Products and Services Vol.2: Nutella : Satan's Spread

There is a guilty pleasure that comes from eating store bought frosting out of the container. It is an American processed indulgence, much like buying a box of porn, or a 12” hot dog in Vegas. Eating frosting sans cake is so dark, and so wrong, it veers as close as any food can to sexual deviancy. Some Betty Crocker chocolate frosting, a plastic spoon, and a few hours of Guiding Light has long been an American remedy for cheating husbands, drug addled children, and bi-polar manias. A coworker once confided in me that his wife actually lives on a diet of store bought frosting, Crystal Light drink mix, and American Idol re-runs. If frosting as food product is so quintessentially American, why did it take Europe to invent the socially acceptable, yet deviant food product known as Nutella?

The devilish, Italian company, Ferraro, first thrust Nutella onto the shelves in 1949. There is no doubt that Satan must have had a job in R and D at Ferraro when these Italian scamps decided to market a peanut butter like spread made of 70% sugar and vegetable oils. Nutella also has skim milk, hazelnuts, and cocoa in its recipe, but these pointless ingredients only account for 28% of the product’s make up. Today, Nutella is produced world wide, and is often marketed as a substitute for the nutritionally superior, albeit boorish peanut butter. Nutella is no peanut butter. Nutella is frosting, if frosting were laced with crack and sprinkled with the tears of virgins. Describing a Nutella experience is like trying to describe a near death experience, or the first time you watched your friend’s mom take a shower through the hole you drilled in her bathroom wall. It’s evil, as evil as hazelnuts can be.

Last weekend I found myself horizontal on the floor of my sister’s kitchen dipping Teddy Grahams into a small glass jar of Nutella. Time ceased to exist, I didn’t know if I was gay or straight, and my world became singular, delicious and frightening. That night, I lost any semblance of self control, and as I blindly consumed the entire jar of this Italian satanic spread, I felt as American as apple pie.