There are few things as amazing as being in a supermarket at 2 AM.  I should clarify that by specifying that I am talking about your typical 24 hour supermarket.  These are the types of stores that when you go in the middle of the night, are very quiet and empty.  There are a few customers, some wandering in basically pajamas, coming in just to grab some forgotten essential.  Beyond them, there is pretty much no one in the store.  So if I happen to go there with a friend in the middle of the night, we are pretty much by ourselves, free to reenact Career Opportunities.  Ideally, that friend would be female.

Luckily, I do not live near any of those types of 24 hour supermarkets.  They can be useful, but they are a bit too bland.  Luckily, I live near a 24 hour supermarket where the environment is less similar to a supermarket, and more similar to Tijuana.  Luckily, I live near Pathmark.

Since this site, for some reason, is read by people around the country, I should explain Pathmark’s story.  As there are always a few exceptions to anything, I’m sure some Pathmarks that are actually very nice supermarkets.  That being said, the one near me is definitely not one of them.  I’m sure there is something like this near you.  Be it a Piggly Wiggly, a Kroger, or whatever the hell it is you non-New Yorkers shop at, there are rogue supermarkets everywhere.

Nobody expects a supermarket to be perfect.  All day long, brown boxes full of products ready to be placed on shelves sit in the middle of an aisle.  Normally, this happens in only a few aisles, and employees do their best to keep the boxes out of the customers’ way.  And, unfortunately, there aren’t always enough registers open to keep up with the crowd.

None of this applies to Pathmark.

First of all, any time after midnight, there will almost never be more than one cashier open.  Whether you have two items or a shopping cart full of them, you are waiting on the same line.  And don’t expect to have the shopping cart people let you go ahead of them if you only have a few things.  These are hardcore veterans, who know that if they let one person ahead of them, everyone behind them will want the same treatment.  Or they’re just jerks.

And forget about a few isolated boxes.  At night, the store turns into an Indiana Jones adventure.  Cardboard boxes are strewn everywhere; no aisle is safe.  It’s the most organized garage sale you will ever see.

Given all of that, every time I go to Pathmark late at night, I know something awesome is going to happen.  And by awesome, I mean terrifically unfortunate at the time, but funny in retrospect.  I had come home from a hockey game to discover that I had no milk; which, of course, won’t do.  So I decided to make the five mile round trip journey to Pathmark, unshowered and disgusting.  I figured it would be good camouflage; no one would bother me since they would see that I was one of them. 

Since I only planned on getting a couple things, I didn’t grab a cart or a basket.  Eventually, arms filled with items that I hadn’t planned on getting, I made my way to the register.  Of course someone with a full cart was ahead of me, in the midst of being checked out.  Somewhat unexpected was the fact that this person had neglected to bring any sort of payment.  What this meant was that each item the man had, an entire shopping cart, needed to be voided off, item by item.  This is no simple process, either.  This involves scanning the item, then entering a piece of paper in the register every time.  And of course, there was only one register available. 

Since I had plenty of time before I would be rung up again, and my arms were growing tired from holding my awkwardly stacked mountain of food, I decided to wander around.  It was then that I found this.

Frosty Paws, an ice cream for dogs.

I had actually purchased a box of these a long time ago, however they disappeared from my freezer.  So this time I put them in a Ziploc bag with “DO NOT EAT” written on it.  The fact that I have to write “do not eat” on a box of dog ice cream should speak volumes about the household that I live in, although that is beside the point.

The box describes it as a healthy replacement for ice cream. I am not a dog owner, so I am speaking with a bit of ignorance when I say this, but what the hell?  Why does a dog alternative to ice cream need to exist?  The box claims that dogs love Frosty Paws because it is cold, like real ice cream.  Again, my lack of dog knowledge might be showing, but I don’t think dogs like ice cream because it is cold.  I have a feeling it has to do more with the fact that it doesn’t taste like dog food.  A dog will eat a cold steak or a warm fruit salad; it doesn’t give a damn about temperature, just so long as it is a change of pace from dog food.

