Why, Mott’s? Why?

So, as some of you may remember, during a recent trip to the grocery store, I discovered a terrible new development in applesauce engineering:

I was too stunned to buy it, and some of you expressed disappointment. Well, if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s disappointing my three readers, so I dutifully went out this weekend and bought a package of Mott’s Magic Mix-Ins.

Magic. Ha! Kids will believe anything! Mott’s knows it, and so do parents. Dig the friendly advice on the back of the box, extolling this garbage as an “easy way to get fruit in your kid’s diet”:

Hey, my parents had an easy way of getting fruit in my diet: They made me eat it. Nobody was sprinkling anything magic in my fruit to make it cooler. And asking for it would have earned me a magic trip to my room without dinner.

You know what else kids believe in? Mystery Fruit. For decades, America’s foodmakers have been obsessed with inventing blue fruit. It used to be called “blue raspberry” (Why raspberry? Why blue?), but now it’s just plain old Mystery Fruit. You’d think they’d come up with something really cool, like Mottsberry, but I guess all the creativity in R&D was spent on coming up with the idea of mixing goddamn Pop Rocks in applesauce.

So here’s the way it works: You take your applesauce, in its traditional plastic cup with the foil lid that never removes without tearing, and your packet of Magic Mix-In, which is fastened to the aforementioned foil lid with a clear, sticky substance that resembles the nasal drip of aliens I used to have nightmares about as a kid.

Here’s what it looks like after you pour the Magic on:

Here’s what it looks like after you stir it in:

And here’s what I looked like while eating it:

Imagine taking a melted generic popsicle and pouring it into a cup of applesauce, and you’ll get an idea of what the Mott’s Mystery Fruit tastes like: Cloyingly, artificially, sphincter-tighteningly sweet. And don’t forget the goddamn Pop Rocks in the applesauce–it just adds to the overwhelming sensation of wrongness. Very bad. Very, very bad. If this is what the youth of our nation needs fruit to taste like before it can be eaten, I say the hell with Social Security, we’ve got bigger fish to fry.