We recently made a trip to Cincinnati, which is hardly my favorite city in Ohio, but it has a decent enough number of attractions to keep you occupied. Their children’s museum in the Cincinnati Museum Center, a refurbished old train terminal still decorated in the Art Deco style, is a treat, as is the Cincinnati Zoo.
But for me, the highlight of our trip was a visit to the enormous grocery store, Jungle Jim’s International Market. Billed as six acres of foodie paradise, Jungle Jim’s was just amazing. When our hostess explained that we were going to go see a really cool grocery store, you may imagine my skepticism. “Really cool grocery store” could be placed up there with “awesome appliance outlet” and “great rug sample supplier” for yawn inducing phrasing.
Let me just tell you how wrong I was.
About the size of a Super Wal-Mart, Jungle Jim’s greets you with a pond out front replete with scale size elephants spouting water and various other safari style animal models surrounding the grounds. Inside, every section is broken down by international, ethnic, or food group category, and each section is decorated to fit the bill. Thus, the BBQ section (which featured alphabetized shelves of hot sauces numbering in the hundreds and included a glass fronted top shelf of “adult themed” sauces such as “Blow Me” and “Dickhead”) was topped with a real, old fashioned fire truck above the aisle on a metal platform.
The England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales section included a layout of Nottingham Woods with animatronic Robin Hood. The Mexican section offered piñatas. Near the seafood area (where you could purchase live tilapi and other fish) life size great white and hammerhead sharks hung from the ceiling. The bathroom doors are designed to appear as the entrance to a port-a-potty.
As far as selection went, Jungle Jim’s is, in my experience, without peer. I’ve never seen that many brands, flavors, or styles of tofu in the entirety of my life if you added all tofu-related exposure up. It is a pleasure just to walk the aisles and remarking upon all the varietals of olive oil, balsamic vinegar, noodles of every nation, chocolate bars, and so on.
The only place I’ve seen to compare their beer and wine selection to was the Liquor Mart in Boulder, Colorado which is an alcoholic’s heaven.
But what caught my fancy specifically were the odd cola selections.
Now I’m a sucker for other countries candies, beverages, and other non-meat treats. One of my favorite things to do at unusual ethnic restaurants is to order something I’ve never had before, some combination platter of novelty or mysterious dish containing words I don’t know. The surprise is often the best part of it all. (For the record, if in Germany, stay away from weisswurst, a concoction that looks like nothing so much as a sun-bleached dog turd, with a taste one assumes must match.)
The first strange beverage I picked up was a disgusting looking can of what was unappealingly named “Grass Jelly Drink.” I carried it over to show the family and our hostess. All agreed that it looked distinctively nasty. But for fifty nine cents, how could I not purchase it? Plus, it would give me the added bonus of being able to display it on my desk at work to the disgusted interest of my coworkers.
And that’s where the idea came from. Being that I work with fun individuals, it occurred to me that here was a group I could compel to try all the beverages I found. I began to go through the rows and pick a distinctive sampling of what I could find. Then I would take it to work Monday morning and have an old fashioned, sit-down-around-the-table taste test with the other three people in my department.
Here’s what we discovered.


Pumped into the bottle for the Skeleteens/Eat Me Foods in LA, CA. Slip & slide into www.sekeleteens.com Found on bathroom wall 818.844.31_1.
Well, aren’t you all some edgy kids? Their website, by the way, doesn’t work, though Googling Skeleteens will bring you to amateur hour web design.
The cola on the other hand, packed full of stuff like kava-kava, guarana, lime oil, orange oil, clove, blends of ginseng, dill weed, echinacea, and so on. I worried with the addition of kava it would be unpalatable in the extreme, but instead it was rather pleasant, a little different of a flavor, but nothing nearly as shocking as the marketing would lead you to believe. Others have compared it to Jolt though it lacked the sincerely acrid sweetness of that legendary soda. Whether or not any of the various pick-me-up herbals included had any effect, I can’t vouch for, as it did little for me. A decent flavor, but again, nothing I’d buy with any regularity.


All in all, a successful venture, especially by the owners of Jungle Jim’s. If you hoped to entice me back to Cincinnati, I know of at least one place whose siren call will prove irresistible.
6 comments:
What, no Moxie? Truly an acquired taste, that.
Also, have you see the blog, "Steve, Don't Eat it"? It's classic and your coworkers will love it.
http://www.thesneeze.com/mt-archives/cat_steve_dont_eat_it.php
Thums Up has a special place in my heart, a one-time fighter of Western corporate imperialism that proudly affirmed we could give our kids diabetes too. Oh, and every bottle is scuffed to hell.
P.S. Interesting V.P. pick for Old Man River. Is the wife torn now?
I don't think wife is even a little bit torn. She recognizes the play for what it is: manipulative cynicism. She didn't support Clinton out of identity politics and there's no way Grandpa Simpson could win her vote.
I actually find it insulting that he would nominate a woman. Hillary voters are smart voters. We care about her politics. He thinks we only care about her vagina. It's totally demeaning.
Hillary is intelligent, independent, and experienced. She would have effected real change. What is important to women isn't just that a woman is in a leadership position. It's that a woman is in charge--in a meaningful and positive way. I don't want to be placated. I want to be empowered. It's not as if McCain will allow this woman the power and influence that Gore and Cheney had. Instead, she will be relegated to the more traditional vice-presidential role, her power and influence ranking somewhere just under that of his other First Lady. Had Hillary been tapped by Obama, which I'm not advocating here, she would have been a partner because she had the preparation and sense of self to serve in that way. Palin's politics and lack of experience are an insult to thinking, political women who are longing for a strong, intelligent, competent, and vibrant woman president. If McCain won the presidency and then died, our first woman president would be someone who is entirely unprepared to do the job and someone whose politics could move back advancements women have made since the 1970s. This is not a legacy feminists long to see. And a woman who does not execute the job of president well undermines the chance that this patriarchal society will ever take another risk on a woman president.
"Jim Palin, father of Todd Palin, displays a photo of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's beauty queen competition photo." Hmm... I wonder what Hillary was doing at this age.
I'm just getting angrier and angrier.
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