Delicious Insensitivity

BLACK MELON-PAN: A snack Matt bought, with over 200% of your minimum daily requirement of what the eff.

A brief explanation. I'm the world's biggest fan of melon-pan. It's the greatest invention Japan gave the world, bar-none. It is made by baking a flaky pastry bread into a cookie shell, with melon flavoring and sugar. There are a few varieties, with different amounts of melon paste, or chocolate chips, or cream filling, or even orange marmalade. This "special new product," however, went that extra, casually racist mile.

For whatever reason, afros make a(n) hilarious addition to any anime/manga. It's the cornerstone of most of the humor in Yakitate! Japan (an otherwise wonderful show that substitutes bread baking for violence), it was brought to the States in the Samuel L. Jackson-voiced Afro Samurai, and now it's in some other show that's apparently doing product tie-ins with one of the big convenience store chains.

So, in order to make this melon-pan the main character's afro, they made the cookie shell Oreo-like, with brown food coloring underneath to get the pastry the right color, and chocolate cream filling, just in case you forgot what they were going for. As my black co-worker at the training I went to put it, "Aw, HELL no."

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