Mexican cooking and recreating classic New England dishes from scratch developed while living in Mexico, on a steady diet of pork and habanero peppers. You can see more of my writing and photography online on Serious Eats, the Huffington Post, BlogHer, and Foodista, as well as in print for Downeast, Indulge, and Cigar Snob magazines.