Chew On This

 I've had enough of this cancel culture. When I was a kid, we didn't wear seatbelts and we all survived. Most of us anyway. And who really needs bike helmets? Get your big government hands off my skull! 

And now they're coming for my Skittles. 

California Assembly members Jesse Gabriel and Buffy Wicks' AB 418 proposes that California stop manufacturing, selling, or distributing foods that contain Red Dye No. 3, Titanium Dioxide, Potassium Bromate, Brominated Vegetable Oil, or Propyl Paraben. These items include but are not restricted to Skittles, Hot Tamales candy, Dubble Bubble Twist Gum. Well Mister Gabriel and Ms. Wicks, I would like to suggest to you that Potassium Bromate is the very stuff that made California the place it is today. 

Hold on. Back up. Before I go too far, I want to point out to those of you who haven't fully appreciated or recognized the sarcastic tone of those first few paragraphs that I am saying all this with my tongue planted firmly in my cheek. Which is not mean feat, I can tell you. 

That said, I would also confess to the foot I have in a previous generation. The one that invented things like lawn darts and pixie sticks. I spent my youth in a world that did not put stickers on record albums to promote their explicit content. It was a time that required little Mikey from the Life Cereal commercial combining Pop Rocks and soda to determine that these were unsafe food combinations. 

Okay. Let me back up on a few more points here: Record albums were physical media made of vinyl and they were the way we used to transfer media from one to another. Pop Rocks were a candy created with the sole purpose of inducing pain in the mouth of the consumer. And commercials? Well they were why YouTube was created, so they would have a place to grow old and die. 

Now back to Skittles. My son and I only recently celebrated to return of the original lime flavor to the standard package, ridding us once and for all of that miscarriage of candy malfeasance that was green apple. Finding out that other ingredients include poison? Well, that's just another great heaping disappointment on the road to adulthood. To paraphrase Robert Frost, "nothing with Red Dye Number Two stays."