The nieces had been spending their allowance at the corner store lately. A lot.

[conuly]

There were two big problems with this, the first being that they were getting entirely too much junk food during the day and the second being that that junk food was all full of food coloring.

I do suspect that the huge moodiness and tantrumminess of the past few weeks (HUGE!) might have been from the food coloring, so Jenn and I decided to just cut it off.

They did make the fair point that it can be hard to get treats without the ickies, so I went yesterday and picked up some candy and chips in bulk that is food coloring free, and we told the girls they can pay for those treats from their allowance instead, at prices comparable to what they'd pay for food-coloring-full equivalents.

I then spent quite a bit of time bagging everything up into single servings. (Did you know a single serving of jelly beans is just ten beans? That seemed chintzy, so the baggies have 15 each. At 5 for 8¢ in the store (I did the math as I bagged) we are making a 1¢ profit if we sell them to the girls for a quarter a bag. Woohoo! Money in the bank, baby!

Then I nibbled the leftovers. Well, the ones that weren't gross grape. Blech.

When you guys eat jelly beans (pretend there's a poll here), do you just pick whatever comes to hand or do you sort them first? And if you do sort them, do you a. eat randomly, b. eat one color at a time or c. try to make them come out even?

On that note, I saw this article today. I had always wondered what sort of awfulness the phrase "natural flavoring" might cover. Wondered, but was too scared/sensible to check....

http://tinyurl.com/kq73u9p

Comments

[redbird]

I don't eat jelly beans very often: once in a while I get some from the bulk bin of fancy ones at the supermarket, so I can select the ones I want. When I've got my bag of, say, tangerine and watermelon, I may grab a specific flavor, or see what comes to hand, or even eat one of each together.

[conuly]

Individual jelly bean buying is the best, but you get what you can get, y'know? (Now, if only they sold butter popcorn flavor without the food coloring!)

[steorra]

I don't really eat jelly beans. When I used to eat Smarties (Canadian ones, which are very different from American ones - they're candy-coated chocolate, like M&Ms), I would generally eat the colours in a certain order, but I am not sure I'd specifically sort them first as opposed to eating those of one colour from the pile, then eating ones of another colour, and then of the next colour, until I was left with only blue ones and finally ate those.

[conuly]

Blue were the best or the worst?

[steorra]

The best. I got to look at them longer.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

I eat one color at a time, starting with black, which is my favorite, and finishing with purple, unless I can pawn the purples off on somebody else.

[conuly]

It turns out that Concord grapes actually taste like that. Blech!

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

They don't taste like that to me. I like Concord grapes, which taste like wild grapes, only bigger and sweeter - artificial grape flavor tries to imitate that taste, but fails; plus there's always that metallic chemical aftertaste. Eating commercial candy, one always knows one is consuming nothing healthy, but fake grape flavor makes it a little too obvious that it's not made from actual food.

[conuly]

Well, regardless, I don't like Concord grapes. I'll say blech again.

The nieces like them, though, so whenever we get them from the CSA I just tell them to gorge their little hearts out.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Awell, de gustibus est non disputandum. I was 10 when I first tasted Concord grapes in actual Concord, MA - just about this time of year; we were doing the obligatory annual historic New England foliage-viewing *thing*, so it was probably Columbus Day. So there we were by the Minuteman monument, "by the rude bridge that arched the flood", and the coolness of eating Concord grapes (that I picked off a stone wall myself) in Concord was very cool. Then after college I knew someone who grew them, so I had them now and then. They taste like old-fashioned Smucker's grape jelly to me, which was my mother's 'default' jelly all through my childhood.