Grapermelon gum
It's hard to look at a package of Wrigley's Grapermelon without thinking: "This gum must be stopped before it grapes again." Companion flavor Strappleberry has its own issues, but at least they involve consenting adults.
But Grapermelon has problems beyond its name. There's the flavor, for example. Is it artificial grape? Artificial apple? Artificial watermelon? Or just plain old Pez? The more you try to nail it down, the more your palette seems to spin, top-like, across a patchwork quilt of dubious taste sensations.
Just what an increasingly confused America needs: schizophrenic gum.
Moreover, the gum wears a Chiclet-like light candy shell. Now, there's a place and a time to be eating Chiclets, and that's Tijuana in 1972, where you could buy an overstuffed handful from a street urchin for a nickel. Paying a buck at the local Kum & Go for 12 tiny pieces of the same basic gum — that's another story.
Ancient template for a joke:
Smith: This [food item] is [negative attribute 1]. It's [negative attribute 2]. And even though the menu says [positive attribute], it's [negative attribute that is in ironic opposition to positive attribute]!
Johnson: Anything else wrong with the [food item]?
Smith: Yeah, the portions are too small.
Johnson [eyes bugging out]: Whaaaaaa-ut?!
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Funny, right? At least in theory? Perhaps. But in most cases, Grapermelon included, larger portions would at least help assuage the customer's feelings of betrayal. Take burritos as big as your head, for example. They may contain stuffing evocative of a hobo's sleeping bag. And they may, in many cases, turn a night of hard drinking into a night of hard regurgitating, eventually ending up as a nutritious breakfast for local sparrows and squirrels. But at least the burritos are big. Everyone will grant them that.
Thus: Crippled by its small serving size, flavor and name, Grapermelon is an abomination. In search of answers, we turn to the Old Testament, which is excellent at identifying and condemning abominations.
Although God's manual for better living doesn't directly address the issue of polyfruited chewing gum, it does have a passage regarding mildew that, with a few minor alterations, lends itself readily to the situation at hand:
If any convenience store is contaminated with Grapermelon — and if the contamination is in the main part of the candy section, it is a spreading Grapermelon and must be shown to the district manager. The district manager is to examine the Grapermelon and isolate the affected shelf for seven days. On the seventh day he is to examine it, and if the Grapermelon has spread across the shelf, it is a destructive Grapermelon; the shelving is unclean. He must burn up the shelving, pin the crime on a drifter, and file an insurance claim.
But if, when the district manager examines it, the Grapermelon has not spread across the shelf, he shall order that the contaminated article be restocked. Then he is to isolate it for another seven days. After the affected shelf has been restocked, the district manager is to examine it, and if the Grapermelon has not changed its appearance, even though it has not spread, it is unclean.
Burn it with fire.
These are the regulations concerning contamination by Wrigley's Grapermelon brand gum.
It's hard not to appreciate how sensible this advice is, even if it originates from a time when the snack food of choice was honey-soaked goat entrails, and Hebrew children groaned "not manna again!" at supper each night.
That was a different, possibly fictitious, world. Now, we're dining on Texas-fried Oreos and manna is sure to be just another entree choice at a future chain of biblically themed restaurants. And yet, the abominations continue: If it's not purple french fries or breakfast sandwiches denser than the Earth's iron core, it's polymorphously perverse artificial grape-tainted gum. Is there truly nothing new under the sun?
That depends on what you mean.
— James Norton (jrnorton@flakmag.com)
