ANGLES: Gross or Great: Are Gushers delicious?
Yes, they’re fun, nostalgic candies
NOAH WICKS
ntwicks17@ole.augie.edu
They look like jewels. But take a bite and you’ll realize that they’re worth so much more than that.
Fruit Gushers, the fruity candy snack invented in 1991, hearken back to the childhoods of millennials and Gen Xers, alongside other sugary treats like Fruit Roll Ups and Fruit by the Foot. They are fun, colorful and most importantly, they burst in your mouth.
The packaging is psychedelic. A purple and pink multicolored bag draws you in with splashes of the fruity core liquid on the cover alongside the red, pink and orange jewels. The large white logo pops, the curvature of the letters giving it an animated ‘90s feeling.
The actual gushers look squished and irregular. They aren’t as beautiful as the elongated hexagonal bipyramids on the package, but who cares. It’s candy.
The snacks are slimy to the touch and cover your fingers with a sweet, sticky goo that you can’t help but lick off.
Upon first taste, the coating of the gummies provides an instantly sweet sensation that tastes like pure sugar. And then, the “gush” hits, adding a sudden burst of flavor to the experience.
They are named gushers for a reason. There is supposed to be liquid inside. It’s the unique trait that makes the snacks so appealing, like the “pop” to Pop Rocks and the soda flavor to Bottle Caps.
The raspberry lemonade flavored gusher is refreshing, just like drinking real lemonade on a sunny day. The orange cherry is a bit subtle, and it’s a taste that slowly develops, rather than hitting your taste buds full-force. The strawberry peach is a sugary take on the fruits, though it is a bit sweeter than the actual flavor would be.
Even though the name suggests it, Fruit Gushers don’t have a pure “fruit flavor.” They don’t need one. They were meant to be sweet, sugary and delicious treats that occasionally fulfill your candy craving with their sticky goodness.
At 110 calories and 14 grams of sugar per serving Fruit Gushers aren’t the healthiest of snacks. But they do have 10 percent of a person’s daily value of Vitamin C, so they do possess a little bit of health value.
But what gives Fruit Gushers their true value, is the nostalgia they give. They provide a brief window back into their childhoods of watching Saturday morning television, riding Heelys and playing with digital pets. Plus, Fruit Gushers were included in Buzzfeed’s “48 Reasons ‘90s Kids Had The Best Childhood.”
So, just pop one of these gems into your mouth. You’ll realize their true value soon enough.
Noah Wicks is a English and journalism major from Nunda, South Dakota.
No, they aren’t fit for adult consumption
KEELEY MEIER
kmmeier16@ole.augie.edu
I hold an unpopular opinion with children and adults alike: Fruit Gushers are disgusting. However, it has been a while since I’ve tried them, so I wanted to be a good sport and see if I am still correct.
I am.
The sugar level in my blood skyrocketed by just taking a whiff out of the bag of obnoxiously colored gummies which appeared as though they would stick in my arteries and clog them forever.
When I first picked up one of the slimy snacks, I instantly regretted deciding to be a good sport.
However, I closed my eyes and ate it.
It burst in my mouth as if I was popping a zit. Nothing on God’s green earth could possibly be more unappetizing than that. If that isn’t bad enough, the aftertaste resembled all the chemicals it probably took to make them the unnatural color they are. It didn’t help that they were stuck in my teeth for the next 12 hours (sorry, dentists of America).
The gummies tasted as much like the advertised flavors as lime Lacroix tastes like actual limes. The orange cherry tasted more like someone ran over an orange with a semi-truck that had roadkill on its wheels. The strawberry peach tasted more like a cherry that had been injected with nail polish remover. The raspberry lemonade tasted as if the person who made them has never tried raspberry lemonade in their life.
If the horrid flavors don’t scare you away, the package includes a warning that says children should be seated and supervised while eating. This is not a promising signal of a good candy.
But then again, Fruit Gushers’ main audience is little kids who also think that dirt and glue taste good, so I don’t put much stock into these liquid gummy nightmares.
