Obligatory Food-Related Post...

Today, I want to talk about all the weird candy I used to eat when I was a kid. Hopefully I'm not dating myself too horribly by doing this, but I have memories of a lot of bizarre stuff that, for whatever reason, passed off as "edible" to my and many other 5-15 year-old palates back in the 1980s. Let's review:

1. Raise your hand if you ever got a ream of these at a truck stop on some long ago summertime road trip?

Dot Candy                                               via

Now raise your other hand if you spent as much time pulling bits of paper pulp out of your mouth as you did enjoying your food-colored sugar.

2. Speaking of trips, remember how your parents refused to go to Great Adventure (AKA Six Flags) and kept taking you to Colonial Williamsburg instead? This also applies to those of you who wanted to go to McDonald's as a child and kept getting re-routed (usually due to the presence of a Grandparent of some sort) to the nearest Cracker Barrel. To those people, I present your consolation prize.

Stick Candy                           via

3. It always seemed perfectly reasonable that if you drank enough of these, you would eventually not be thirsty anymore, right?

Nik-L-Nips                            via

 In hindsight, not really very reasonable.

4. Hey! What goes swell with drinking? Well, once upon a time, candy cigarettes were all the rage. Then, they were removed from the market for allegedly contributing to the rise in minors addicted to smoking (never mind the fact that they tasted like sidewalk chalk). Given this trajectory, I always found it odd that this product slid under the radar.

Big League Chew                     via

I shared some with a co-worker last week. Still delicious. No spitting required.

5. I could go on and on, but I'm tired, so I'll leave you with my personal childhood favorite. It's a rock! No, it's candy! No, it's....

Rock Candy
via

There's really nothing bad I can say about rock candy. Nothing but smiles over here.