Trader Joe's Is Getting a Lot of Heat for This New Summer Snack

Trader Joes (edited)
Trader Joes (edited)

The latest offerings from Trader Joe's may look like delicious summer cookout snacks, but they've caused an uncommonly loud stir across the pond.

It all began last week when the grocery store unveiled "Puff Dogs," a summertime snack consisting of an uncured beef hot dog "swaddled in a perfectly flaky-when-cooked puff pastry." The snack is not unlike your everyday pigs in a blanket, except these are made of beef and sold out of the freezers of Trader Joe's. There's just one problem: it's basically the same thing as the classic sausage roll, a British pastry dating back to the Napoleonic Wars. According to the BBC, Greggs, a British bakery chain, "sells more than 2.5 million of them every week."

As anyone who's thought for more than 30 seconds about where french fries come from knows, snack food have always been at the vanguard of cultural dissemination and fierce debate, and the United Kingdom is no exception. For the last several days, the Britons have taken up arms all over social media and in the country's news outlets over the perception that the grocery store's recently announced "Puff Dogs" are actually just a giant ripoff, roasting the insinuation that any American chain could have "invented" the cultural product they hold so dear. To be clear, Trader Joe's never claimed to have invented the food.

It's a beautiful, hysterical display of collective national pride...and misguided anger. Read some of the funniest tweets we found below.

h/t BBC

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Eric Vilas-Boas is a writer and editor at Thrillist. Follow him @e_vb_.