David Foster Wallace Speaks About Mike & Ike Italian Ice

So, I’ve reserved the conference room in our office all day today in order to conduct a solo taste test of Mike & Ike Italian Ice, a chewy candy from the Just Born corporation. Typically, an employee may only reserve our conference room for two hours. So, to get around this, I went around to numerous employees and vending machine restockers claiming the conference room sign-up sheet was actually a civil union petition for my home state of Illinois. Surprisingly, the people in my office are not quite as open-minded on this matter as those resupplying us with Butterfingers and Sprite.

I received from a friend of a friend employed by the Nabisco Corporation marketing department sample instructions from a taste test recently completed in San Diego for a new type of cracker and I’m applying these rules to the taste test. They are as follows: (1)

1)Don’t take a test if you’re sick. I am feeling well today.

2)Don’t eat or drink anything strong before the test. No garlic or coffee because those tastes linger. (2)

3)Do not smoke before testing. Smoking deadens your taste buds. It interferes with your nasal epithelium, which affects your sense of smell, which is linked to taste. Nicotine, when it enters the brain, can tie up nerve centers typically involved with taste, thereby reducing the brainpower you have to devote to tasting Mike & Ike Italian Ice. Very important.

4)Avoid strong perfumes or fragrances. I hope showering with soap doesn’t count.

5)Avoid talking during the evaluation. I am alone and will try very hard not to talk to myself.

6)Please turn off your phone. I left it at home.

First of all, Mike and Ike(3) is a chewy, fruit flavored candy with five flavors to each box. The different flavor themes are Original Fruits, Tangy Twister, Tropical Typhoon, Berry Blast, Italian Ice, Redrageous!, Lemonade Blends, Jolly Joes and Mike and Ike Zours, which is a sour-infused blend. The Italian Ice flavor is a relatively new addition to the Mike and Ike family and capitalizes on what is historically a cool summertime street dessert sold from wheeled carts. The candy version is not served cold, but at room temperature and just in case you’ve hastily purchased the candy for the first time and been wooed by the cool, icy-colored box into thinking it belongs in the freezer, there is a kind warning reading “To enjoy this Italian Ice, you do not need to freeze this product.” I would have capitalized the word ‘THIS’ just for clarity’s sake, but Just Born clearly knows its customers more intimately than I do.

The flavors are Lemon, Orange, Cherry, Blue Raspberry and Watermelon and I’ve poured out the entire box on the large conference table to accurately judge the color against the dark Formica. Atypical with the Italian Ice flavor is that they are actually inside a small, antiseptic white bag whereas most Mike and Ike candies just rest comfortably in a rectangular box board case with a convenient (though impossible to perforate without a Bowie knife) finger-sized dispensing slot. When opening this opaque bag, there is a powerful synthetic fruit fragrance to the candy, triggering flashbacks to former olfactory addictions to glue and turpentine. The pastels of the candies, shaped like inflated child's Tylenol, seem ripped from an Easter Sunday coloring book and my first taste is the lemon. Lemon is one of the most common frozen Italian Ice flavors and the Mike and Ike captures the modesty of the flavor quite well, to the point that you barely remember which flavor you just consumed. Most consumer lemonades should take a hint from this candy, in my opinion, and take it down a notch.

I decide to engage the watermelon next and it instantly calls to mind Big League Chew, which, having never played baseball as a child, I don’t have much experience with. Again, the taste comes and goes like a drive-by shooting. The cherry tastes quite like that artificial cherry flavoring found in most cough drops but not in actual cherries and I realize I’m only twenty minutes into this taste test. How I am going to fill the next seven hours is a slow-growing tumor metastasizing on the conference table next to my pool of Mike and Ike candies. I decide to smell the bag again and it has surprisingly lost none of its original scent. I inhale deeply, letting the fumes of the candy seep deep into the bronchial branches of my lungs, where hopefully they won’t rot away my ability to breathe like the candies will my teeth's ability to grind peanuts.

Mike and Ike prides itself on being both ‘naturally and artificially flavored’, yet it’s unclear which flavors are flavored naturally (and what that means) and which ones are flavored artificially (process also unclear). The ingredients list confoundingly includes pear juice from concentrate yet there is no pear-flavored candy. There is not even a relative of the pear within this flavor assortment.(4) I picture crates and crates of unsold pears day after day watching their apple, orange and banana brethren fly off in trucks to school lunches, grocery stores and sandwich shops when just before they begin to rot, the JustBorn team arrives in blue, embroidered vests to whisk them away to be squeezed down into juice concentrate and then inseminated along with magnesium hydroxide and Red #40 into a line of candies that doesn’t even claim pear as a flavor. Perhaps JustBorn should consider Pearnado! as a potential flavor for us Midwesterners sick and tired of seeing apples and bananas walk away with all the gold medals. We used to have a pear tree in our front yard that annually bore fruit, which the garbage men plucked and ate and left half-eaten in our yard. Pears are clearly second-class fruits. Apples are immortalized in the idiom ‘American as apple pie’ and cherries remain an omnipresent cocktail garnish while bananas provide the rare potassium in our diets and countless opportunities for phallic jokes, leaving the pear unknowable and unrecognized. It’s patently offensive to the pear to include it in the ingredients list.

