Today’s Intense Moral Outrage
Posted on July 11, 2021 Posted by John Scalzi 63 Comments
Look, the whole fuckin’ point of M&M’s is that they are the milk chocolate that melts in your mouth, not in your hand™. So this unholy monstrosity is not only questionable the level of composition (really? As the add-in to a chocolate bar, you’re adding… chocolate? Really?), it also goes against everything M&M’s stands for as a product line. This is, literally, the actual worst.
This is why we can’t have nice things, people. This is why our nation is on the precipice. I just hope we all can take a long, hard look in the mirror at who we’ve become, and realize what has to be done. I pray we can find the courage. Our children’s children will remember what we do, here, now.
(And no, I didn’t buy it. I SWEAR. Stop looking at me like that.)
— JS
I see you about to make a burrito joke. Stop it.
I am honestly confused what the problem here is.
agreed. The hard candy shell was specifically designed so the chocolate wouldn’t melt and it was able to be a treat for soldiers in the field
Obligatory “yo dawg…”
Some products work out, some don’t. Which explains this M&M idea, New Coke and most cars made by Cadillac.
I’d straight up buy a case of these NOW, but they’d melt before they got to me at the moment. I have to wait for not-summer here in November!
Life is so not fair!
DROOL!
(I wonder how they’d taste in a burrito)?
I gotta agree, this is unholy! Another sign that the sacred seals are being broken, horsemen are riding, … humanity is at a crossroad.
Wherever you are, find an old man or woman who has never spoken. Lean in close, you’ll hear them whisper, “a dark storm is coming…”
The milk chocolate melts in your mouth not in your hands, but the candy on the outside leaves funny colors on your hand when it melts.
Think about it
How many teams of food scientists with advanced degrees were needed to bring this to life? As many as work on new Oreos or variants on Cap’n Crunch?
Can you imagine what that brainpower could do if it were in the service of humanity?
They’ve always melted in your hand. Don’t believe me? Hold some for a minute or so. You will have a multicolored (multicultural? could be useful for 127.0.0.1 pleasure but I digress) . Hold them 2-3 minutes and you get goo. Very tasty goo, but goo nonetheless. Share with your friends? Depends on the friends at that point.
Soon to be found only in the dollar store aisles until they’re gone, if there is any decency left in this world.
I do so want a bag of peanut M&Ms in their proper state. Or two.
PeggyL,
The peanut M&Ms are readily available almost everywhere and I can tell you from extensive research are fantastic.
Look, if you can put Reese’s Pieces in a Reese’s Peanutbutter Cup, we can put M&M’s in a chocolate bar. It’s like a reverse meta candy treat. Or maybe a deconstructed confection.
So … how did it taste?
whistles nonchalantly
Betcha the military won’t be putting this junk in their MREs!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%26M%27s
I first saw those on the discount shelf in a supermarket, whole boxes of them, apparently remaindered, maybe a year ago. I assumed it was a failed product idea. But Mars persisted, I guess.
What is the world coming to?
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!
This is the content we come here for.
Those things are good. I’ve never tried the peanut one, but the milk chocolate one…I need to avoid them because I’ll eat the whole bar. And I’m and M&M lover from way back.
These have been around at least a few years, and are still going. Other flavors too, I’ve seen mint and others. As well as reeses pieces in peanut butter cups, pretzel bits in peanut butter cups, probably a dozen flavors of M&Ms currently available. The latest is bags of M&Ms with multiple flavors in the same bag. Like Chocolate Peanut + Peanut Butter, or Dark Choc peanut + Milk Choc peanut + white choc peanut.
Kids these days, calling it cookie dough when they’re not going to be baking it, putting M&Ms into candy bars…
Truly, we are on the Timeline of the Damned.
No one’s going to talk about the guy leading kids around with the promise of candy?
Maybe the wrapper is edible, and it’s recursive?
I heard that you can shove M&Ms up your ass and the shit comes out yellow, red, purple, blue, and brown. True story.
Sorry, you’re maximally wrong on this one.
