PB&J In a Bag and more M&M Creations

I was at the new Wal-Mart in Fairfax today and was stunned to see a new product in the check out line. The Mars M&M company has come out with a limited edition equivalent of Peanut Butter and Jelly (PB&J) in a Bag. The special M&M's are called "Strawberried Peanut Butter M&Ms," and they are weird. I couldn't resist buying a pack to test them out. Sure enough, as I suspected, they tasted like little morsels of America's favorite slap together sandwich. Just add a hint of chocolate, shrink it down to the size of a pea, and put a candy shell around it. Why not?

Just to clarify, I don't really like PB&J, so I was really going out on a limb with this little pack. But I figured in a worse case scenario I could give them all to my toddlers who will eat anything. However, the most I shared was two M&Ms to each of my two kids, and about three or four with my wife. Yeah, I'm stingy. Fortunately for my taste buds the peanut butter flavor overpowered the PB&J effect, which made for a good mid-morning snack. I love peanut butter.

Shortly after eating them, I patted my portly belly and decided to check and see if I had done myself a nutritional favor by eating that bag of M&Ms instead of a real PB&J. One bag contains about 230 calories and various other nefarious ingredients. One PB&J sandwich contains about as many calories, perhaps a few more, and is possibly healthier. It all depends on the bread, peanut butter, and jam that you use; And also if you lay it on thick (like I do), or spread it so thin you have to sniff the bread to see if there is anything on it (like my wife). Needless to say the Mars M&M Company has come out with a nifty little snack. I just wonder if we as a society are to the point where we are too lazy to make a PB&J. If so, we now have an easy solution.

I checked out the M&M website to see if I could find anything else about their nifty little sandwich in a bag (not named such, probably for marketing reasons. It doesn’t sound as appealing). Unfortunately I didn’t see anything about their strawberry excursion, but I did see something else that really caught my eye. M&M’s have offered personalization to their candies for a while now, letting people pick their color, and even picking messages to go on the candies as in those little sweet hearts at Valentines Day. Now they have taken it one step further, and creepier. You can now get faces printed on your M&Ms. On their web page they highlight a girl’s face on some pieces with phrases such as “Tiff is 16” and “Born to Party!” on other pieces. I think this is a clever idea, although it is a little strange. Why would you want your face on a piece of candy that is going to be crushed to bits in one of your friend's mouth. I do think we could really put this to good use though. If the US Government had special M&Ms created with the top ten most wanted criminals’ faces on them, we the people could literally help take a bite out of crime! Think about it.