Don't Feel Blue Just Because Your M&M's Are

I, for one, relish the opportunity to ingest the admittedly "unnatural" blue M&M's. They're new, they're exciting, and they're just about the only blue food you can get. I always felt this color imbalance in our diets was bizarre and unfair. The introduction of blue M&M's allows us to experience a color previously lacking in our meals-- undoubtedly a change for the better.

Claims that the the cobalt-colored candy-coated chocolates which melt in your mouth (rather than your hand) are unnatural are indeed true. They are also irrelevant, because every other M&M color is also artificial: just check the ingredients list. The sky is blue, although a markedly different shade than the new candy. However, the new blue M&M's appear no less natural than traditional green ones, which are of a vastly different hue than most vegetation.

Regardless, if the naturalness of your diet is important to you, you should be eating organically grown vegetables and not M&M's. After all, when you get down to it, what's so natural about 60 microscopic insect fragments or 1 rodent hair per 100-gram sample (the FDA's food "defect level" acceptability limit for chocolate), anyway?

While I too mourn the genuinely tragic loss of those oddly-beige M&M's, I will learn to live with it. The world is a constantly changing place, and M&M's are no exception: Witness the reintroduction of red M&M's and the release of peanut butter ones.

Truthfully, I like variety and change, especially when it's something trivial like candy colors. In fact, these sorts of minor changes are important because they teach us to adapt and to be better prepared for more serious changes in our lives, which we may find much more difficult (like moving to a foreign country or getting a sex change). Cherish the opportunity for such an exciting color change in your life. Hey, let's face it: Blue is a cool color.

Of course, none of these arguments can actually persuade you to like the new M&M's; it is first and foremost a matter of personal preference. However, if you happen to prefer things the old way, you really shouldn't be complaining if you didn't take the time to vote.

And in response to the accusation that blue M&M's make people act "very. . . strangely," I think I once heard a similar rumor about the green ones.

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