Hygiene revolution

The Jelly Belly plant tour was a lot of fun - seeing rainbows of fruit flavors being tumbled into existence, hearing the cheesy tourspeak (the unlikely true-life success story of the Little Company That Could's rise from humble beginnings to its market dominance today, complete with historical footage of President Reagan snogging jelly beans!), getting a free packet of jelly beans, and, tada!, the chance to take a commemorative picture Mr. Jelly Belly himself (yes, there is a picture floating in the cosmos of me and a coworker posing with a giant plush jelly bean, and no, we did not have work pay to obtain documentation of the event).

Because I don't really care for jelly beans, I always discount how much I will enjoy the tasting bar. That's because I forget how truly superior Jelly Belly gummy candy (worms! bears! Halloween shapes such as spiders and bats! sour everything! Yum Yum Yum!!!) is to all other brands (even my beloved Haribo!!). They are just so amazingly chewy-soft (especially the gummy spiders, with their large, blobby, almost-gooey bodies) and explosively fruity, and I severely underestimate how much I should buy (*cut to a few days later, with me looking down at the empty bag with a brow furrowed in confusion and despair, wailing, where have all my gummies gone??!!*).

Anyhow, what struck me most about the tour, more so even than the myriad other food processing facilities I've visited, was the absolute and fanatical cleanliness of the production floor. Millions of partially (jelly centers only, and also the gummy candies) and fully assembled jelly beans lay in open-faced boxes, on conveyor lines, in tumbling drums, and were otherwise strewn throughout the plant for days at a time (did you know that it takes about a week to make a jelly bean!!!). Without a single bug, mouse, or even a speck of dirt in sight! Such thorough extermination of vermin and other agents of impurity is actually breathtaking to contemplate (especially for one who has taken a course on the history of human hygiene). While I've never been upset by the production conditions of the food processors I've visited, I've never been quite so tempted to eat colored sugar off the floor.

(Just kidding, there actually weren't any jelly beans or jelly bean ingredients on the floor, which is case in the amazing point.)

That, my friends, is the antiseptic promise of modern living.