Celebrate Valentine’s Day With Dried Meat Hearts and Neon Pink Cheese Slime

The first capitalism-boosting holiday of the year is almost upon us but due to the ongoing pandemic, an intimate meal in a quiet bistro isn’t an option for Valentine’s Day 2021. There are alternatives, thankfully, but why waste your money on roses when beef jerky conversation hearts and neon pink mac and cheese do much better at expressing your love and affection?

In a time when people will spend hours scrolling through images of photogenic meals on their phones, it didn’t take long for brands to realize they could drum up some easy publicity by tweaking a tried and true recipe towards the absurd or combining two iconic snacks. Instagrammers care more about new Oreo flavors than the latest headlines, so for 2021 Kraft Foods has decided that nothing says love like combining out-of-the-box macaroni and cheese with conversation heart candies.

You know the candies we’re talking about, right? The ones made from what appears to be pastel-colored recycled chalk painted with short but sweet messages promoting togetherness? There is zero chance anyone has ever thought they’d pair well with cheese-covered pasta, but ahead of Valentine’s day 2021 that’s exactly what Kraft Foods is doing. You won’t be able to find Candy Macaroni & Cheese in stores, which will include an additional candy-flavored packet adding sweetness and a neon pink hue to the college life staple. Instead, you’ll need to head over to this page on the Kraft Foods website, surrender all of your personal info, and then hope you’re one of 1,000 (lucky?) winners who will receive a kit in the mail ahead of February 14.

Instead of embracing candy conversation hearts, The Manly Man Company (yes, we sighed too) decided everything but the sentiment needed to be replaced. So instead of making the treats from a laundry list of lab-engineered chemicals you can’t pronounce, Meathearts are made of beef that’s been dried to the consistency of an Egyptian mummy. For about $27 you can get a pack of 21 Meathearts that, like their candy counterpart, bare laser-etched slogans of love and affection through delicious meat puns like “Beef Mine.”

If there’s one takeaway leading up to Valentine’s Day in a few weeks it’s that 2021 promises to be as much a nightmare as 2020 was… and maybe even more so.