Today, we’re looking at Cheetos Crunchy Wild White Cheddar Snacks.  I like that they just call them “snacks” on the bag, because I was wondering what exactly to call them.  Chips?  Weird lumpy corn sticks?  No.  Snacks.  Cheetos is the Herb and Jamaal of the snack world.  Approximately one person reading this will understand that joke.

Cheetos are famous, of course, for being the favored snack of video game-playing nerds living in their mothers’ basements.  I don’t know how or why this happened, but it’s true.  Cheetos doesn’t really fuck around with flavors; there’s the classic orange, Flamin’ Hot, and a couple of other ones that nobody’s heard of or cares about.  Unlike Doritos, who releases a new flavor every two days, the original Cheetos are immediately what you’ll think of when you hear the name.  Cheetos.  Orange dust-covered fingers.  Nerds.

But now there’s Wild White Cheddar, which, according to Frito-Lay’s official press release, has existed before.  I had never heard of them before, but Frito-Lay says it was a “popular flavor”, so I guess I’m just an asshole who hasn’t been paying attention.  It’s also available for a limited time only, starting in late January and ending mid-February.  That is, indeed, a very limited time.  Kind of makes you wonder why they’re releasing them at all.  Hardly seems worth the effort.  I guess they’re banking on tools like me, who will buy any junk food that has a limited run.  I can’t imagine there are that many of us out there.

I’m not entirely sure what makes this flavor so “wild”, but hey, I’m all for alliteration.  Chester does seem pretty damn enthusiastic about putting that Cheeto in his mouth, even though it actually seems larger than his already enormous mouth.  Actually, if you look closely, it looks like we’ve caught Chester in the act of tripping over a Wild White Cheddar Cheeto laying on the ground.  Maybe he’s reaching out desperately towards the Cheeto, trying to grab onto it in the hopes that it will stop his fall.  That Cheeto cannot help you, my friend.  Your face has a date with the floor.  Maybe he’ll get lucky and land on that wedge of white cheddar down there.  I could think of worse surfaces on which to perform a faceplant.

Flipside gettin’ crazy with the fonts, yo.  It’s a little hard to read from the picture, so let me help you out:
CAUTION!
These CHEETOS snacks are DANGEROUSLY CHEESY
So if you need to keep your hands clean, don’t even THINK about opening this bag!
BUT…
if you’re willing to get some
WHITE
CHEESY
DELICIOUSNESS
all over your fingers, open up

AND ENJOY!

I can’t tell if they’re trying to entice me to eat the snacks or terrify me into running out of the chip aisle of my local grocery store, blathering incoherently about my hands being unclean, so unclean.  People with OCD, Wild White Cheddar Cheetos are not for you.  But you’ve probably already figured that out.

I’m also not very comfortable with the sentence “If you’re willing to get some WHITE CHEESY DELICIOUSNESS all over your fingers, open up and ENJOY!”  Think, Cheetos marketing team.  Just…just take a few moments in the meeting and think about the words that you are putting together to form a sentence.

Not much of a cheesy smell present when you open the bag.  What comes through more is the smell of corn meal, which is what Cheetos are made of.  It’s kind of weird to see Cheetos not dressed up in their signature neon orange powder.  The white cheddar powder is barely visible on the light yellow Cheeto, causing them to look naked.  I’m sorry you have to suffer this indignity, Cheetos.

The cheese taste in Wild White Cheddar Cheetos is much more subtle than it is in original Cheetos, and it’s also less tangy.  The snacks taste mostly like that generic artificial cheese flavor that you’d find on other foods, with just a hint of what could pass for white cheddar.  They’re not bad, but they’re not exactly exciting.  The more understated flavor of Wild White Cheddar means that more of the corn meal taste of the Cheeto comes through, which could be a good thing or a bad thing, I guess.  For me personally, it’s a negative.  Ninety percent of the time, when I’m eating a snack food, I consider the chip (or “snack”) to be nothing more than the delivery vessel for the flavor powder, and if it’s a naked chip, it belongs in a dip.  Maybe that makes me a jerk, I dunno.  That’s just the way I feel.

Cheetos Crunchy Wild White Cheddar Snacks are boring.  There, I said it.  If I had a serious hankering for a cheese-flavored snack and these were the only things available, yeah, I’d eat them.  Like I said, they’re not bad, they’re just old news in the flavor department.  Despite supposedly being white cheddar, they end up tasting like just another artificially cheese-flavored product.  On the plus side, the white powder won’t stain your fingers like original Cheetos (or especially Flamin’ Hots) will, so you don’t have to hide the secret shame that you’ve recently been shoving Cheetos down your maw.

According to Frito-Lay, these snacks are only going to be available for a couple more weeks.  So if you have a burning desire to see for yourself what mediocrity can taste like, you better move fast.

• Score: 2 out of 5 teeth knocked out of Chester’s mouth after his fall
• Price: $2.99
• Size: 8 oz. bag
• Purchased at: Fry’s Foods
• Nutritional Quirks: White cheesy deliciousness all over your fingers.  That doesn’t really have anything to do with nutrition, I just wanted to type it again.