Albanese Sour Gummy Bears

 I don't believe in a lot of things.  I find reverence a mostly hollow gesture, and for a while I even drew a sick sense of pride from that. I treated my cynicism as a virtue and I considered myself separate from those currents of influence and thus unbound by their patterns. Time would prove me the fool, though, as I began to curate webs of my own dogmatic fervor. However, instead of being occupied with any grand concerns about ethics or reason, I found myself deeply interested in the concept of "choice."

You see, one of the things I do believe in is the scientific concept of determinism. Since all things have a causal relationship, one could trace backwards or forwards throughout history to perfectly record the past or to perfectly predict the future. This seems counterintuitive to a thinking mind, because from our locus of perspective, we are a being with free will and can obviously express our agency. So how does one reconcile these two disparate truths: that we have the freedom to choose and yet we could have never chosen differently?

Yeah, it's a head-scratcher. Like a zen koan, the problem arises from how language and logic interface with each other; we expect thoughts to map perfectly onto base reality but this is never the case. So I've shifted the area of attack; instead of asking why I make the choices I do, I began simply trying to observe and then study those choices. 

With that in mind, there is no clearer example of a choice than Albanese Sour Gummy Bears. This is, hands down, the greatest gummy candy I've ever had. It's not even close. Even the other products in the Albanese line, while good, cannot touch the heights of their 12-flavor (Cherry, Pink Grapefruit, Watermelon, Strawberry, Orange, Blue Raspberry, Lime, Grape, Green Apple, Mango, Pineapple, & Lemon) collection. And good news for anyone out there like me who doesn't believe in anything: these gummies are unbelievable.

i give it 100 radicals out of 100, and 5 hype out of 5, making it "legit hyphy"

Reese's Pieces

In the early 1920s, H.B. Reese worked as a foreman in the shipping department of the Hershey Company. As a father of 10, he had a lot of mouths to feed, so though he was a creative businessman, Reese worked diligently at this stable job to support his family.

Harry Burnett Reese was a candymaker at heart, however; after his shifts at the chocolate warehouse, he returned home to his basement workshop laboratory where he made various candies and confections, including two candy bars named for his children. By 1923, he had launched his own candy company where hand-coated candies were sold on consignment. 

In 1928, when one of his customers was having trouble sourcing chocolate-covered peanut butter candy, Reese (then a father of 16!) decided to tackle the challenge personally. After developing an automated process to manufacture them, he integrated individually-wrapped peanut butter cups into his product line, leading him to greater heights of success. Once WW2 shortages forced him to streamline his business, these best-selling peanut butter cups became his only product.

After his death, the former Hershey dairy farmer, Hershey shipping foreman, and Hershey competitor had his legacy come full circle when his candy company merged with Hershey's in 1963. I've discussed at some length Reese's position in the market, but they obviously make a rad product that I'm a fan of, so I tend to give them a lot of runway. 

In 1982, an auteur director wanted to use M&Ms in his little alien movie. The Mars company wasn't interested, so they pivoted their pitch to a new candy with the same oblate spheroid shape. The director was Steven Spielberg, the movie was E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and the candy was Reese's Pieces.

Reese's iconic peanut butter coated in a candy shell colored orange, yellow, or brown. That's it. That's the whole candy. No need to gild the lily here; no need to reinvent the wheel. This is a candy utterly without nuance, though it honestly benefits from that absence. To me, though this is hugely subjective, Reese's Pieces is a candy that carries nostalgia. It feels inexplicably bound to my ideas of the movie theater experience, perhaps due to that cinematic lineage, but perhaps just because it's such a good movie snack.

I give it 86 radicals out of 100, and 3 hype out of 5, making it "yeah, hype"