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Stuff Your Face With These Weird Food Combinations
Contrary to what your parents told you when you were young, food is meant to be played with! Where would we be if we hadn’t discovered the incredible taste combination we received when we mixed chocolate and peanut butter together? Or when we realized sea salt and caramel could be blended with coffee to create a delicious, salty-sweet treat? Below are eight weird food combinations you may never have tried but that, according to those who swear by them, actually taste amazing!
1. Hot Chocolate and Cheese
It’s hard to imagine two foods more people love, but chocolate and cheese together?! Now that sounds weird. However, in Columbia, hot chocolate with cheese is a tradition and a delicacy that people in North America are only just starting to discover. The cheese used is called “queso compasigna,” meaning rustic cheese. The best translation you can find in US grocery stores would probably be a mild mozzarella or halloumi. Cook up a batch of hot chocolate and then add a cube of cheese on top. When it melts, you’ve got heaven in a cup.
2. Avocado and Chocolate
The concept of mixing these two disparate-seeming ingredients comes from the popularity of both and the ability to use avocado to make an otherwise decadent dessert-like chocolate mousse-into something considerably healthy. People absolutely love this combination, which often requires mixing equal parts of both ingredients together. The two flavors smooth and complement one another, rather than fighting for dominance as one would think.
3. Cheetos and Milk
What is slowly becoming a new-but somehow deeply disturbing-option for after-school meals is a combination of Cheetos and milk. Now, one can conceivably imagine eating Cheetos with milk, but many people are actually starting to enjoy the option of Cheetos in milk, like a cereal. This also led to the concept of Cheetos milk, which is the milk left over after the Cheetos are eaten. A Filipino website, Pepper, even offers a recipe one can make with the concoction: Cheetos milk fudge truffles.
4. Pickles and Ice Cream… or Bourbon… or Peanut Butter
Pickle-lovers are always trying to mix these tangy treats with everything under the sun, which may be why most of the weirdest food combinations have pickles in them. There are also dozens of pickle-flavored foods, such as chips, candies, even vodka! But why do people crave pickles to the point where they try to add them to every other food? It could be because your desire for pickles is actually an act of self-preservation: pickles are extremely acidic, which can help stomach issues and minimize bloating, and they have lots of sodium, which can help the body absorb water when dehydrated.
5. Peanut Butter and Hamburgers
Many people love putting condiments on their hamburgers-ketchup, mayo, mustard, sometimes all three! But have you ever thought of slathering a burger with melted peanut butter? The Wheel Inn restaurant located in Sedalia, Missouri, which first opened its doors in 1947, offered the Guberburger, which included a beef patty, lettuce, mayo, tomato, and peanut butter. Unfortunately, the Wheel Inn is now closed. Still, the idea of the Guberburger lives on, and you can find recipes for this savory meal online.
6. Cheddar Cheese and Apple Pie
If you’re from the South, you may balk at the idea, but Northerners prefer a slice of cheddar cheese melting on top of their apple pies. According to Southern Living, this practice could date back as far as Medieval times and was perhaps carried over from Europe to the US, eventually connecting the so-named dairy country (the Midwest) with the apple country (New England).
7. Coca Cola and Red Wine
What may sound unfathomable to Americans is the combination cocktail that has become a huge part of the indigenous Basque culture in Europe. There’s even a name for it: Kalimotxo. The legend goes that the cocktail was invented when servers at the 1972 Basque festival Puerto Viejo realized their wine had gone bad, so they mixed it with Coke to hide the taste. Now, people enjoy the drink all throughout Basque country-with lots of ice, of course.
8. Peanut Butter and Onion
Perhaps the truest test of can-you-handle-this-food-combo is the peanut butter and onion sandwich. Most people state that sweet onions should be used, as they are less abrasive than the tangier varieties. It’s unclear where this sandwich originated, but during the Great Depression, the Bureau of Home Economics reportedly created a recipe for peanut butter stuffed onions. This amounted to baking an onion and then spooning peanut butter into its crevices. If you’re looking for a reason to try it, Hemingway apparently loved this combo.
So, before consider yourself a daring eater, maybe try out a few of the above and let us know what you think. →
From Globe, For Globe - Pulse of the Planet
Banksy’s never been unmasked, but he keeps his agenda front and center.
In 2010, the artist and provocateur known as Banksy became one of Time magazine’s top 100 most influential people. In the process, he joined the ranks of Lady Gaga, Steve Jobs, and Barack Obama. Yet, unlike these individuals, Banksy’s real identity has never been revealed. How did he get around the portrait Time Magazine asked him for? By appearing with a paper bag over his head.
Despite the refusal to self-identify, Banksy’s art has skyrocketed in popularity over the years. Never one to shy away from visual shock and awe, the graffiti-artist-turned-master continues to meld activism with art in brilliant and controversial ways. Keep reading for the incredible true (as far as we know) story of one of the West’s most essential and influential visual artists.
From City Walls to Canvasses and More
Banksy has elicited just about every response you can imagine since his graffiti art beginnings in the 1990s. “Debuting” in Bristol, England, Banksy spray-painted city walls, an illegal outcry against injustices of every sort. But the decades have brought a surprising evolution from an urban street artist to an established visionary whose canvasses sell for millions at auction houses worldwide.
