Tuesday, January 7, 2014

HOW THE BLACKSTONE GROUP IS DESTROYING SOCIETY AND RAPING MY CHILDHOOD

Any Star Wars geek worth his weight in salt will remember the sheer disappointment that came after George Lucas violated their eyeballs with the monstrosity known as the Phantom Menace. Now mind you, Lucas was always a hack who got really lucky with Star Wars because everything he has done before or after as a director was fair at best to downright awful. The three prequels to his Magnum Opus showed without a doubt he can't direct people to save his life, although his action sequences are thrilling. He can come up with great scenarios but his dialogue is moronic. In other words, Lucas should just produce and never direct or write a screenplay ever again. Thankfully, Disney has bought out the right and may actually make a decent sequel which is what he should have done in the first place as prequels generally suck and suck hard and his three certainly fit the profile there.

The exact opposite has happened with foods I have grown up with since childhood. Lately, I have noticed certain brands I used to absolutely love have devolved massively in quality. Wish Bone salad dressing tastes like watered down vinegar. Celeste pizza, once my favorite frozen pizza ever, would be better if I ate the box it came in rather than the terrible crap inside. Even Swanson and Hungry Man dinners are not very good lately. Turns out, all are now owned by Pinnacle Foods which in turn is owned by the Blackstone Group, the very same equity firm buying huge numbers of houses nationwide driving up the prices and skewering the data over house ownership as well as returning to the days of credit default swaps on said houses which is one of the prime reasons the whole economy collapsed in 2008. Awesome.

Yes, the exact same company which is singlehandedly destroying the country is the same one ruining once great names by making their food as inedible as possible. Here's a list of the products they are killing:

  • Armour (acquired from Dial Corporation)
  • Aunt Jemima Frozen Breakfast (name under license from Quaker Oats) frozen breakfast foods
  • Birds Eye
    • C&W
    • Comstock-Wilderness
    • Husman's
    • Nalley
    • Snyder of Berlin
    • Voila!
  • Celeste
  • Duncan Hines (acquired from Procter and Gamble in 1997)
  • Hungry-Man frozen TV dinners (acquired from Campbell Soup Company)
  • Lender's Bagels (acquired Kraft Foods in 1999)
  • Log Cabin Syrup (acquired from Kraft Foods)
  • Mrs. Butterworth's (acquired from Unilever)
  • Mrs. Paul's
  • Open Pit barbecue sauce
  • Swanson frozen TV dinners (acquired from Campbell Soup Company)
  • Tim's Cascade Snacks
  • Van de Kamp's
  • Vlasic
  • Wish-Bone (acquired from Unilever in 2013[5])

  • Every single one of these that I have eaten lately is worse than the prison food I ate at college or at Marriott's nationwide. That is not a misprint. The same company that supplies prisons with their food is the same that give food to the hotel chain and schools everywhere. The worst meals I have eaten are at Marriott's where food goes to die. During a business conference, my girlfriend and I were subjected to said meal which I warned her before hand might be the worst thing she would ever eat. She scoffed and said how bad could it be? To this day, we still talk about how nauseating it was. But this is par for the course, where people do whatever they can to save a buck, not caring that they are poisoning you in the process.


    Pinnacle foods certainly is as they have turned once great names in shells of the former self. Celeste pizza used to be delicious with a spicy sauce and real cheese. Now the cheese is imitation, the sauce non-existent and there are no less than 80 ingredients, most of which are chemicals. Yuck. My favorite is the "mozzarella cheese substitute" which makes me ask, what exactly is that because it sounds disgusting? Having eaten my last Celeste pizza recently, I would agree that it is disgusting and inedible at this point.

    Likewise goes for Hungry Man and Swanson dinners which were once great late night drunk food and are now better suited for the garbage bin. Their fried chicken dinner used to be one my favorites but now find the chicken to be containing far less meat, hardly a surprise from a company cutting corners wherever they can. The enchilada meal used to be surprisingly good and is now a sloppy mess best suited to eat when you are constipated and want to spend the day on the toilet.


    Even Vlassic pickles, my favorite once upon a time, are not nearly as crunchy as advertised. Hell, it even says so on the jar which is a blatant falsehood. Lender's bagels are more chewy than I remember. Van De Kamps I gave up on years ago as their breading tastes like it was dragged through a sewer. The only product at all that I can give any kind of positive recommendation to is the sugar free maple syrup under the Mrs. Butterworth label which is excellent. But give it time and I am sure they will mess that up to.

    The point of all this is that monopolies are becoming all too real and they are not doing good things as they never do. Airlines are getting more and more condensed leading to exactly the problems airports have seen over the last week with not enough flights or personnel to alleviate bad weather conditions. Media is controlled by five companies, giving us enough misinformation to choke a horse. And on a quick side note, if I see one more badly written article where English doesn't seem to matter, like I saw on Breitbart today (I know that is not exactly the site that would have good grammar but still) I am going to barf blood. The idiot who wrote a post today used awful grammar that my six year old nephew would have noticed. The fact that many of these sites don't pay their writers anything, and I literally mean nothing, speaks volumes over their content.


    We are rapidly losing everything we hold dear and our food is getting worse and more unhealthy by the second. And we are letting it happen. I am not buying anymore products from the Pinnacle group until they start feeding us real food and not "cheese substitute." Don't forget, Soylent Green is people.

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