Most US mass market chocolate, by which I mean not things like Ghirardelli or Dove, are made with High Fructose Corn Syrup, and taste pretty bad. These, though, are made with real sugar. While the concept doesn’t make a lot of sense, this is a higher quality chocolate than you usually get in this market. I find the M&Ms candy bars to be far and away the BEST tasting candy bars that you can get without going high-end in America.
(Yes, Europe, I know, but your stuff is expensive here. No, I don’t know why most of our chocolate is so terrible.)
Honestly, I’m a bit surprised you’ve never noticed these before.
Not sure how long they’ve been around, but it’s been at least two years.
This is just wrong. Like a ‘cook it yourself and wash the dishes after’ restaurant, or a BYOB bar.
Eh, it’s a texture thing, not the apocalypse. Cf Crumb Cake.
Put the caramel M&Ms in some salted dark chocolate, and I’d be all over that. Not so much a peanut M&M fan.
So what you’re saying is, we should only let the military have them, because their original purpose is all that matters?
I’m going to get injected this week with a derivative of botulism toxin, which started out as a deadly disease, but was first used medically to treat strabismus, and in more recent years it’s been discovered that it can help stop chronic migraines. Yay for Botox!
M&M minis are a crunchy thing with a popular brand name. Crunchy things in chocolate bars are popular, from crispy rice, which does not have to stay in the cereal bowl where it belongs, to pieces of nut, to things like this.
Heck, they sell candy bars made of chocolate with lots of air holes. They sell chocolate ice cream with other forms of chocolate flavor mixed in. Even triple chocolate cake doesn’t get rejected on the grounds that chocolate chips began their chocolate life with another purpose. I think crunchy things — even crunchy things filled with more chocolate — can find their way into chocolate bars, even if they were assigned to warm-handed GI’s at birth.
I say up with crunchy things in chocolate. Up, I say!
May even the sky fail to be their limit.
kdb
My kid got one of these for a recent candy holiday. She picked all the m&ms out that she could and left the rest of the bar uneaten. The 3 year old chocolate fiend has made a judgment and found these lacking.
As someone who is A) allergic to chocolate and B) married to someone allergic to peanuts, there is only one word that can describe my reaction to your moral outrage: “Meh.”
Like those sandwiches made with donuts in place of bread or rolls, it strikes me as a bit too much of a good thing.
(Although Kate Kirby’s statement intrigues me. Damn it, woman, I’m on a diet.)
Clearly, what we need here are M&Ms that contain chocolate bars.
Whenever I see companies coming out with all these outlandish new ‘things’, I feel bad that possibly I’ve not eaten enough of the good old things they are known for. This passes after a few minutes.
But if I do grab some candy, it is more likely to be a bag of peanut M&Ms. Unfortunately, I don’t see them too often.
My children, if you have the ability to let M&Ms dissolve in your mouth until the candy coating is gone, you will have great powers. That so few have this patience is why America has grown weak.
Milton Hershey – he figured out how to make milk chocolate using cheap milk (and clearly cheap chocolate, too!).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hershey_Company#History
The blue one, with the crunchy M&Ms inside, is really nice. Great change of textures.
“I see you about to make a burrito joke. Stop it.”
Who says we’re joking? Burritos are sacred, which makes it possible for some people (cough, cough) to profane them.
I know fundamentalists who condemn my soul to hell for my pro-choice stance etc. But I won’t even use ‘Louisiana’ type hot sauce on my burritos.
These M&M’s could be put in a wrap with cabbage and sriracha and earn someone eternity in the pits of fire.
So, instead of putting peanuts into a chocolate bar, which anybody could do, they put peanuts into chocolate wrapped with a candy shell and put that into a chocolate bar.
Seems like unnecessary effort, but I won’t argue tastes.
🤣
The reason for this is to maximize shelf space in your supermarket candy aisle. If there were just one M & M product (or coke, or Reese’s or whatever) it would not be able to push aside all the other brands of soda or candy. It is sort of like junk DNA, or benign intestinal flora.
Even Intensely Morally Outrageous Chocolate is better than NO chocolate.
The obvious solution is to buy and eat them all in order to save the children from them. Think of the children, man! ;)
You’ve obviously not discovered the insane world of Kit Kat bars yet. In Japan, they have such flavors as Nestlé’s Kumamon Ikinari Dango KitKat which is designed to taste like ikinari dango, or mochi filled with sweet potato and azuki red bean. I kid you not. I’ve lost track of the number of truly weird Kit Kat bars out in Japan.
