It started when I picked up my twelve-year-old from Scouts. She opened the sliding door to my van with two large boxes in her hands.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Candy,” Betsy said.
Oh no. “Do we have to sell it?” I asked with fear in my voice.
“No,” Betsy said. “They were giving it away.” That was just the beginning. You see, those weren’t boxes of candy. They were cases of it. Inside each case were four boxes, and inside each box were fifteen individual packages of the most dangerous candy Europe ever produced. In fact, it was outright banned in the US until 2018. Considering all the things that are legal in the US—in Colorado, you can vape marijuana while riding a buffalo—that’s saying something.
I’m talking, of course, about the Kinder Joy, and it’s both a menace to society and a damning indictment of what the rest of the world—and the US itself—thinks about the intelligence of the children here. In Europe, it’s a chocolate egg with a plastic toy inside. But not in America. Our offspring aren’t smart enough for that. Congress reasoned that if the outside of something is edible, kids will assume the inside is edible, too. That’s why cherries with pits in them are banned in 49 out of 50 states. In the one place they’re legal, Rhode Island, a million people choke to death each year. And don’t even get me started on avocados. There’s a reason all the best internet recipes for guacamole feature ads for coffins. Happy Meals barely get a pass because the toy is separated from the hamburger and fries by a thin plastic wrapping. Without it, kids would have eaten all those mini Beanie Babies, and the 90s would have ended very differently.
The Italian company that makes Kinder Joy wasn’t deterred by America’s steadfast determination to keep its stupidest outliers from dying. Instead, it came back with a new, improved US version. No, it wasn’t covered in stars and stripes, though I admit that would have been awesome. I endorse any product that shamelessly exploits patriotism for profit. Instead, the new Kinder egg is separated into two individually sealed compartments. One section has a white, chocolatey frosting and two malted balls. The other contains a crappy toy disassembled into sixteen different pieces. Imagine if Ikea made the prizes you can get at a school carnival for one ticket each and you’ll get an idea of the quality and complexity involved. The packaging says there are over a hundred different Kinder toys, but each box only contains two different types. So far, we’ve encountered a dragon you wear like a ring, a bear that was also a very bad crayon, a dump truck, and a seal that does a backflip. This was exciting stuff. I have yet to encounter a single item that didn’t belong in the trash can before it was fully assembled, yet my kids insist on putting them together each and every time. So do drunk adults. Our friends Rocco and Phoebe dropped by while in town for an early family Christmas. Many, many drinks into the evening, the Kinder Joys came out. You can bet that all the toys were put together with exacting precision. In a way, it might be a diet aid. It’s hard to eat candy too fast when you’re interrupted by an instruction manual every time you open another egg. I have no patience for any food source that requires that much reading.
Betsy got those two cases after her Scout meeting Tuesday night. Then my other three kids each got two cases following their Cub Scout meeting Thursday. For those of you keeping track at home, that’s eight cases, which makes 32 boxes and 480 individual eggs. Each frosting cup section is 110 calories, meaning that, on a 2,000 calorie a day diet, a grown man could live on nothing but Kinder Joys in our house for 26.4 days without losing a pound. I may or may not be contemplating doing that exact experiment. Better clear off a spot on my mantle for a Pulitzer.
This is PART of our haul.
Still, the more plastic frosting bowls I eat, the more questions I have. It’s not just the sugar talking, although that definitely plays a role. I legitimately do not understand the safety steps involved in the creation of this product. It exists in its current form because someone was concerned a kid would be unable to tell the difference between candy and small plastic pieces in a toy. I get that the European form of this candy is not appropriate for toddlers. Do you know what else isn’t appropriate for toddlers? Virtually everything. I wouldn’t give a three-year-old a ribeye because they’re not capable of cutting it up effectively. Also, I’m not giving good meat to someone who is just going to cover it in ketchup. That’s like lighting money on fire. But there are no warning labels on steak. It’s just assumed that parents are smart enough not to feed it to toddlers, or, if they do decide to give it to them, that they’ll dice it up into teeny, tiny pieces first. Nobody is out there trying to make steak illegal because it’s not kid safe. Honestly, every single food is potentially deadly to children while they’re first learning how to eat solids. I’m not sure why regulating authorities made such a big deal out of the Kinder Joy. A kid who hasn’t mastered chewing can’t go to the store and buy one on their own. A parent would have to get it for them and then open the packaging. That implies at least some level of adult supervision that would stop a kid from choking to death. Then again, sometimes, the adult is the problem, especially if that adult is me.
