It’s a pomegranate world whether you want it or not

Whenever I manage to find something I like, I generally stick with it and don’t feel much obligation to change. Change is only good if it’s better.

I can't begain to tell you how many of my favorite things have been discontinued just to make way for something "new and improved".

For example, I grew up in a simpler time when juice came in flavors like orange, apple or grape. There was no need for exotic stuff or weird blends.

Anything fruit flavored was based off these simple flavors and it never got more unusual than maybe raspberry or cherry.

In the 80s however, something seems to have gone awry. Someone discovered that they had these large weird green berries in the land of goofy animals and suddenly everyone on the planet was trying to figure out what they could stick kiwis in that had never had it before.

So who was the first guy to think "That looks like a fuzzy green testitcle, let's try it out" anyway?

Kiwi wasn’t really good enough by itself so you had to mix it with something else, usually bananas. I never have liked bananas so I never really like the weird mixtures of kiwi either. Kiwis are OK by themselves but to be honest, it’s just not as good as orange, apple, grape, cherry and the oh so exotic raspberry.

Apparently enough people like having kiwis mixed with other crap though that it was deemed a success. I’ve got no real beef with that except once kiwis became “de riguer” the entire product development staff at every large food conglomerate suddenly seems to have realized that they have to keep concocting weird ass tropical fruit flavors or there is really no justification for their jobs.

So, starting in the 90s legions of people with no real purpose in life started concocting all sorts of bizarre and clearly inferior mixtures of whatever oddball fruits and flowers they could find on the internet. It became like the great race to the south pole and eventually jumped the shark.

Mangos, dragonberrry, quince or whatever oddity you could find a native eating began to infiltrate the food isle. Weird flowers and spices are starting to appear. Pomegranates and some nasty tasting thing called Acai berry have risen to the top lately as the Lindsey Lohans of weirdo fruit of the day.

To be honest, pomegranates suck as food. You have to pick at them, they are full of seeds and the flavor is mediocre at best. It’s sorta like trying to unwind the rubber bands on a golf ball core just to find out there’s nothing more interesting inside than a rubber ball (of course, I’m sure golf balls aren’t made that way anymore. There’s something new and exciting now like Nike balls made out of titanium hair wound around a balled up core of Tiger Wood’s tramp’s phone numbers or something)

Gratuitus photo of Racheal Uchitel nearly naked

Problem is, there is only so much shelf space on a rack so to make room for all these weird flavors, something’s gotta go. Well, have you noticed lately how you can hardly ever find plain old orange soda or grape gum down at your local zippy mart? To hell with that, we need something new and fashionable like pomegranate mango.

I’ve had this habit of drinking wine coolers instead of soda since the 80s. They taste good and aren’t as sweet as soda and I just like em. That’s about to end though as now the only tolerable flavor left is something called “Seagrams Exotic Berry” (raspberry flavored) and even that’s getting hard to find.

Gone are lemon-lime, orange, lemonade etc. They’ve been replaced with weird stuff like “Calypso cooler” (this is bright blue colored) and “Jamaica me Happy” or “Fuzzy Navel”. Ad men suck alright. I have to confess that drinking wine coolers is a bit “frue-frie” at best but it’s downright intolerable to be drinking something that tastes weird and has a name only Richard Simmons could appreciate.

However, this is what broke the back of this old camel. I went to loot out the kids Halloween candy and boosted a Tootsie pop. The wrapper looked a bit off to me so I looked a little closer and saw this:

Come on people, - You know this isn't right!