5 Foods You Didn’t Know You Could Get from Vending Machines

Because the TacoCopter proved to be the biggest, hoaxiest mouth-cock tease since the fabled self-basting turducken with a quail in it, our appetites have becoming harder to please, ironically, as we’ve gotten hungrier and lazier. Fortunately for us couch jockeys, thanks to the miracles of computers and such, there’s been a rise in recent years of unexpected foods being served up in even more unexpected means. Translation: Vending machines blorting out foods you wouldn’t think they could, but doing so anyway. And quite ably at that.

Well, boy-o’s, open your minds wider than your mouths and prepare to have both completely decimated by flavors coming out of machines that, by all good taste and reason, shouldn’t. Here’s a look at the oddest delicacies that can be yours for a couple quarters.

5) Pizza

You’d have to be a grade A-dingus to miss what Italian company Let’s Pizza is all about. If you’re still confused, yes! They’re Italian, so they make pizza. Let’s Pizza is a line on vending machines that’ll give you a piping hot pie in fewer than three minutes. It’s billed as a “mini-pizzeria that’s open 24 hours a day,” but the number of times the commercial boasts about it being made “in a human-free environment” makes me wonder if the machine is actually just a bunch of tiny humans with dozens of hands touching the pizza I waited an entire three minutes to eat just because I didn’t tip.

4) Cupcakes

Beverly Hills-headquartered cup-cakery Sprinkles recently introduced an honest-to-God ATM that dispenses cupcakes. It has a screen that lets you watch robotic arms and evil demons fetch the cupcake you asked for in real time, and has proven so popular that another one was introduced in Chicago without the demon parts. It doesn’t affect the knee-weakeningly sweet taste of these little guys, but, hey: It beats going into a bakery and talking to a human to ask for one like a jerk or something.

3) Beer

America sucks and here’s proof why: You can’t buy a cold one from a robot. Both Argentina and Prague have us beat in that regard – also, have you seen their ladies? – but the former arguably outpaces the latter in sheer machismo alone with the Rugbeer vending machine. To get a beer out of it, its manufacturer, Cerveza Salta decided the most responsible manner to procure one would be tackle it. That’s right: You have to lunge at the machine with all your weight to get a beer out of it. Good to know all those bullies who put the beatdown on pipsqueaky kids to get chocolate milk out of them already have the skill set necessary for this one. Yay?

2) French Fries

Leave it to those potato-loving Irishmen Aussies to outsource a French fry-machine to Spain. The Foodcube, as it’s so appetizingly called, is “recommended for… offices, factories, universities, shopping malls, leisure parks, promenades and piers, sports centres and stadiums.” It takes 90 seconds to spit out, and don’t worry: They’re plenty greasy with the usual oil fries have. Not the oil that robots have instead of blood, the greasy oil that we have in our hearts instead of human blood. Also, the machine dispenses ketchup, which kinda looks like blood. So that’s good!

1) Eggs

You know that feeling when you just got off work, you missed the train, it starts to hail, and you just found out your favorite TV show about aliens who have sex with each other was canceled? The good people at Mars, Incorporated would have you believe you should reach for a Snickers bar, but they’re wrong. You should reach for a nice, delicious egg. Mmm, eggs! Nothing beats their eggy taste. These machines are only in Japan, and for a mere 300 yen (about $3), one could be yours to help turn your entire life around. Each compartment in the machine contains a bag of 10 to 12 eggs, which means they do run out rather quickly. So, to slightly tweak the conventional wisdom: In some cases, the early bird could actually get a deadly case of salmonella.