The following food tourney was made possible by Safeway and Clarence Birdseye, who developed the quick-freezing process of food preservation in the early 20th century.

Contestants:
Banquet, Beef Enchilada and Tamale Combo Meal
Discover Cuisine, Chipotle Chicken with Mexican Style Rice
Stouffer’s, Steak Fajita Flatbread
Hungry-Man, Chicken Burrito

Last Place – Banquet (8%)

Though priced right (one dollar), Banquet really drops the ball on their Beef and Tamale combo. In fact, they maybe never had the ball in the first place. Inside of the seedy black plastic tray is a bunch of slimy, nauseating stuff that nobody really has any business eating. The tamale and enchilada were, literally, impossible to discern; they both could have been sculpted from day-old barf. The beans, colored of dead and battered flesh, slip between fork prongs before you get anywhere near your mouth.

If you are going to a grocery store and buying this kind of thing intentionally to eat for dinner, then you have abysmal taste in food. If you are buying a bunch of ‘em for your family, then God help you. Eating sculpted barf sucks at any price point.

Third Place – Hungry-Man (12%)

Engineered for the microwave dinner eaters that weren’t quite fulfilled by the regular “sissy” microwave dinners, Hungry-Man promises to, at the very least, fill you up. Which is exactly what their Chicken Burrito dinner – weighing in a 1lb – is supposed to do. But immediately upon peeling the plastic off the tray, it becomes strikingly apparent that this full pound of food is not going inside of anybody. There is a strange tangy sweet scent that emanates from the small cup of Cocada Pudding that is not dissimilar to the small of 7-11 nachos. The beans, once again, are more of a foreshadowing to what the next bathroom visit probably has in store. And the burrito, stringy mushy, cuts like a dull plastic knife through the wretched odor of Pudd’nhead Cocada.

Second Place – Discover Cuisine (45%)

After recovering from my initial shock (this line of food, surprisingly, shares no relation to the cabel channel of the same name) Discover Cuisine’s Chicken and Rice dinner delivered a palatable, confusing meal. Sporting perhaps the most misleading pictures on the box (favorite touch: the cute piece of cilantro placed on the seemingly barbecued chunks of chicken), the dinner amounted to basically a passable pile of rice topped with chicken and soaked in tangy barbecue sauce. Now the box promised a jalapeño sauce, but ten bucks says they just used the same vats of bubbling red liquid that they pump into their other non-Mexican dishes. A bit offsetting, but not a deal-breaker by any means. The meal is sold finally on the crispy heartiness of the black beans in the rice.

First Place – Stouffer’s (55%)

This steak fajita flatbread, coming from Stouffer’s “Corner Bistro” line of foods, and tasting exactly like microwavable pizza, was a Frankenstein creation of tasty proportions. This is the kind of multi-genre zappable appetizer that you can really hang your hat on. Four square pieces of spongy cheese covered bread, sprinkled with pea-sized bits of pepper and steak, the dish contained a strange confidence that the other three competing meals lacked. It was alright being Goldfish-colored Mexican-flavored pizza and I was okay with that too.