Bite of the Issue: The Worst Halloween Candy Imaginable.

We’re all familiar with bad Halloween candy. Cruel, unfestive people may put out bland sweets like Tootsie Rolls or candy corn, and true sociopaths might hand out apples or toothbrushes, yet these people have not scratched the surface of what bad Halloween candy can be. Hiding behind the masks of jellybeans is a collection of lab-synthesized edible attacks brought about by the devil himself. This Bite of the Issue is an exploration into the jellybeans created to disgust.

If you’re unfamiliar with it, BeanBoozled is a simple party game in which you spin a wheel that picks the color of the jellybean you must eat. These colors vary randomly between a good and bad flavor. For example, a red jellybean is either cherry-flavored or dead bandage-flavored, and green can be juicy pear or booger-flavored. 

The experiment is simple: after first separating the bad and good beans by scent, every bad bean of a color is eaten at once, until all the beans have been tasted, after which they have been ranked by experience. A lone paper bag has been placed beside the beans, in case disaster strikes. To start off the jellybean gauntlet are flavors that are, against all odds, palatable. The clear best of the bad jellybeans is toothpaste. Unsurprisingly, it tastes like a generous squeeze of toothpaste shoved into your mouth. An extremely sharp minty flavor coats the tongue, but it isn’t exactly unpleasant—in fact, pinned against the other jellybeans in the experiment, it’s rather refreshing and serves as a palate cleanser. Another tolerable jellybean is, surprisingly, stinky socks. Even paired with its counterpart, Tutti Frutti, it simply has little flavor to compete with the other jellybeans. This result is honestly disappointing, considering that stinky socks is a rather familiar scent, far more disgusting than its jellybean manifestation. The wet dog jellybean has a similar malfunction, in which the taste is indiscernible, and the scent is too weak. Besides that, and this might be a hot take, the sensory experience of a wet dog jellybean is not so bad in the first place. 

Following those three are the jellybeans that taste awful, but not bad enough to warrant gagging. Burnt rubber, a scent that most would lack any experience of, yet the taste of the jellybean is strikingly familiar. It hits everything that comes to mind about burnt rubber. A strong bitter aftertaste, with harshly artificial notes. It tastes like the waste that might come out of an oil refinery. After burnt rubber is the stink bug. The stink bug jellybean lives up to its name, being very overwhelmingly stinky, almost as if you were forced to sniff a stink bug and then eat it right afterwards. Thankfully, it had little aftertaste. Two oddly similar jellybeans are the old bandage and booger flavors. Both tasted slightly mellow, yet very artificial, with a pungent smell. These jellybeans practically ignored the taste buds, lunging instead to attack the nose, and they were mostly successful in their assault.

Lastly are the truly awful jellybeans. The flavors that your body would simply reject and regurgitate right back out. The first of these jellybeans is barf. Shockingly, this bean tasted nothing like real vomit, which practically everybody is well acquainted with. For those rare people who enjoy their own vomit, this jellybean is not for you. Rather than the pungent acidity of barf, this jellybean has a uniquely dense, almost pain-inducing bitterness, and an obvious artificial aftertaste. Both the barf bean and the upcoming final jellybean seem to latch on to the taste buds and create a long-lasting, unforgettable scent in the nose. Despite jellybeans being mostly a combination of sugar and starch, there is no tangible hint of sugar for your brain to latch on to. This jellybean is just torturous, but somehow it can still get worse. The worst bean of all is liver and onions. This result is a total surprise, since both liver and onions have millions of fans across the globe. However, much like some jellybeans mentioned before, the artificial origins of this jellybean cause it to taste entirely different from its supposed flavor. Rather than liver and onions, this final jellybean tasted like the pure embodiment of suffering. The flavor of “liver and onions” is practically indescribable, because it features none of the familiar flavors that were in the other jellybeans, like bitterness and acidity. There was nothing for the brain to latch on to, so the jellybean shocked the brain so much it responded in utter disgust and fear.

With that said, for those who would like to give trick-or-treaters a special surprise this Halloween, consider slipping in a bag of barf or liver and onion jellybeans. It might, however, cause mass panic and despair (and a police report for poisoning children). Otherwise, keep this information in mind next time you play BeanBoozled, and stay wary if there ever comes a time you receive a mysterious unbranded jellybean bag.