Black Licorice

Hoo boy, black licorice sucks. It's not just kinda-bad, it's not just mildly bad. It actually has a hostile taste. It's a flavor that has you groping for an emergency beverage. It's foul.

Now if I licked a car tire, that would be foul too. But here's the difference. The car tire isn't in the candy aisle. There are things that taste worse than black licorice I grant you, but there's nothing that exceeds black licorice in the disparity between promised taste and actual taste. Nobody thinks a handful of mouse droppings is going to taste any good. But if we bagged them and put them next to the Snickers and called them Mouseychews then I think you'd be setting unrealistic expectations.

See, that's how I feel every day when I'm in a store and see something like "Good n' Plenty" on the shelf. I want to shake somebody by the shoulders and say "They're selling mouse droppings as candy!" See, the marketers of licorice are brazen. They could try to call it health food or new age food if they wanted - that stuff is expected to suck. But they call it candy. Candy!

Maybe that label dates back to the age when there just wasn't a lot of candy. Was there candy in pilgrim era America? What did they have? Taffy? Sugar cubes? I'm guessing it was back in the colonial era, or the frontier era, or the robber baron era (I don’t know, I get my eras confused) when someone took a long swig of licorice-flavored, hallucinogenic absinthe and said: “You know, maybe it’s just the wormwood talking – but I think this would make a great candy!” And then he fell over and died. And so licorice was born.

Well, okay, that’s not true. I just looked up the history of licorice and it comes from the boiled roots of the licorice plant. For hundreds of years many cultures have used it medicinally. Whoop-dee doo.

To those of you who have given licorice as a gift, or offer it to guests, or give it to children on Halloween: how dare you. What the hell is wrong with you. Even if you've somehow managed to acquire the taste for yourself, what possibly makes you think it's okay to offer it to others? Are you trying to ruin a child's Halloween? To see licorice in the candy aisle is insult enough. To actually expect someone to eat it on your whim is disgusting. You should be forced to drink glasses of Clamato until you swear to keep your licorice to yourself.

P.S. Not a big fan of the carob chocolate either.

And you know, since this isn't a long entry, let me throw in my two cents about those milk mustache ads. (now in what, their fifteenth year?) Do they realize that the mustaches in these ads are grotesque and obscene and bear no resemblence at all to a genuine milk mustache? Do they not know that milk mustaches are unflattering and borderline repulsive to have to look at, particularly when the ad makes it appear you've been drinking heavy cream out of a bucket? Would you make a Hersheys ad showing a smiling person with chocolate smeared around the sides of their mouth? No, that would be disgusting. So why does milk get a free pass?