I have nothing new to say. On the jobs front, I'm plugging along trying to make things work. To stave off insanity, I wrote about what I had for lunch today.
Here are the results:
Lunch today was a handful of Jolly Ranchers. Now, Jolly Ranchers are just one of the many food/candy companies that offer a flavor known as "blue raspberry." There's also blue raspberry Charms blow pops, Tootsie Roll pops, ICEEs, Dum-Dums, candy canes and Jell-O shots.
This has to be a phony flavor. Who ever saw a blue raspberry in nature? In fact, as George Carlin points out, there are no blue foods period. Blueberries? Fuck 'em. Those are purple.
But why blue raspberries? How did this happen? Upon what meat does this, our blue raspberry, feed?
I think the larger color palette of candies is to blame. That apocryphal matching together of fake fruits and fake flavors spawned by the candy-industrial complex after decades of churning out sugary products to shove into our country's collective snack-hungry maw.
To begin with, red is too confused and crowded as it is to give red to raspberries. Cherry and strawberry have taken red right out, and they get preferrential treatment in the heirarchy of artificial fruit flavors and colors because everybody loves them.
Starburst candy dodges this quite deftly by making their strawberry chews pink -- which strawberries are not, but it's close enough. And strangely, Starburst dodges the raspberry issue as well by simply not having raspberry candies at all. This makes them either geniuses or cowards.
Confusing the issue further, some downright gutless food companies attempt to sidestep the issue of what to do with raspberry by combining them with blueberry, blackberry and strawberry flavors to create that fatherless bastard of food flavors, "mixed berry," that scourge of yogurts and concealer of the chalkiness of stomach acid palliatives. Colors there range from a soulless purple to a defeated pale blue.
None of these stopgaps address the issue that refuses to go away -- what to do with the fucking raspberries. Blackberries have a similar taste, but nobody's going to eat any black candy, brain-damaged licorice lovers notwithstanding. And grape already had divine right to the color purple. You have to make grape purple, because green (which grapes can be) is taken up by apples (which could not be red because of strawberries and cherries).
So the only solution? Call the raspberries a color they are not -- blue -- and be done with it.
And why not? You've created something that nobody has ever seen before and is therefore, from a marketing perspective, exotic. A blue raspberry! Ever seen one outside of a fever dream scenario? Of course you haven't.
This was a good idea for the first person who came up with making the raspberry blue, but it's a little ridiculous to repeat the blue raspberry thing over and over again across the food industry. What worked well once now just seems silly. Because after all, there's no such thing as a blue raspberry.