- Gummy
I have been hooked on gummy worms lately, especially after dinner. I keep them in the fridge, on the instruction of my gummy-enthusiast colleagues, because they swell and grow firmer, juicier, and you can suck on them for longer. When I bought my own gummies the other day, I searched “are gummies bad for you.” The first result was from r/habits: someone confessed to eating exactly 5 gummy worms every night as they finished their work, and was asking if this was a bad thing—they added that they work out twice a week for 40 minutes each, if that mattered. Not a single comment took the poster’s concerns seriously. They were a chorus of affirmations, radical positivity, telling the anxiety-ridden gummy-eater that they would be fine, that they should enjoy their candy. I found it incredibly sentimental, the first genuinely nice thing I had read online in months. I have eaten more than several gummies since, sucking off the sour and holding them in my mouth, saliva pooling around the slowly shrinking worm.
In the first packet I bought, the flavours were tropical and fruity: an assortment of Pucker Pineapple, Mellow Melon, and Succulent Strawberry. They were nice enough, but not entirely to my taste. I came to prefer flavours that were not trying to evoke anything in the natural world—chemical inventions that, somehow, tasted just like Blue. Neon worms, fizzing with preservatives, gelatin, and sugar, became my favourites. I liked them as sour as possible, citric acid coating my tongue as I winced in pleasure.
One of the colleagues who introduced me to the sweets had gone a level further, having been inured to regular store offerings of sourness. She ordered tubs of citric acid online, dipping her pinky finger into them for a light snack. I wondered if I would be eating gummy worms long enough to graduate to her level. Though I was currently addicted, I wondered if I would be sick of it in about a few weeks. It was like eggs, or any other food that teenage TikTokers who post about mental health like to call “hyperfixations” (I am sure they are misusing the term somehow). They call it the “egg ick”: “When we find our new favourite dish and eat it obsessively until the switch inside us flips and we suddenly hate it more than anything.”
Eggs have a peculiar taste and texture, and I don’t think we were ever meant to eat them. I never questioned it while growing up vegetarian because my dad said it was the best source of protein we could have, next to tempeh, tofu, and lentils. But the egg is an egg from something, an un-child on the verge, a milky and defenseless thing. Like chicken breasts or minced beef from the supermarket in their plastic, I was always presented with a final product: a hard-boiled egg, sliced into quarters, sometimes even with the yolk removed. Salt and pepper. So clean that it could have never glanced against life.
In her late teens or early 20s, my sister began eating meat. She was not allowed to bring it into the house, so she ate fried chicken with her friends outside. My parents knew but did not mind, as long as they didn’t have to see it. Once, when primary school classmates I was trying to impress came over for a birthday party, they asked if they could order sausage pizza. I felt the stomach-dropping guilt I had only reserved for gay activities: reading lesbian Hannah Montana fanfiction on the family computer, looking up “Ellen kissing wife” on Google Images. I think both guilts came from the same source: that not only had I disobeyed a rule, but that there was something rotten and foul inside of me, and I could not help but be tempted by its foreign, exciting tastes. Once, I stuck a finger down my throat and threw up at an overnight camp when it was revealed to me that the catered food might not have been vegetarian. I remember how immensely proud I was of myself, for I had resisted.
I kept eating gummies for weeks after my initial purchase, but the excitement started to dwindle, and the guilt rose up again. The artificial worms were technically vegetarian, but I could not let this gustatory fixation become a norm or a habit. Firstly, because it would not be special anymore, and secondly, because I would keep wanting more. The small, kiddie packets from 7-11 wouldn’t be enough. I would start buying them in bulk, ingesting more and more sugar and gelatin and un-pronounceable preservatives until they became all I could stand eating. I was feeding myself, but the wrong part of me.
I was washing a bunch of baby kai lan the other day when I saw it: a tiny slug, no longer than a segment of one of my fingers, black and squirming. It had been inside the packet when I bought it, and it was somehow still alive. It didn’t look like it had chewed up any of the greens, but it seemed healthy, wetly sliding along the edge of my red plastic strainer. I jumped, exclaiming. The slug paid no mind. My first impulse was to kill it, and to throw all of the kai lan away. I did not hate worms, but I didn’t know what the slug had done in there. What if its secretions wouldn’t get washed away? What if I ate them and got sick? I imagined more of the small slugs wriggling in my stomach, nibbling at the walls.
I let it inch up my index finger. There would always be some slug in the vegetables, a bit of a feather or feces stuck to the outside of an eggshell. I did not know where or how my gummy worms were manufactured, but I knew that gelatin was boiled from the bones of cows. I took a wet piece of kai lan out of the strainer and held the stem close to the slug. It slowly climbed on. I held the vegetable aloft, walking as steadily as I could to the door. I took the elevator 9 floors down, walked outside, and held the stem close to a nearby bush. The slug inched off it onto a new leaf. I had no idea if it was even a slug, if it would thrive in this bush or immediately die somehow. I took a picture of its new home and went back upstairs.
I washed the kai lan again and cooked it with some garlic, soy sauce, and sesame oil. I ate it with tofu and rice. I ate some gummy worms for dessert, and forgot about getting sick.
I’ve been holding onto these paragraphs, wondering if they would really fit anywhere, but knowing that I could not delete them either. The prompt of ‘the misfit piece that tries a bit too hard’ feels right for it.