And apparently dairy is bad for dogs.  I knew cats were lactose intolerant, but I did not know that about dogs.  This is because I have grown up on the image of milk being enjoyed by cats and dogs alike.  You feed a kitten a saucer of milk, you give a dog a Milk Bone, so what’s going on?  Campbell’s doesn’t name a soup Cream of Arsenic, so why name a product Milk Bone when the intended recipient can’t even drink milk?

The whole thing with dairy being bad for dogs is just strange.  Even stranger is when I looked up Frosty Paws on Google.  I got a bunch of sites with a “home made” recipe for it, and almost all of them invariably included vanilla yogurt as the main ingredient.  Huh?  One site listed the ingredients as honey, chicken broth, raisins, and peanut butter.  Gross, yes, but at least that fits into the whole “dairy is bad” scheme. Although the site I got it from was written from the dog’s perspective, so I don’t know if I can trust a dog’s knowledge of the recipe.

Talking about the concept of Frosty Paws is one thing, but I had to know how they tasted.  Stupid and disgusting, yes; but I knew avoiding it would compromise my journalistic integrity.  So I sat down with a cup of it, favorite ice cream spoon in hand.  Yes, I have a favorite ice cream spoon.

The thought entered my mind that it would be just as easy to throw some of it out, and take a picture of an empty cup, without ever having actually eaten it.  But no, I had to.  I had to know as much for my sake as yours. 

Opening the cup, I had only one hope: that it doesn’t taste like dog food.  I’ve never actually eaten dog food, but the smell is just so horrifying that I assume the taste is on par with it.  I have eaten dog biscuits before, which really aren’t bad.  I wouldn’t eat them as a snack, but if someone pays me a dollar to eat one, or has a dog biscuit eating contest, hell yeah, I’m in. 

The ice cream didn’t smell like anything.  Ice cream normally doesn’t really smell like anything, but the fact that there was no pungent or even faint dog food aroma was a good sign.  I took the first bite, and braced for the worst.  Luckily, it wasn’t bad at first; it just tasted like a dog biscuit.  It’s not exactly Breyers, but it could be worse.  Then, once the ice cream actually melts in your mouth, it starts to get worse.  The initial cold temperature masks the flavor well; all you really taste is cold.  Then, once the heat of your mouth warms it, it gets pretty bad.  It tasted like what I would imagine a mother dog’s milk to taste like.  Although I don’t spend too much time imagine what that would taste like, so that could be an inaccurate description.

I made it a few more bites in, but had to stop.  I wanted to eat the whole thing, just to say I did, but couldn’t do it. The more bites I took, the stronger the aftertaste was getting.  I also hadn’t thought to have a beverage in my room, so I had to leave and get some orange juice.  Unfortunately, orange juice wasn’t the best follow up; it was kind of like the gross taste you get when you drink orange juice after brushing your teeth, only creamier.

The nutrition facts for each cup are seven grams of fat, 128 calories, 196 mg of sodium, and 9 grams of sugars.  I couldn’t find the carb count for it, so I don’t know if Frosty Paws are Atkins approved.  They do, however, have plenty of “Crude Protein.”

As a snack, I can not give Frosty Paws my seal approval.  It is a shame, since I am a big fan of novelty foods.  I also wish it tasted better, since it would be entertaining to eat dog ice cream at a party.  Although this line of thinking is probably why I don’t get invited to many parties.

Even though I wasn’t a big fan of it, my cat seemed to somewhat like it.  She took a few bites, and then ultimately decided that ice cream wasn’t her scene.  I have ultimately decided that cats do not like food that isn’t room temperature.  I once microwaved my cat’s food, and he was not pleased whatsoever. 

So I give Frosty Paws a hesitant thumbs down, and I can’t really tell what the cat’s rating of it was.  She did take a few bites, but that doesn’t indicate much.  One of the other cats has eaten half of an almond joy bar, which indicates that this cat is much smarter, also because he was nowhere to be found when I was taste testing the Frosty Paws.

In conclusion, pass on the Frosty Paws, and cats are way better than dogs.