Snack manufacturers are a creative bunch. Every time I glance at a candy aisle, there’s a tempting new twist on an old favorite: Dark chocolate Milky Ways, white chocolate Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, Butterfinger sticks, fudge Cadbury eggs, the log-like Kit Kat… and have you seen the many incarnations of the Hershey’s Kiss? The attempt to make junk food new and exciting to America’s sugar-loaded and fat-ladden palates is sort of pathetic, like a dumpy housewife getting a new hairdo to rekindle her sex life, or a dinky pizza parlor hanging an “Under New Management” sign.
Most new candy fails, but a few manage to successfully innovate and endure. The humble M&M, for instance, was inspired when Forest Mars Sr. saw soldiers in the Spanish Civil War eating pellets of chocolate pressed in sugar to prevent melting. He returned to America to invent the M&M, which became a winner in a public eager for a candy impervious to heat. The M&M’s austere design allows for momentous transformation, and when the Peanut M&M was introduced, it soon outsold its progenitor. Then in the late 80’s came a treat for the nut connoisseur: Almonds.
Almond M&Ms are my current favorite weekday lunch dessert. How I enjoy the twenty minutes of post-lunch grazing on chocolate-covered almonds and a cup of coffee. The presence of almonds assuages the candy guilt instilled by the food police; I can look at the fat content on the nutrition label and assure myself it’s mostly the nutty healthy fat. And with only 200 calories, 2 grams of fibre and trace amounts of riboflavin and niacin, I am fully deluded into believing that this is health food.
But yesterday afternoon, gusty rain sent me slinking to the vending machine in the basement of my office building. I hoped to find Peanut M & Ms, but they are by far the fastest-selling item in the office. All that remained in the candy row were Snickers (nauseating), Hershey bars (ruined forever to me by Dagoba bars), Take 5 (isn’t 5 a little excessive?), Nature Valley granola bars (as if), and Golden Oreos.
Obviously I’m a candy person, not a cookie person. I have never before seen Golden Oreos, yet I found myself titillated. I liked Oreos when I was a kid, but then I found out the reason I liked them was because they were choke full of trans fats, giving them an unmistakable palatable texture that coats the mouth in chocolate grease. Mmmm… trans fats…
Tiredly of staring at the meager pickings, I slipped two quarters into the vending machine, pressed C6, and took a package of Golden Oreos back to my desk. I was delighted by the realization that no tell-tale black Oreo gunk would coat my teeth; should a co-worker happen by, I could bare my corny yellows without fear of looking ghoulish.
