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

[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.