If I ever compile a list of shit I really should never, ever, eat, the Strawberry Twizzler has got to be near the top of that list.

The first sign that these should know be eaten is when the first one comes out of the package and enters your mouth. In that half-second before you bite down, you can actually FEEL fake strawberry flavor chemicals outgassing from this thing and hitting the roof of your mouth. It's like eating a brand-new strawberry mousepad. It's unnerving. It's something food should not, under any circumstances, fucking do.

And then, of course, there's the texture. Now, fresh out of the package, the texture's a bit mealy and unpleasant. The proper Twizzler texture only comes after the package has been left slightly open for a couple of days and the plastic in them sets. At this point, most of the volatile whatever the fuck it is has boiled off and they can be eaten with most of the flavor going to parts of your mouth it's supposed to go to. They get chewy and plasticky and good, and you can even sort of taste a sort of fruit-like flavor after a while.

The other reason I shouldn't eat Twizzlers is that they are one of two foods, the other being Cadbury's chocolate mini-eggs, that I will literally eat until they make me slightly ill. Put an open bag of strawberry Twizzlers in front of me, and barring intervention or a rare dose of willpower, I will eventually regret it. I don't know why this is. It's like they evaporate when they hit your stomach, releasing strawberry amnesia fumes so that not only do you feel like you didn't just eat something, you don't remember having eaten it. So you reach for another. Until, 45 minutes later, the bag is empty, tomorrow's column is done, and you feel like you want to hurl pink foam.

All that said, I still manage to end up with 3 or four bags passing through me over the course of a year. It's wrong, it would make Michael Pollan weep, but there are worse vices. Not many, I'll admit, but they're out there.