While recently you were treated to a taste test of British candies—a celebration of the ways these quality chocolate goods can tap into the pleasure centers of taste and nostalgia—this exploration is of an entirely different sort. Irish junk food comes in many weird and marvelous forms. Generally put, these foods lack the decorum you'll find in their more conservative British competitors. Collected here are seven of the most appealing and startling of the snack follies past and present that grace the shelves of our convenience stores. Should you have the chance to visit the Emerald Isle, in this mix you'll find some guaranteed teeth-rotters to try and [...]

Willy Wonka was British, you know. It makes sense: we Brits have a sweet tooth, but it's been refined over the years. Not for us the sugary punch in the mouth of a Three Musketeers. Oh no. British snacks of the sweet kind are much more sedate. We’re all about texture. If American candy and cookies are like a Corvette roaring down a freeway at 100 miles per hour, British sweets are like a wonderful and infinitely varied fleet of bicycles. It's a complicated and convoluted world, British candy and cookies, but let's approach it in the form of a good old-fashioned taste test so you know, when you next [...]

Recently, I visited H-Mart, a Korean grocery store chain headquartered in New Jersey (that ‘H’ stands for “Han Ah Reum,” which means “arm full of groceries”). I went in for laver seaweed, fermented rice booze and doenjang paste. I left with nearly fifteen dollars’ worth of snack crackers, sweets and chips—eight shinily packaged, savory examples of Korea's contributions to the international junkfood industry. I’m not normally a chip eater. I didn’t grow up on Cheetos or Fritos, and I never cared much about Doritos one way or the other. But I do love a taste test, and all eight of these products were new to me. Findings: some of these [...]