another indication that I am not human

[calimac]

Candy manufacturers are now making fruity candies only in red. Because people like that color so much.

But I'm not a person. Red is just about the only fruity candy color I won't eat. I hate artificial cherry and berry flavors of all kinds (so I won't eat blue, either). I'll only eat red candy if it's cinnamon, which I love, or in the rare case that it's apple. Throughout childhood I thought I hated real cherries and berries, too, until I tried them. I love cherries, accept strawberries, and will eat raspberries. But I still hate the artificial flavors of them. Not true of the artificial flavors of other fruits I like: just these. Favorite popsicles: pineapple, watermelon, grape, followed by almost anything citrus.

I detest red-fruit flavors so much, in fact, that red is my most unfavorite color in general, although my astrological sign says it should be my favorite. Throughout childhood, it was associated in my mind with candy I didn't want to eat, and it's retained my permanent disfavor.

Comments

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I am mildly fantasted by the notion that you would have tasted artificially berry-flavored candies earlier in life than the actual berries they were meant to mimic, and thus been biased by candy flavors against actual fruit. That's completely bizarre to me. I agree that what American manufacturers consider cherry-flavor is profoundly dire. Worse even than "grape" flavor. But as someone who grew up first in small-town Sweden, I had cherries, raspberries, gooseberries, strawberries, alpine strawberries, and all sorts of more "exotic" berries out of the garden well before I ever tasted the American versions of artificial candy flavors, or indeed the Swedish ones. It may be worth noting that the various fruit and berry flavors you find in Swedish candies are completely different from what you find in the US, and in my view, much nicer. My experience of the American flavor spectrum in cheap confisserie was generally traumatic when we moved to the US. Most of the new flavors were chalky, medicinal, and just nasty. So maybe it's not that you don't like red candy more broadly, just the US versions...

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I was an American kid from the deepest suburbs and, in those days at least, American kids from the deepest suburbs got a lot of candy. And canned food rather than fresh. The first time I had fresh pineapple, I said "ugh" because it didn't taste like canned pineapple, which I was used to. (That one I got over, soon enough.) So yes, I knew berry and cherry flavors from candy before I could try the fruit - which for a long time I avoided, thinking I'd hate it.

You're probably right about it being specifically American flavors. I think I've had red "Swedish fish" and not minded them at all.