Grocery stores are saturated with food products. Food products are made to resemble real food, but aren’t real food. Every Friday I’ll feature one of these products.

Next week is St. Patrick’s Day, which means Irish stereotypes will abound… Guinness.  …Pots of gold.  …Potatoes.  …Bono. …  How could FPOW not participate? I thought.  So I went to my local HEB looking for some green-colored, bailey’s-flavored, shamrock-shaped concoction to share with everyone.  I went straight to the cereal aisle and came across a familiar friend:

Hah! Trisodium Phosphate!!  Boy, that has a lot of syllables!  And … fake marshmallows! Those are funny. Okay too obvious, I decided.  My search continued.

I scoured the store, but believe it or not I couldn’t find anything else St. Paddy’s related.  HEB’s seasonal section had given the Emerald Isle a miss, and jumped straight from Valentine’s Day to Easter.  Well, I figured, who was I to fight the tide?  If these are the food products, then these are what I must report.  And thus, ladies and gentlemen, I give you, the Easter candy aisle…

To honor the fact that Easter candy is dominating grocery store shelves two months before the holiday, this week’s FPOW is the Easter candy aisle itself.  But that’s only the beginning!  To really do the Easter candy craze justice, every week from now until Easter I will choose one food product from this aisle as my FPOW.  In the next six weeks you’ll see a marathon-running chocolate bunny, eggs which claim to come from distinctly mammalian creatures, and yellow number five contorted into every spring-related shape you can think of.  Stay tuned, and if you come across any Easter products in your shopping that you just have to share, be sure to email them to dissertationtodirt@gmail.com.

One final nod and an honorable mention to the Easter product that the kid who photo-bombed my shot literally climbed the shelf to grab about 30 seconds after I took the photo.  Personally, I think it should be the mascot for this Easter FPOW series: the Welch’s Fruit Snack toting dead-eyed Easter doll.  It will haunt your dreams.

Have a great weekend, everyone.  Happy SXSW to everyone in Austin!  This weekend, I’ll be attending the food blogger panels at TechMunch.  Hope to see some of my fellow foodies there!