Fruit Stripe Gum

Pixie Sticks, Jujubes, those weird candy buttons that look like hallucinogenic accounting printouts — the list of sugary grade school delicacies that fail to make the transition to adult snack staple is as long as it is sickly sweet and artificially colorful. The big box of Nerds at the movie concession stand might induce fleeting nostalgia, and you might gaze for a moment in bewildered awe at the jar of cue ball-sized jawbreakers at the candy store, but for the most part, childhood treats lose their appeal when adulthood hits. You begin to forget that some of them even ever existed.

But spot a pack of Fruit Stripe gum and it all comes flooding back. You suddenly remember that Fruit Stripe is the most joyous, tastiest, sweetest gum in the world — so good that it hardly seems real, and not some Technicolor masticular fantasy falsely implanted in your memory. But then you pop a stick in your mouth and — A la recherche du temps perdu! It really is as good as you remember... for about five seconds.

And then, the crash. Good God, the crash. Without warning, the beautiful ray of sunshine you were chewing becomes a foul pellet of Silly Putty. The only solution is to cram another piece in your mouth to drown out the evil and bring back the high. The delightful Proustian moment is over, and your taste buds are pummeled by a crazed cycle of beauty and horror that ends only when the giant wad of gum you've created makes your jaw unhinge anaconda-like or the pack runs out. Fruit Stripe is the yin and the yang of all comestibles. Both the alpha and the omega. Death and rebirth in an endless cycle that would make pious Hindus proud.

With its psychedelic wrapper and bizarre rainbow zebra mascot, Fruit Stripe is a throwback to the '60s, when chewing gum technology couldn't keep pace with the the wunderkind marketing wizards' mushroom and acid-seeped fantasies. In the beginning it came in modest five-stick packs filled with an assortment of four basic flavors: cherry, lemon, lime, and orange. Today it comes in a 17 stick multi-pack jammed with what could be called the five flavors of the apocalypse: Cherry, Lemon, Orange, Peach, and Melon. Peach and Melon? Where did those come from? Are they really necessary? Are they even distinguishable? And now there's a hidden bonus with each stick: temporary tattoos. (You'd have more luck cutting them out and staple-gunning them to your skin than getting them to stick properly.)

Fruit Stripe should lose the lame, newfangled gimmicks — they cheapen the mind-blowing, yet fleeting, magic of the gum itself. And besides, kids would buy it on its own merits, shitty tattoos or not. Fruit Stripe is like crack for 8-year-olds, and just like crack for big kids, it practically sells itself.

— Matt Salo (msalo at nga dot org)