Welcome to Corner Store Food Critic, where we select an item typically found at any number of corner stores in San Francisco, bring said item home in a carefully wrapped bag, and then taste it in private. Seeing as how that, in a pinch, many of us eat entire meals bought solely at barely-lit corner markets and liquor stores, we now see it as our duty to examine the crud you shove down your throat during moments of drunken weakness or sheer hunger/laziness. That tin of deviled ham? Hellacious-looking Rockstar derivative? Bizarre Skittles flavor concoction? New Hot Pocket flavor? Those bottles of viscous water with chunks of aloe plant floating inside? We'll cover that and more. In this edition, we get our paws on Yorkie, a sexist chocolate bar.
There's a special place in heaven for local corner store owners who stock a wide variety of Cadbury, Kinder, and European-y Nestlé candies. Such treats they are when compared to the Snickers and Skittles and Milky Ways littering store shelves. We always stock up when we stumble into a store selling the comparatively rare candies.
During a recent visit to a liquor store on 19th Avenue and Noriega -- we're in the Outer Sunset each Saturday due to our semi-regular morning Saturday jog from SFsit HQ in SOMA to Quan Ngon for pho and imperial rolls, not that you asked -- the Cadbury's Yorkie screamed out to us as we waited in line at the cash register.
The tagline? "Yorkie -- it's not for girls!"
We had to buy it, obviously. No girls allowed? Sign us up. But... why, exactly, wasn't it for girls, we wondered. Will the Yorkie bar add shine and luster to our penis? Does it gently exfoliate the Y chromosome? Would it shave years off our adam's apple? We had to know.
After tearing it open and inhaling it in seconds, it's pretty much your basic milk chocolate bar perforated into six segments. The way most average chocolate bars land on the tongue, it's fairly tasty yet chalky. Unmemorable too. According to Wikipedia, the bar was created in 1976 by Eric Nicoli who "spotted a gap in the confectionery market and used the cheap cocoa from Rowntree's favourable futures market position to launch Yorkie." (Think of it as the grappa of Cadbury chocolates, if you will.)
Avert your eyes, ladies. Here's what the Yorkie looks like inside:
We still couldn't figure out why it's cheekily marketed towards dudes and not dames. But, as Wikipedia goes on to explain, the bar's anti-female sentiment ruffled some crinolines in 2001.
In 2001, the advertisement campaign made this more explicit with the slogan and wrapper tagline It's not for girls, which caused controversy. Nestlé also received complaints about this campaign from Norwegian and UK people who found it sexist and distasteful. Special versions for use in Ministry of Defence ration packs read It's not for civvies.
Could be worse, though. Much worse. Food marketed towards women tends to be more offensive and harmful.
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