Anyway, I was wandering through the gum aisle at Walgreen's when I spotted a snack food I had never heard of, but looked too horrifying not to try. Dessert Delights sugar free gum from Extra. I saw three flavors and bought all of them.
Here they are in order (from least to greatest) of potential to induce retching:
1.) Key Lime Pie
2.) Strawberry Shortcake
3.) Mint Chocolate Chip
Sportingly, Duckie agreed to try them with me, although she was definitely concerned about vomiting as a product of this little experiment. It didn't turn out to be a problem. Let's get to the results:
I decided we should try the key lime pie first. It seemed the closest to being a typical chewing gum flavor. You know, citrus (okay, that's still an unusual flavor, but it's not unheard of). So we each popped a piece. And you know what? It actually tasted like key lime pie! Kinda. The flavors were there, though it could have been limier. It even had a creaminess that you would expect from a key lime pie. How about that?
After allowing our palates to recover we moved onto the mint chocolate chip. That was the flavor I was most curious about. Mint is obviously extremely common as a gum flavor. You've got your spearmint and your peppermint and your wintergreen....mint, mint, mint, mint, mint. But chocolate? Have you ever had chocolate gum? If I've had it I'm sure it sucked. Extra's foray in the arena wasn't great, but it did okay. The mint was strong, the chocolate was weaker but inoffensive, and again we had that creaminess. Interesting.
Finally, we tried out the strawberry short shortcake. It had the classic synthetic strawberry flavor so ubiquitous in processed foodstuffs (well....the strawberry flavored ones, anyway). I don't know if the other flavor could be really defined as shortcake, but once again it was vaguely creamy.
So I guess we know what happened. The good people at Wrigley discovered a "creamy dessert-like" gum flavoring, and then crammed it into some gums with other desserty flavors. Ta Da! Dessert Delights gum! Hurray!
I think I'll stick with Doublemint.
