Bouncy Bubble Barium
I had to drink a pint of a milky barium solution this morning so my innards would show up better on the cat scan. I had my choice of berry-, banana-, or unflavored. I went with berry. It was yucky, but not as yucky as I’d been led to believe by the sympathetic eyebrow lift of the radiology staffer that handed the bottle to me.
In fact, I’d go so far as to say it tasted better than several kinds of packaged candy. Artificial banana flavor tastes like nail polish to me, so maybe the banana barium drink was truly awful, but it couldn’t be any worse than those repulsive wads of spongy orange packing material marketed as “circus peanuts.” Nor could it be worse than Necco wafers, those chalky disks you see most often in a Valentine’s Day variation, with brief love messages stamped on the front. (“BE MINE,” or “LUV LUV,” or “CUTIE,” for example). And especially not worse than Dots, those hardened driblets of sugar paste stuck so firmly to the paper strip they came on that eating them meant supplementing your dietary fiber with a fair amount of wood pulp.
Wax bottles with syrup inside, Razzles, Red Hots, Jujubees, anything licorice—they were all nasty. But if there were nothing else going, kids would eat them. Couldn’t pass up a chance to eat some candy!
Since flavor was never the issue, it seems to me you could get kids to wolf down broccoli if you compressed it into inedible lumps with barely enough sugar and wrapped it in colorful paper sleeves. The marketing would require some care. If you called them “Brocco-bites: good and good for you,” kids would suspect the same kind of parental trick that makes them say, “If you’re hungry, eat a carrot.” No, the trick is to make eating them seem slightly transgressive, like those little plastic garbage cans with sugar tablets shaped like fish bones and wormy apples. Call them “Mean Greenies,” or even “Nasty Greens.” Then put them next to the chocolate chips in the baking goods cupboard, warning kids not to eat too many, because you don’t want them to get sick. Kids would start sneaking them on the side. After they’ve eaten a few, roll your eyes and say, “I don’t know what makes you eat those things. When we were kids, we at normal candy, like miniature Snickers bars. (Of course you didn’t; you ate wax bottles with syrup inside. So lie.) Vegetable problem solved.