Egg turds and forky dumbells: Top five dumbest foodie X-mas gifts this year

Foodies tend to get the shaft during the holidays, because every year there is an increasing number of useless, gimmicky, and downright bizarre food-related gadgets available for purchase everywhere -- and non-food nerd friends and family just lo-o-o-ve to buy them. While it would be nice for non-foodies to cease and desist with the holiday gift swindles, that's probably too much to ask Santa for this year, but at least now you know to avoid these: the top five dumbest foodie X-mas gifts this year.

See also: The 10 Most Pointless Christmas Foods

It's widely known that carrying around a martini glass in one hand and a greasy napkin filled with prosciutto-wrapped dates in the other requires some degree of dexterity, so having a glassful of delicious martini not end up on your feet is a lovely selling point. But when you consider the fact that regular martini glasses aren't supposed to be filled to the brim anyway and the whole point of drinking a classy, stately drink such as a martini becomes the mootest of points when served in a plastic contraption for drooling trailer park idiots...well, it kinda makes you wanna just keep a grip on the old glass stems. And these glasses are not, strictly speaking, spill-proof, any more than bicycles with training wheels are crash-proof.

There was a glorious time when fiber optic things -- and things that glow in the dark -- were new, edgy and amazing, and that time was the 1980s. These shimmery place mats look like they were left over props from a Star Trek movie/show set, which I'm sure is aesthetically pleasing to Trekkies, but for everyone else, they are about a hundred thousand light years past useless.

Here's a funny joke: What can you purchase for a foodie friend/relative for $39.95 (plus shipping and handling) that will ensure they crop-dust your couch with egg and bell pepper poots? The answer: Hammacher Schlemmer's Pop-Up Egg Maker. This to-go coffee mug-looking device has a hole in the top where you can drip in two eggs at a time, plus some accoutrements like peppers, cheese and chocolate chips, and then, after six to eight minutes, retrieve what looks like an egg turd with a little stick.

Harried parents who are short on time -- and nutritional education -- could make use of this almost-too-stupid-to-be-real wiener-chunking device. Much like what the ever-useful banana slicer does with bananas, this contraption makes short work out of processed meat, with uniform cuts and less effort than using a kitchen knife. But this convenience comes at the expense of any shred of human dignity. And the same parents who cannot be bothered to use a damn knife to cut up a hotdog are probably the same parents who feed their kids cut-up hot dogs a lot.

This is one of those foodie gifts that defies logic, has to be Googled more than twice to ensure it's a real thing -- not an SNL skit commercial -- and it's almost too inane to bother cracking jokes about...almost. This gift combines the symbiotic activities of weight-lifting and mouth-cramming, and is designed to improve forearm strength while simultaneously ensuring that plate-to-pancake-hole delivery is achieved. What this weighted set of silverware actually does is symbolize everything that is wrong with diet fads, Americans, and the holiday shopping industry as a whole -- and if these show up at Williams Sonoma I will rage-quit being a foodie and spend the rest of my life growing corn on my front lawn and shooting squirrels for sustenance.