Introducing Clamato!


I don't know if food will ever taste the same again. I don't know if I could ever drink anything with a remotely red tinge again without making the sign of the cross first. I don't know if I should go to the doctor right now to beg and plead for him to conjure up some sort of taste bud transplant and all-around memory wipe so I can forever forget the horror and wrongdoing I inflicted upon my poor body on the night of December 28th, 2001. The single worst event in my personal history - the single worst event in anyone's history. Words can't describe my fear, my sorrow. Words can't describe the memories of a drink gone so wrong, I'm liable to run for Planetary Dictator next year just so I could outlaw the thing forever and save millions from a potential assault on the dignity of their mouths that'll leave them mere shells of the people they once were.

I tasted it, and now, I'm here to warn you about it. I tasted it, and now, I have twenty-four hours to live.


Clamato may as well come with a warning label citing that you should only drink it if you equate the desire to drink carbonated clam extract as meeting the cruel side-effect of seriously wanting to die. I shudder to think of the poor test animals over at the Mott's Laboratories, forced to intake this stuff in it's concentrated form, presumably left for dead on the side of the freeway asking themselves why they couldn't have just had hot needles shoved up their asses like all the other guinea pigs.

I'm a huge V8 drinker. Or I should say, someone who drinks V8 a lot. I'm not 12 feet tall or anything like that. I've had a bad cold, the kind one only gets by consistently not wearing a jacket outside in mid-40s weather, and my body was giving me the message loud and clear: 'you need juice.' If only I associated this with orange juice or even those cute little lemon-shaped containers that let you flavor lamb without squeezing fruit, our story would end here. But I wanted V8, I really wanted V8. So I drove to the corner deli, headed on in, and was disappointed to find that while they had every variety of designer water in the world steadily available, they didn't have my prided vegetable juice. All they had was Clamato, sitting in a bottle that boasted it as a tomato cocktail which was 'deliciously zesty.' This sounded enough like V8 for me at 3:30 in the morning, so I grabbed my future slayer and went home, ready to beat the cold.

The first indication that something was terribly wrong with this drink, aside from the name which makes it sound like a novelty soda on a Cartoon Network show about sarcastic shellfish, was the thickness. V8 is rich with a lotta pulp, a solidly acceptable feature for a drink that's supposed to be mashed up drained veggies. Clamato looks more like a really old Snapple that fell behind the vending block eighteen months ago. Sure enough, they share some of the same ingredients - corn syrup and high fructose rank pretty high. Rarely have I ever had the inclination to put sugar on a stalk of celery or to dip tomato wedges into Fluf, so I'm not sure how the team that put this dynamo together thought they'd end up with something fulfilling. At least they got the tomato part down, right? Yeah, they did that, with the added bonuses of garlic and onion extract, so far making this a mutant, carbonated Bloody Mary mix. But then, just when you're on the verge of letting things slide and just saying this drink isn't for you and ending it there, they throw in something so insulting to my stomach and so very wrong that I'm surprised hospitals haven't had to delegate entire floors for treatments of Clamato Trauma. They added...clam extract.



From the label, hidden underneath voodoo passages that waive Mott's of any liabilities from those who cut off their tongues just to get the taste of this abomination out of their mouths: '...and just a dash of clam broth, to give you a one-of-a-kind, deliciously zesty taste.' Yeah, it's one-of-a-kind all right. But 'one-of-a-kind' is a pretty vague selling point. I could market the same drink with my urine included on a day when I drank a ton of coffee instead of the clam juice and proclaim the same thing - it doesn't make the description any less true, and let's face it, it'd probably be thrice the zesty.

As a footnote, drinking the entire bottle fills you with 1,740 milligrams of sodium, so on top of tasting death, you'll look like a giant, well-fed tick for a few days. It even smells bad. Like fishy Play-Doh.

Listen, I've got no ax to grind. I didn't wake up this morning and say to myself...'you know, I don't have the energy to review a He-Man episode for the site, so I'll just play it easy and ruin Mott's otherwise unsullied reputation instead!' Pepsi Co. isn't paying me to blast carbonated clam juice. I just find the whole concept ridiculous as a whole, and it's just one of those deals where you say Clamato...I say Clamato?!?! The only perk of the entire ordeal for me is that, in drinking this, I'll have an easy answer the next time someone asks me what my most embarrassing moment was during a round of Truth or Dare. After all, I'd rather admit my faults than take the dare and risk having to drink it again. I survived it once, but I'm pretty sure going the Clamato Route twice in one lifetime is five times riskier than walking into the Apollo, wearing a Jeff Foxworthy t-shirt, screaming 'Attica!'.

And now, how the dinosaurs really became extinct:


Allosaur: Hey everyone, I've got something you've just gotta try!

Remember folks, clams might be good at shore bars or cut up in certain types of pasta, but don't drink them. You'd think this would go without saying, but Mott's advertising campaigns can be viciously effective. I'm telling you, just say no. Say no to Clamato, and we're well on our way to breaking the health curves that were set on a downward spiral after those Wheat Thins that tasted like chicken came out a few years ago.


- Matt
matt@x-entertainment.com