Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Ever wonder whether the nutritional labels on your food are telling the truth? Wonder no more: For just $800, you can order “Typical Diet,” two six-ounce bottles of a freeze-dried blend of four days’ worth of all your daily recommended fat, protein, calories, vitamins, and minerals, prepared by the US government’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
Nutritious and delicious? Maybe not. I’m not sure anyone has ever tasted this concoction (and in fact NIST warns it’s not for human consumption”). It’s used as a standard against which food manufacturers test the nutritional content of their products. The Guardian points out that fans of Typical Diet might want to check out NIST’s other fine food products, which include baby food composite, meat, and a standard issue fish from Lake Superior, methylmercury and all. But the fun doesn’t stop there:
Nist offers many kinds of useful and, to the connoisseur, delightful Standard Reference Materials. Its catalogue runs to 145 pages.
Prospective purchasers can peruse page after page of bodily fluids and glops, among them bilirubin, cholesterol and ascorbic acid in frozen human serum. There are other speciality products in dizzying variety: toxic metals in bovine blood, naval brass, domestic sludge and plutonium-242 solution, to name four.
Prices are mostly in the $300-$500 range. There are bargains to be had, including an item called “multi drugs of abuse in urine”, on offer at three bottles for $372.
Good news for all you 2012ers out there: Typical Diet doesn’t expire till 2016, so you can start stocking up now.
