Whilst looking in the dairy cabinet of the supermarket near to where I work, for plastic wrapped cheese slices to make sandwiches with, I noticed that they were running a special on Yogo. Yogo is one of those things that I remember liking when I was a kid but that I must have only had incredibly rarely. Thinking that I hadn't had Yogo in years, it might be fun to try some and see if it was as good as I remember remembering it to be.
I like the fact that Yogo autocorrects to the word Togo because I very much like the African nation more than I like this artificially flavoured milk product.
I used to like Yogo as a kid and that's probably because as a child, my palate wasn't as well developed and honestly couldn't tell the difference between something which was nice or something which tastes like nothing real in the world. The pot of Yogo which I ate purported to be chocolate flavour but in reality it was a weird cacophony of sweet, of what I imagine Dettol tastes like and of cocoa that had gone off because it had been left to rot in the sun since 1973. Yogo was so terrible that if I were on a space mission that had so gone horribly wrong that the computer had killed all the crew and I was left hurtling off into interstellar space, that I'd probably eat the training manuals before I'd consider the Yogo. Yogo is the equivalent of the nuclear button, it is the weapon against hunger of last resort and even then you'd be hesitant about it. If the African autocorrected nation of Togo was suffering a great famine and we sent them a million pots of unleabelled Yogo without explanation as to what it was, I think that they might consider it worthy enough to use as mortar to build brick houses out of before eating the stuff. Yogo must be one of those things which we give to children to help build up their immune system, for if they can survive eating a pot of Yogo then that proves that they are made of sterner stuff than previously thought. I already think that the fact that anyone survives childhood at all, is testament to the durability of human beings; but giving children Yogo is like deliberately setting out to void the terms of the warranty.
The fact that Yogo calls itself a dairy food snack rather than a definable milk product like yogurt or pudding is both telling and quite frankly, a bit scary. When even the manufacturers of the product are at a loss to describe what their confection is, then you know you're in trouble.
I suppose that Yogo has the same sort of consistency as a crème caramel but that's where the similarity ends. It's kind of a little bit grainy, as though the sugars haven't quite been combined properly during its creation and like a whipped mousse, if you put a spoon through it, it retains its shape. This is a bit like the confusingly named Früché which also doesn't know what it is but at least the flavour resembles something close to the description on the packet. Mango Früché tastes like mango; Chocolate Yogo must have been invented by someone with no idea of what chocolate is.
Yogo is marketed towards children through the use of cartoon characters and that there should be sign that it is horrible. A product like Bird's custard comes in a serious looking packet because it is at least edible to anyone over the age of 13, and the ironically named Angel Delight whilst it might have zero chance of delighting any angel and also has the sweetness turned up to eleven, passes a taste test of some sort. Angel Delight unlike Yogo, remains one of the avenues that you might actually want to relive your childhood through. The French company Danone with its Yoplait yoghurt brand sells a product called Petit Miam which literally means "little yum"; this is sensible because the only difference between Petit Miam is the quantity of yoghurt in the pot. There is no adult equivalent of Yogo because it is disgusting.
I already know that I am weirder than a nine dollar note and that even as a child my tastes in things were vastly different to other children. The tastes that I most remember from childhood that I want to return to are a Pizza Meat Pie which was seven kinds of delicious, the Lamb Rolls which came from an Indian snack shop, and Nestlé's Yorkie Mystery bar which has kind of been reinvented by Cadbury with its Marvellous Creations line. For some reason I remembered Yogo and a competitor called Snack Pack with fondness but I guess that I've experienced first hand the wise old saw that "you can never return to the past". Yogo is something which I remembered from childhood and to be honest, should have stayed there. Yogo is awful.
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