Smarties, revisited

A few days ago an Easter care package arrived from my mum. First of all, it’s probably worth mentioning that included in the care packaged, amongst the home baked cookies, the flax corn chips, and the chocolate easter eggs, were two hair brushes. I now own five hairbrushes. But there was also a bulk bag of Easter-themed Smarties. Easter-themed Smarties are just Smarties, but with only “Easter” colours—if you can even call them colours now that the artificial colouring agents have been removed.

Readers may remember a highly critical review I once wrote about Smarties and how they’re essentially garbage now that Nestle has opted to only use natural colouring agents. I adamantly believed that the best part about Smarties was the taste of the artificial colours. And for the most part, I still stand by this assessment. Any time I have tried to eat the post-2009 Smarties that come either in boxes or holiday-themed packaging, I’ve always been disappointed. But I have to admit that these bulk Smarties were pretty good, even without the artificial colours. I don’t know if this okay-ness is specific only to bulk Smarties or what, but yeah, they were pretty good. They still weren’t as good as the old Smarties, and they certainly looked like they had already been sucked on so that their former bright colours are obscured by the melting chocolate, but yeah. I don’t know. They were pretty good.

I don’t know what this means for me or anyone, but 2015 might be the year that I rediscover Smarties. I also want to add, just as a point of interest, that one time I bought a Halloween pack of mini Smarties because it wasn’t mentioned anywhere explicitly that they were made only with natural colours, and I hoped that I discovered a cache of probably expired Smarties, still featuring the artificial colours. But I was wrong, and I was disappointed.

Ultimately that these bulk Smarties tasted better than their packaged counterpart comes as no surprise. Bulk Smarties from Overwaitea have always been the best Smarties.

In case you're wondering, yes I did manage to pick up a copy of Jonathan Safran Foer's Tree of Codes, published by
Visual Editions  (VE2) in 2010 and now out of print.