Does anyone else remember Don Novello aka Father Guido Sarducci? I’m dating myself, but yes, I saw him in the early SNL years.
Novello also had a pseudonym Lazlo Toth, which he used for his letters filled with moral outrage and dimwitted confusion over corporate America. (He also claimed to be Richard Nixon’s biggest fan.) The letters were typed in proper business letter format, but the content was barely past 7th grade.
He published many of them (and the various responses he received) in The Lazlo Letters. The one that I remember the most was the one where he was deeply upset at Mars quality control failing, allowing a deformed M&M through. According to the letter, the deformed M&M was an enclosure.
Mars sent back a very apologetic letter, along with a coupon. (And Richard Nixon always sent back a photograph of himself.)
There have been two Lazlo Toth books since, but I have not seen them.
We (and Yeats) were wondering what rough beast slouches toward Bethlehem to be born. We seem to have found it.
Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.
Product development is a circle of hell. A couple of past jobs involved food and beverage development, and I still have nightmares. It always starts with sales and marketing departments, and then expands into a multi million dollar clusterfuck that bumps the stock price for ten minutes two years later and then it dies on the shelf because almost nobody likes new products. People are creatures of habit, and most will try something new once or twice for the novelty, few add the new product to their regular purchase, and most of those will replace the older version, so market share is split, not gained. But someone will get a promotion and a bonus, leveraging that into a better paying job somewhere else, just before the millions of spools of extra packaging has to be dumped and the unsold finished products discounted, and the final project accounted as a massive net loss and a few dozen overworked development folks get blamed and shit canned. Not that I’m bitter 😂…
I’m more astonished that the tony residents of Pacific Heights let that guy dance around like an idiot with those kids, singing their heads off, and didn’t call the cops.
I actually bought one of those things once. I was hungry. It was on sale. It was right there. In a big display by the cash register. I succumbed. Lemme tell ya it was Really Awful. I don’t understand how it remains on the market, and I like both M&M’s and chocolate.
@Jeff Hentosz
It was Alamo Square, so the Pacific Heights Nobs didn’t care.
And Dianne was mayor, so . . .
Doctor looking at an X-ray: “See those little round things? You know what those are? Those are M&Ms. Those people are right, they don’t melt.”
Alan Sherman, “I See Bones”
Who told you M&Ms were a Nice Thing?
I am sharing my “trail mix” with friends while hiking. Almond M&Ms…
Friend: “Dean, I love your gorp. It is the best.”
Dean: “Indeed, it has exactly the right amount of raisins”.
Friend: “Ha ha ha ha yes”.
“The poor boys were in such great pain and they had all the pain medication they were allowed to have. It was really strong stuff and too much would kill them. We couldn’t even give them aspirin most times. I got a clever idea to use a new candy. The boy’s thought I was giving them pills. Time for a blue one, time for two yellows, those boys would be calm for an hour or two and sometimes rest. I was their favorite nurse because I told them I wasn’t supposed to give them the E pills because they were experimental. I always had a pocket full of M&Ms.” Nurse Anne (redacted) from her diary.
It sounds hideous. Then again, I was introduced to musk-flavored Life Savers by someone who gets them from a friend in Australia. I wish I could find them here, as I loved them.
Have you seen the Japanese snack boxes your daughter reviews? You might want to tone down the outrage a bit, Scalzi.
Yeah, seaweed and bean paste Kit-Kats, ;-)
I don’t even think we have peanut M&Ms here in the UK let alone in bar form. We do however have smartie chocolate bars which are a similar idea and actually rather nice.
It’s probably better chocolate than in any American bars though, based on the handful of American chocolates I’ve forced myself to taste and almost universally regretted.
They didn’t even bother to put peanut M&Ms inside, but M&Ms and peanuts separately.
In homage to the post preceding this one shouldn’t the title be:
When is A Chocolate Bar not A Chocolate Bar?
?
I just read Coke is changing the Coke Zero Sugar formula. Mistake or improvement?