Is your favorite food a viable dining option, or just an overrated clump of calories that's outlived its 15-minutes of food fame? Find out inside as we make our way through 11 of the most overrated foods, taking great care to ridicule inanimate objects, because someone's gotta do it.

Is your favorite food a viable dining option, or just an overrated clump of calories that's outlived its 15-minutes of food fame? Find out inside as we make our way through 11 of the most overrated foods, taking great care to ridicule inanimate objects, because someone's gotta do it.

1. Take-n-Bake Pizza

"Hey kids, want some pizza? Sound good? Great, I'll just swing by this store and pick one up. You getting hungry? Well, you're gonna have to wait, because this shit takes three hours to pick up, bring home, cook, and eat. Patience is a virtue!"

Take-n-Bake pizza is baffling to us. "I'd like some pizza … three hours from now," said no one ever.  Plus, Take-n-Bake pizza already exists. It's called DiGiorno. It's called Tombstone. It's called Bagel Bites, which you nuke in the microwave for near-instant pizza gratification when you're too high to cook an entire pizza by yourself.

Take-n-Bake is like the pizza equivalent of buying pants, but when you get to the pants store, there's just a bunch of fabric and underpaid Bangladeshi child-laborers. Overrated.

2. Peel-n-Eat Shrimp

What's with the peeling? Eat-shrimp already exists. Just go for the eat-shrimp.

There's no need to spend valuable minutes of your life maiming your dinner, especially when your dinner is as full of as many contradictions as peel-eat-shrimp: You season the outside shell, then remove the outside shell you just seasoned. You de-vein and dismember it to avoid consumping extraneous body parts, but the freshly discarded legs roll around on your plate, threatening to embed themselves in whatever you're eating and secretly make their way into your GI tract.

The hours of barbaric manual labor leave you with a flavorless mutant, which you douse in sauce to stomach the reality that you've just eviscerated your dinner with your bare hands. Overrated.

3. Bacon on things that aren't more bacon

Bacon, for some reason, has become a shining emblem of masculine humanity. The ultimate indulgent sin, the ultimate carnivorous-self assertion. If you don't like bacon it somehow implies some sort of impotence, as if a desire to top everything with it tells the world your sperm are strong and your eggs are easy. Bacon is not a barometer of vitality or staying true to homo sapien's desire for pig meat, you guys. Testosterone is.

On its own, bacon is a ubiquitous breakfast staple that we commend for its longevity and ability to soak up last night's booze in our bellies. But  putting bacon on brownies, cheesecake, doughnuts, or any other dessert-related item is more of a sad misuse of meat than an intelligent culinary move. Overrated. You're welcome, piggies.

4. Muffins

Muffins are like icebergs. There's the top, which is like the tip, and it's the part you see and think about. Then there's the hulking underwater demon that functions as the body, which is the part you never, ever want to come into contact with. What is this, the Titanic?

Any food that's universally known to have one good part and one really shitty part that you force yourself to eat because you just took a bunch of vitamins and need something to quell the seething pool of acid in your stomach is, you guessed it, overrated.

5. Artichoke

Never has there existed a vegetable that tried so hard not to get eaten. Most fruits and veggies offer themselves up to you, sacrifice-style, but the artichoke? It looks you in the face and says "fuck you, you're not eating me."

The artichoke presents such a mighty self-defense fortress around its heart  that you have to expend every calorie you have in your body to dismantle it for consumption. Good luck on living through the experience without  without getting stabbed by one of its bloodthirsty barbs, or dying by esophageal obstruction after a wanton heart-hair lodges itself in your throat. And the only thing that can tame the beast? Weeks of marinade in olive oil and some sort of acid until it loses its will to fight and softens up.

We think we should all just leave well-enough alone and submit to the artichoke, for they have won this battle. Overrated.

6. Cupcakes

Cupcakes are just an easy way out for people that can't handle the challenge of an actual cake. Between the six-inch heap of achingly sweet frosting and the dry, predictable cake that lurks underneath, cupcakes offer nothing of substance to the palate or stomach other than a conjuring up a faint memory of eating something like it at your fifth birthday party alongside a Capri Sun and an orange slice. Overrated.

7. Molten Lava Cake

It's like the Criss Angel of desserts: stupid.

It walks up to you all like, "Wanna see some magic?" but despite your adamant protest against the magic, it does the magic, spilling forth its chocolate lava filling as if it were pulling a rabbit out of a hat. Then, like Criss Angel waits for reluctant applause to fill the awkward silence, the chocolate lava cake waits for you to be impressed by its similarity to a dessert Pompeii, begging you to start begrudgingly dipping the dry chocolate in the wet chocolate while crying.

Too bad you've seen that trick 100 times. Also, you're probably at Chili's. Overrated.

8. Trail Mix

Eating trail mix is like an eternal Sophie's Choice of eating: You can eat what you like, but there's a catch. You must also eat something you hate. That's because, due to the long list of ingredients in trail mix, its almost statistically certain that there will be something in there you don't like, lurking among the things you do.

But whether it's the peanuts, raisins, or white-chocolate chips that shit all over your tastebuds, you have dry your tears and swallow your pain eat it. Why?  Because if you're eating trail mix, you probably got lost hiking in the woods and the protein from the snack-shaped abomination is the only thing that's keeping you from murdering a weasel for dinner. Overrated.

9. Popcorn

Popcorn exists just to hurt you. Whether it's burning your hand, popping your eye out with a wayward kernel, slicing up your gums, or getting stuck in your teeth leading to a near-incurable case of gingivitis, popcorn has a thirst for blood. Your blood, to be exact.

It also has nearly no nutritional value, and is only made delicious after it drowns in a torrential downpour of movie-theater butter, caramel, or seasoning. Overrated.

10. Sushi

Before you start trying to punch us through the computer, hear us out. We're not saying sushi is bad. It's great. It's healthy, takes a lot of skill to perfect, and has the added bonus of getting rid of all that extra cash-weight in your wallet so you can become more aerodynamic.

But, it receives an extraordinary amount of unnecessary praise. Years of sushi being associated with the wealthy has yuppified it, shifting its traditional function as a cheap street food to that of which something only a person who owns a Siberian tiger as a pet can afford. Which is morally problematic, considering sushi ingredients are, for the most part, incredibly cheap. Cucumbers? Rice? Seaweed? Avocado? Sure, high quality fish is expensive, but most sushi places don't give a fuck about high quality fish, and that's why you end up shitting for days after you eat it. Actual sushi? Pretty good. Its reputation? Grossly overrated.

11. Caeser Salad

The WalMart of salads. The Starbucks of greens. The basic bitch of the vegetable world. Yes, we've come down to the last overrated food on our list. It's the Caeser salad, and you'll find it on every menu that ever existed.

If Caeser salad were a dog, it would be a golden retriever. If it were a car, it would be a Corolla. If it were a person, it would be Secretary of State John Kerry: bland and sexless.

There are so many things you can do with salad, so many creative and healthy ingredients you can throw in there, that the romaine and mayo-based dressing just isn't cutting it for us. Yeah it's a staple, but it's a staple in the same way that sweatpants are a staple of people who've given up and eat cereal out of a frisbee. It's overrated not because its bad, but because we just thought of about 10 really boring things to compare it to without batting an eyelash. In the land of overrated food, the Caeser salad is literally the Caeser.

 

What did we miss? Let us know if we missed your favorite overrated food, and we'll add it to the list.