Confessions of a Jelly Bean Gobbler

Someone brought a sack of jelly bean samplers from Jelly Belly into my office the other day. Each clear-plastic-wrapped sampler contained a dozen assorted jelly beans. Jelly Belly claims to make “gourmet” beans which means that they get adventurous with the flavors. They refer to the more exotic ones as “spice”. I tend to eat jelly beans and M&M’s in groups of about half a dozen. Okay, I’m a pig. I generally don’t examine the mixture in my hand to cull out the weird ones before I ingest them. Traditional jelly beans taste more or less the same regardless of color. In fact, for many years the only flavor that got imposed on a jelly bean was in the shell. The rest of it was just that sticky sugar mix on the inside. Once you got past the shell, the rest was identical.

About twenty years ago, someone got the idea that the flavor could and should be added to the sugary mass on the inside as well. I don’t know if this was inspired by Ronald Reagan who apparently had a thing for jelly beans, but companies like Jelly Belly also started branching out from the traditional, red, green, blue, orange, pink, yellow. Brown, coffee, black (okay they had black in the old days as well), mango yellow, spotted, and striped, all began to appear. Even worse, they had to make up flavors for these colors. We’re talking peanut butter, cinnamon, espresso, curry, etc. While individually, these flavors can be interesting enough, they shouldn’t be mixed. It doesn’t happen very often anymore, but if you’ve ever had the experience of taking a sip from a carton of milk gone sour you would know that upsetting the expectations of the palate can be very unsettling.

J K Rowling got this level of horror at modern era jelly beans just right in Harry Potter with Bertie Botts’s magic beans that included flavors like booger, ear wax, etc. Btw….Turkish Delight , an early name for jelly beans (they were invented late in the 19th century) plays a prominent role in C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia.

No doubt, there are people out there who eat jelly beans one delicately shelled and intricately colored example at a time. I’m sure they hold the things up to the light, sniff the bouquet, and see if they can get the shell to melt in their mouths before they chew. One of my best friends from childhood, Paul, was fastidious in that way. He’d even figure out a sequence for consuming his chain of jelly beans. He wound up being a copy editor for a major newspaper. How weird is that? Maybe too, there’s some sort of feng shui for the proper ingestion of the jelly bean. I’m just not one of those folk.

I’m perfectly happy consuming a small sampler of jelly beans in two random gulps. I suspect I’m not the only person the in the world who’s like that. Think about it. Who’s going to buy more jelly beans, someone who examines them and eats them one at a time or someone like me? So why the heck would you put together handfuls of fundamentally incompatible flavors? It’s disturbing to bite into a bunch of artificially fruity goodness and then stray onto something like peanut butter or licorice.

Naturally, I had about ten of the packs before I figured all this out. I just hope this doesn’t happen to Dots or Gummi Bears. In the meantime, I’m trying to figure out why Gummi Bears generally taste better than Gummi Worms and what the difference was between a U-No Bar and a Kit-Kat or why Kit-Kats are made by Nestle in some countries and Hershey’s in the United States?
In my home town, there was a business called the “Antique Apple Nursery” which may have shifted to a successor company called “Trees of Antiquity”. My town’s main business used to be Gravenstein Apples which didn’t stay competitive commercially late in the twentieth century as varieties that stored better pushed local farmers to sell their orchards to developers. Trees of Antiquity makes a point of keeping alive fruit varieties that may actually taste better but aren’t sold in supermarkets any longer. Perhaps, they’ll have to do the same thing with non-gourmet jelly beans and other obsolete candy varieties.

Some I rarely see or haven’t seen in many years,

1) Beeman’s Pepsin Gum
2) Nestle’s Milk Chocolate Bar
3) The Big Hunk
4) Candy Cigarettes
5) Fruit Stripe Gum
6) Charleston Chews
7) Adams Black Jack Gum
8) Almond Joys
9) Lifesavers
10) Sugar Daddies

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