Strange Snacks of the World -- Doubleheader!

Today's SSW is a doubleheader. The first snack we found at a 7 Eleven somewhere downtown--we hesitate to reveal the exact location, since we want to keep this snack all to ourselves. (No, just kidding! This thing sucks.) While buying various Christmas Peeps for stocking stuffing we stumbled on a plastic wrapped piece of poundcake, a treat we can not easily pass up. A label hastily (and crookedly) pasted on the cellophane wrapper indicated that this was not any random poundcake, but a 7-Up poundcake. Is it flavored with 7-Up, we wondered.

Once we'd wrestled with the wrapper, and munched a corner of the slice, we realized that there was no 7-Up flavor. It was just your standard, oversweet, fat-laced pastry treat. An examination of the ingredients label confirmed this. On the 36-item ingredient list, there is no 7-Up. Which is good, as far as we're concerned, because we hate the taste of 7-Up. But the question lingers: Why would 7-Up want to brand this emphatically generic and characterless snack product? 

Luckily, Snack #2 is much more distinguished. It's a bag of chips, a little pricey at $3.99, which we buy whenever we stumble across it in a Southeast Asian store, most recently at a banh mi parlor in Sunset Park and a Cambodian bodega in Fordham, the Bronx. The chips are called Trai Cay Say, and the 7 ounce bag contains oodles of fried fruit chips, including jack fruit, sweet potato, taro, banana, and pineapple. The chips are crisp and delicious, with no trace of greasiness, and no saltiness. The only ingredients besides fruit are corn oil and sulfite. Could it be these toothsome chips are actually "healthy"? We hope so, because we intend to continue eating them.