Someone on Twitter once told me I was going to kill my children because I didn’t cut up their grapes. It’s not like they were infants. At some point, I trust my kids to be capable of chewing their own food. I guess if I were a better parent I’d grind it up in my mouth first and then feed it to them like baby birds. That wasn’t my worst culinary crime, though. Someone else—again, on Twitter, which really is a special place—told me I was going to kill my kids because I fed them corn dogs. I’m still not sure what the danger was in that case. Maybe the sticks are sharper than they look. You could put an eye out. If grapes and corn dogs are too dangerous for kids, then obviously the Italian version of the Kinder Joy would be a death sentence. No wonder the European birth rate is so low. It’s not that they’re having fewer kids. It’s that they’re covering up all the candy deaths. Big Sugar doesn’t want you to know the truth.
Unfortunately, the American, kid-safe version of the Kinder Joy doesn’t actually solve any problems. If a child doesn’t know not to eat the toy, how are they supposed to know not to eat the wrapper itself? Plastic is plastic. There also aren’t specific instructions not to swallow the included utensil. A kid might not recognize it as a spoon at all as it’s really more of a flat mini shovel, or, if you want to get technical, a frosting spade. My first instinct when I encounter something I don’t immediately recognize is to jam it in my mouth and see if it goes down without a fight. Even if there were warnings on what not to eat, it wouldn’t help. Any kid too young to know they shouldn’t eat plastic is too young to read a warning label. Since all these safety standards assume a complete lack of adult supervision, the candy company should include some kind of MP3 player with a recorded message not to eat the spoon and wrapper. Then some kid will swallow the MP3 player and die, and their parents will sue. And that’s why America can’t have nice things. Move to Europe if you want the good stuff.
The best solution to all of this wasn’t to add more packaging to keep the toy and the candy separate. It would have been to ditch the toy altogether and include twice as much candy. The toy is literally garbage. It’s not like my kids are assembling priceless family heirlooms. These are cheap trinkets that could survive, at most, thirty seconds of sustained play. They’re not interesting enough to hold my kids’ attention for even that long. Almost 100 percent of the time my kids spend with the toys is just putting them together. Then they toss them aside for someone to knock off a table and step on or for a pet to investigate. Note, even the pigs are smart enough not to eat plastic. They sniff it once and move on with their lives. US laws assume children are dumber than literal swine. Decide for yourself whether or not they’re right.
I’ve spent a lot of time complaining about free candy. I’m totally the guy who would look a gift horse in the mouth. For the record, nobody gives you a free horse out of the goodness of their heart. It’s probably old and worn out and now you have to feed it and clean up after it for the rest of its life while getting no meaningful labor in return. Unless you own a glue factory. Then any gift horse is all upside, I guess. The elephant in the room is why was this candy free in the first place. I’d say I’m not in the habit of taking free candy from strangers, but I’m the king of Halloween. I put an obscene amount of time and effort into helping my kids take sugary treats from people we don’t know in the dark. What a great holiday. But even I have to admit it’s a little weird a random person would be handing out massive quantities of candy on a day other than the last of October. There was a perfectly reasonable explanation, or so I tell myself. I’m willing to accept almost any story, no matter how implausible, if it lets me keep free stuff.
It had to do with expiration dates. All of the Kinder Joys technically expired three days after we got them. That meant stores couldn’t legally sell them any more. This time, a dumb law worked out in our favor. Obviously the candy didn’t go bad that fast. Inside that hermetically sealed packaging, the frosting could last weeks if not decades. As for the cheap plastic toys, those could stick around for millions of years. Not in my house, of course. They’ll get two minutes of use here while my kids put them together and then spend the rest of eternity in a landfill. Based on the number of Kinder Joys we have, we could fill up a dump by ourselves. I don’t know what store ordered too many, but they had an insane amount of it leftover that they couldn’t sell. Apparently parents decided that, for the money, they’d rather have twice as much candy and no toy. The Happy Meal model can’t fool us all. Facing a massive loss, the store in question gave away all their boxes of Kinder Joys, probably as a tax write-off. One of the Scout leaders must have a connection there because he took it all. He filled up his truck and a trailer behind it. Then he rolled up to the Scout meeting and started tossing out boxes like Santa. Everyone knows the fat man in red isn’t beholden to food safety laws.
We’re now in the unique and unprecedented situation of having more candy than my kids can eat. They pondered giving away Kinder Joys to their friends at school, but the market is already flooded. The Scout leader must have distributed boxes to kids at other groups he’s in because suddenly the local elementary school is saturated with free plastic eggs. Our candy economy may never recover. Even amidst this confectionery avalanche, you can be sure of one thing: Nobody will choke to death trying to eat a plastic toy. Probably. And that’s what helps me sleep at night.
Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.
James
Illegal Candy