I Got Beanboozled

   

Gratuitous entrapment and deception by way of mystery candy flavors ought to be the rule and not the exception.  It's a phenomenal idea.  With most boxes of chocolates--and, in this case, Jelly Bellies--you do know what you're gonna get and that's boooring. 

Hell, I have to admit to getting a sick rise out of allowable percentages of insect parts the gubmit permits in our Peter Pan and Snickers and not just because it reminds me of how pigheaded some of us are when it comes to choosing the battles we should be fighting--telling the gubmint off we really don't want those aforementioned thorax parts of silverfish or innards of German roaches mixed in with the foods we've been eating since we were knee-high to a slug--versus the battles we do fight (Kashi-backed or health food cereal-sponsored "green awareness" that is actually Kellogg-backed "green awareness").  But I'm getting off track.

Beanboozled is the new and, curiously, more widely produced update of Jelly Belly's Harry Potter specialty beans concocted as an adjunct to the now defunct Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans found in the books/flicks.  Only the Beanboozleds are more putrid; the original Bertie Bott's beans had five flavors (sausage, dirt, earthworm, soap and pickle) over which the thought of eating would not have turned my stomach.  I'm pretty sure a fairly large majority of us WFMU listeners grew up having been nurtured and fed lovingly several times with the glorious taste of soap.  But versions of all the foods you might have eaten in some of your most recent nightmares or after waking up from the night before can be found in the revamp.  It's a game of chance and a right top one at that.  Angie and I stopped in to a Borders for a magazine and a few books last Saturday and she noticed the box had some jelly beans inside with some vile new flavors.  That's it; I'm there.

Each box has ten sets of two different colored beans with two different flavors, half of which are thorougly but unsuspectingly nauseating.  Say you're in the mood for the peach flavor.  Sorry, you just ate the vomit.  Hard to believe but I thought it was actually quite tame compared to caramel corn's buddy, moldy cheese, and the baby wipes delicacy masking itself as coconut.  Their moldy cheese doppelganger was cazu marzu practically diluted to old ham.  You best believe the baby wipes bean was indeed comparable to crumpling up a Huggies baby wipe in your mouth and sucking on it.  NASTY.  I loved each and every one of them.  That's just the brave dumbass in me.

My next challenge: Get Jelly Belly to really produce a cazu marzu jelly bean.  Suggest it for a new Beanboozled flavor as a buddy to the lemon chiffon.  I'd eat it.  Why not?  There are earwig brain chunks in the root beer ones.

Comments

[tastewar]

speaking of bizarre candies: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dy6uLfermPU

[David Mattatall]

It's funny that you should mention "insect parts" in an article discussing Jelly Belly's, in that, they do contain bug parts. Shellac is made from crushed beetle shells and it is used to coat the Jelly's and give them their hard shells.

[Listener bkd]

I always felt sorry for the quality control guy who had to taste five iterations of the vomit flavor before pronouncing them either too vomity, or not vomity enough, before announcing at last, that version 6 was just right.