Over the years, the anonymous spray painter has traveled extensively, leaving his mark from Detroit to San Francisco, Barcelona to Paris and Jerusalem. Besides moving from walls to canvasses, Banksy has also dabbled in other media, including conceptual art, and his 2010 film Exit Through the Gift Shop received an Academy Award nomination.
Humble Beginnings to International Fame
Banksy’s career began in the Barton Hill district of Bristol, where he signed his work as Robin Banx. He tried several handles before settling on Banksy, which proved easier to spray-paint on a wall. Apart from deciding on a public identity, the artist also dove headlong into using stencils, which would come to define his unique style.
The switch from freehand to stencils began with a practical impetus. After Banksy and his friends came within inches of capture by cops, he knew he needed to tighten up his artistic process. Stencils proved a natural answer. Moreover, they came ripe with meaning. Banksy once explained, “As soon as I cut my first stencil, I could feel the power there. I also like the political edge. All graffiti is low-level dissent, but stencils have an extra history. They’ve been used to start revolutions and to stop wars.”
Garnering Public Attention
What sets Banksy apart from other activist artists around the world? His whimsical and pacifist approach to dissent. He juxtaposes images of street-fighting protesters with flowers. But perhaps the visual concepts that have brought him the greatest fame involve children.
In 2005, Banksy traveled to Israel, where he stenciled children’s images on the concrete walls of the West Bank. The most notable featured a young girl holding balloons. But he also painted a boy with a ladder and two children with a spade and bucket. The theme of escapism permeated each work, heightening the political tension of the location - a wall constructed to prevent suicide bombings.
Raking in the Millions
The creative momentum didn’t stop there. Exploring the revolutionary juxtaposition of artistic masterpieces with elements of urbanity, Banksy created nods to Claude Monet and Edward Hopper, complete with window-smashing street criminals, shopping carts, and trash.
Some critics hailed these works, exhibited collectively as “Crude Oils,” as genius. Others disparaged them as vandalization of some of Western Civilization’s most sacred masterpieces. But almost everyone in attendance agreed that the 164 live rats running around the room went over the top.
No matter what critics had to say, the broader public latched onto Banksy’s work in a big way. A later exhibition in Los Angeles entitled “Barely Legal” attracted 300,000 visitors, including Brad Pitt. And his aforementioned 2005 painting Show Me the Monet, interpreted as a desecration of its Impressionist creator, raked in an incredible $9.92 million at auction in 2020!
Bringing Attention to Familiar but Overlooked Problems
Despite his rise to fame, Banksy has never changed his tune about staying anonymous. And the same goes for how he uses art to draw attention to societal problems that are an ignored part of daily existence. Not surprisingly, his performance art continues to spark controversy.
In Los Angeles, he exhibited a live elephant covered in scarlet paint and fleur-de-lis–inspired designs. Animal rights activists protested, demanding the paint be immediately removed from the pachyderm. Banksy used the confrontation to draw attention to one of the city’s most pressing problems - poverty - declaring it the “elephant in the room.”
He wouldn’t stop there. In 2008, he participated in the most successful charity art auction in history, helping to raise $42.5 million to support AIDS programs on the African continent. Work that sold at the auction included A Vandalized Phone Booth for $605,000 and Ruined Landscape for $385,000.
The Artist Known as Banksy
Over time, anonymity has become a springboard, too. As Banksy’s whimsical and revolutionary work appeared in more places, the art world took notice, comparing his pieces to Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. But unlike Haring and Basquiat, Banksy has managed to maintain the mystery surrounding his identity.
At least some of his biggest fans feel just as passionate about the artist’s anonymity. Over the years, they’ve slammed numerous attempts to unmask him. As a result, we may never know the true identity of this pop culture icon.
Of course, this raises many questions. Like, how do art collectors know when they’ve bid on and won an authentic Banksy masterpiece? Practical considerations require entrepreneurial flair, but that doesn’t mean Banksy can’t inject a little whimsy into things. As a result, he created the aptly titled Pest Control, an organization that handles the business side of his artwork.
The Ever-Irreverent Artist
The irony of Banksy’s acceptance by the mainstream hasn’t escaped him. He accepts it for what it is, noting, “I love the way capitalism finds a place - even for its enemies. It’s definitely boom time in the discontent industry.” But, of course, that doesn’t mean he has taken the commodification of his creative vision in stride.
In one of the most shocking moments from his career, the street artist’s Balloon Girl sold at auction in 2018 for $1.37 million. Containing one of his most recognized themes, the auction winner barely had a moment to congratulate herself before the frame of the painting sounded an alarm, and the canvas passed through a shredder built into the frame.
The shredding of Balloon Girl reasserted Banksy’s ambivalent relationship with the art world and those who collect his paintings. It also reminded the world of his cynical 2007 posting of an art auction online with the wording: “I can’t believe you morons actually buy this s-.” Despite the celebrity he now enjoys, Banksy remains committed to anonymity and activism through art, holding nothing sacred as he unflinchingly underscores the world’s most significant social issues and injustices.
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