Mike and Ike also boasts itself as a gluten and fat-free candy, though including ostensible selling points for healthy eating habits on a box of sweets seems to portray a candy in the clinical stage of denial.

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1 - It is not clear if these rules are listed in random order or in order of importance.

2 - Since I am a coffee drinker and beginning this taste test in the morning, this is most regrettable as I might either fall asleep or grade every chewy Italian Ice flavored Mike and Ike with the bitterness and anger of a man denied his morning cup of Joe.

3 - Mike and Ike, despite being a box of dozens of individual candies, seems to be both a singular and plural noun, in the same category as deer, fish, squid and sheep.

4 - I consider an apple to be cousin of the pear. The closest relative to a pear in Mike and Ike Italian Ice is probably the cherry, but I’d label them no closer than second cousins once-removed at best.

David Foster Wallace Speaks about Holiday NERDS Rope

I've recently fallen in love with the writing of DFW and here is a little tribute to his genius:

Most people who work at East Coast magazines rarely frequent places that sell NERDS Rope let alone ingest it. Our Editor-in-Chief didn’t even know it existed and when presented with a sample, mistook it for a souvenir from Honeydukes, the sweetshop at Universal Studios’ Harry Potter Theme Park, which now sees more tourists per annum than most European countries. Our Managing Editor thought it resembled a ‘holiday’ vertebral column(1) his son made in his 1^st grade science class. A grizzled proofreader said it looked like someone ran down the bead aisle at Michaels with a glue-soaked Twizzler. He asked me if there was a razor inside of it. I told him I was about to find out.

The Holiday NERDS Rope is in a festive, sparkling green package cinched up tight on both ends. Dancing, flying, laughing, cavorting and plummeting along the wrapping are little red, green and white NERDS – tiny, bi-pedal creatures in stocking caps that resemble either shaved, dyed rabbits or cartoon germs. Didn’t I see these things battling my white blood cells in a seventh grade video on influenza? Wonka’s press kit states these are anthropomorphized versions of the candies, which begs the question of which human characteristics they possess. Are they loyal like a labrador or compassionate like a hospital nurse or violently insane like the Kool Aid man/pitcher? The packaging is not clear. NERDS look neither intelligent nor good conversationalists, but rather romping and brainless with the groupthink of lemmings in a gymnastics class with no teacher. No razor, by the way.

It’s easy to open and presented on a cheap, long cardboard shelf that slides out like a security deposit box. Tootsie Rolls and Almond Joys have this same shelf to ostensibly keep them from being bent or broken in transit from the candy factory to your grocery store. It would be elegant if the cardboard wasn’t perforated and almost as flimsy as the rope itself. There is something just unclassy about perforations. Why they try to intimate shapely elegance with a primordial, formless candy kids will undoubtedly whip their friends with is beyond me.

The package’s eating instructions call to mind phrases you might hear at an underground S&M club. Bite it! Chew it! Twist it! Pull it! I was so terrified by these commands I WHACKED it against my desk in a panic and the NERDS flew around the room like shrapnel from a claymore. My coworker still has a NERD in her tympanic membrane, giving all words entering her left ear a Wonkafied absurdity.

The taste is described as Soft Gummy Rope Covered With Tiny Tangy Crunchy NERDS Candy.(2) No commas are used, so these flavors may happen individually or in a simultaneous pell-mell attack reminiscent of Doughboys charging over a German trench. Be warned. It’s actually quite fragrant with a cherry fruit garden smell and the taste, like most candies whose main ingredients are dextrose, sugar and corn syrup, is more complex to describe than most mathematical proofs.(3) It’s quite delicious and wipes away the entire taste of the Indian food I had for lunch (as well as years of hard-earned tooth enamel) and leaves my mouth feeling like a dentist has pressure washed my mouth with microscopic sugar crystals. I washed it all down with a glass of milk. Merry Christmas.

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1- Santa’s spine would be classified as a holiday vertebral column. It’s red, green and white and evidences years of chimney-induced back injuries.

2- Cinta Sauve y Masticable cubierta con Dulcecitos Agrios y Crujientes NERDS. The packaging is also in Spanish as Wonka is clearly targeting the Latino/Latina demographic.

3- There is a hint of strawberry, watermelon, cherry and the white NERD is what I refer to as a mystery flavor due to the Airheads candy, which produces a white taffy candy called white mystery, a secret flavor with Fort Knox type security. The white mystery Airhead tastes remotely berry-flavored with a hint of lemon, lime, watermelon, (not the flavor of a garden-grown watermelon, but of a laboratory watermelon flavoring, which is different), banana (again, laboratory banana) and green apple (which is actually acidic like a granny smith apple). As a child, I used to think the white mystery Airhead took on the flavor of whatever you were thinking before you opened it and the candy through some inorganic form of ESP discerned your thoughts and embodied that flavor. It generally worked except for the time I wanted it to taste like root beer. You might be wondering what laboratory banana or watermelon tastes like. The flavors are more like fragrances laced on pieces of hardened sugar. Some are astonishingly close to their natural counterparts, like banana, and some are not, like artificial flavorings for grape. A banana flavored NERD, for example, tastes like a banana pumped full of steroids, biologically enhancing the flavor to limits Mother Nature clearly did not intend.