Adventures in Eating: ?????

I thought I would do things a little differently this time.  I'm just going to give you a list of ingredients, and you get to guess the foodstuff.  Let's get started:


1.) Beef -- Good start so far.  It's probably not Oreos.
2.) Mechanically separated chicken.  Guess what.  It looks worse than it sounds.

3.) Corn syrup.  I just juked you right there, didn't I?  You thought I was gonna zig, but I zagged.
4.) Flavoring.  Yep, that's what the packaging says.  Is it grape favoring?  Or pumpkin spice flavoring?  Or mint flavoring?  I can't tell you.  You're on you're own.
5.) Soy protein concentrate. I think another term for that might be "filler".

I'm going to pause here to let you know that, according to the packaging, this food item contains less than 2% of the remaining ingredients.  For some of these ingredients this information is meant to provide some solace.  "Sure this food contains ant livers, but don't worry.  They make up less than 2% of the total product.  That's not so bad, is it?"


6.) Dextrose.  More sugar. Apparently the corn syrup wasn't enough.   Wait, aren't the corn syrup people busy telling us that sugar and corn syrup are the same thing?  Why do we need both in one product then?  Hmmm....
7.) Vinegar.  Probably to cut through the mechanically separated chicken.
8.) Paprika and paprika extracts.  So this food is super paprika-ey.
9.) Sodium tripolyphosphate.  Mmmmmm.  Yummy!
10.) Tabasco brand pepper sauce.  This ingredient is a bit of a distraction.  As it turns out, the label I'm taking this ingredient list from is a "Tabasco Spiced" variant of a classic processed food.  We should all just be relieved that there is Tabasco in this "Tabasco Spiced" product.  Hurrah!
11.) Hydrolyzed soy.  You can call it soy sauce.
12.) Corn and wheat proteins.  There's that filler again.  At least it's not wood pulp.
13.) Lactic acid starter culture.  I have no idea about this one, and frankly I'm a little worried.
14.) Sodium nitrite.  Eh.  It's a preservative.  We can live with that, right?
15.) Sodium hydroxide.  Also known as lye, and it's the main ingredient in Drano.  I'll just remind you about the fact that this ingredient comprises less than 2% of the food.  Feel better?

Okay, have you got a guess?  What if I told you that this tasty, though disturbing, food was also marketed in the 1980s with the help of the gravel-voiced WWF wrestler, Randy "The Macho Man" Savage?  That gives it away, doesn't it?  Snap into it!