p l e a s i n g p r o d u c t s -- C h O c O b A n A n A s

i have a very active sweet tooth and lately it can't get enough of the lovely, tasty casali choco bananas. i bought them once at a local A & P, then whoosh, they took away the foreign items mini aisle. so i obsessively searched the internet and found no line deli, a wonderful site to buy foreign tasty treats, including my austrian "schokobananen."

while i love the combination of chocolate and real chiquita banana bits (!!), especially when kept in the freezer, creating a sort of frozen banana a la the bluths of arrested development (see george michael, hel-loh "annyong" and maeby working at the stand), but what really gets me obsessed is the packaging... bright colors to inspire the tropicality of it all, the matching blue label of the chiquita banana, reminding you of the healthy aspect-- real bits of banana inside-- and the perfectly compact & aligned rows of candy awaiting you as you tear open the side strip.

i wondered why the packaging intrigued me as much or more than the product itself, and then i remembered beer frame, one of my favorite zines from the nineties. this zine, created by paul lukas, was a journal of inconspicuous consumption where he reviewed products by "deconstructing the details of consumer culture -- details that are either so weird or obscure that we'd never see them, or so ubiquitous that we've essentially stopped seeing them. this can mean anything from a bizarre canned good, like sauerkraut juice, to a beautifully designed light-industrial object that we've always taken for granted, like the Brannock Device (that gizmo they use to measure your shoe size)."

check out this link for an interview with paul and access his past columns (this month's review-- heinz' green ketchup).

UPDATE: score!!! i just found the 12 pack schokobananen in the garden of eden on washington street (thanks to a tip from our ex-mola cafe favorite barista, eli) and two other flavors -- orange and strawberry... let's just say i bought a few to stock in the freezer...