I saw an article this week about something trivial yet interesting (as many of the peculiar and mundane subjects are in such time-wasting videos). The subject was a legacy treat called the circus peanut. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this concoction, it’s a marshmallow in the shape of a peanut, though with a flat surface, unusual colors such as orange, and a distinct banana flavor. Sometimes they’re found colored yellow or pink, but orange is the prevalent color for these treats, which have been around since the 19th century.
The video mentioned the decline in the candy’s popularity, and it speculated that people are put off by something that does not meet pre-conceived expectations. In other words, our minds are programmed to expect something shaped like a peanut to, first of all, be the color of a peanut and, more importantly, taste like one. Instead, we get something orange tasting like a banana, which of course is yellow.
Or is it?
There are other colors to bananas, but the yellow varieties are what we expect to see and, therefore, the varieties tinted red, brown, or even purple or black, are not widely cultivated for sale in our produce sections.
So, are we being lied to with an orange banana-flavored marshmallow with what appears to be a poorly thought-out moniker? No, not really. A peanut is a peanut. It’s a hard-shelled legume with the seeds (you read correctly) inside the shell, and they are (as we expect them to be) fed to circus elephants. However, some folks are allergic to peanuts, and some people have no teeth, and kids like candy, not nuts. The manufacturer of the circus peanut provided a sweet snack with a flavor many people like, in a texture pleasant to the tastebuds.
And here is something else to be said for the circus peanut: somebody at General Mills placed a circus peanut on a cutting board and chopped it into little pieces to add to some Cheerios cereal, thus creating what we now know as Lucky Charms (TM), back in 1964. And everybody knows the best part of any cereal with marshmallows in it certainly isn’t the crunchy grains. We save the horseshoe-shaped bits for last and, even if they are a bit stale, we love them just the same.
The article shed an unnecessarily negative light on an old snack which is still a presence in candy aisles, in the same neighborhood as those paper strips of button candy, Necco(TM) wafers and licorice whips. They’re nostalgic, quirky, and overall, not a bad little diversion from all the cultural concoctions we devour regularly that are even worse for our health.
And yes, I’m sure elephants would eat them.
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