u/Asher-TXT

My favorite candy flavors are cherry, watermelon, strawberry, and fruit punch (though the last one usually is only a lollipop flavor, it's still peak though). These are all red flavors that are always colored red (watermelon is occasionally green but not often). For a lot of my life this has not mattered. Red is a good color I don't mind a lot of the candy I like is red. Unfortunately, now I kind of Have to care that a lot of the candy I like is red, because my stupid fucking red 40 allergy may have come out of dormancy (when I was super young I was allergic to it but I stopped having reactions eventually and now I am experiencing things suspiciously similar to a minor allergic reaction a day after eating red candy) and like 90% of red candy (in the US at least) uses red 40 to make it red. And until I get allergy tested for the sake of my safety I have decided to cut out red 40 of my diet.

Why do all the red candies need to use red 40? There are many other things you can use to make food red. I know this because there's many non candy foods that use other things to make them red. I can remember paprika (used in gold fish, which are orange but orange things also usually use red to make them orange, and used in cheez-its) for natural red colorings but there's another, more common, one that I just forgot the name of (I have memory issues okay). It's not like red 40 is the ONLY option for making your candy red. Surely these large candy companies with a ton of money can at least consider making a red 40 free version of their candy. I want to be able to have all that delicious red candy before I get allergy tested (and hopefully it comes back negative at least for red 40 so I can go back to consuming mass amounts of red 40.)

It's not like I ONLY like red candy, but my other favorite flavors are either pink or purple. You are NEVER going to believe what color is used to create both of those colors (hint: it's red they use red 40 for those as well). And mannn I just don't like other colors usual flavors (blue raspberry is fine but not great and blueberry isn't as common of a flavor as it should be, green is either sour apple or lime and sour apple is Bad a majority of the time but lime is good sometimes, I fucking hate artificial orange but orange is usually created with red so that's not even an option, uhhhhm. Yellow is usually lemon which really depends on the day for my feelings on it but usually I can at least stand it) as much as the red flavors. They should do things like blue raspberry but for other flavors. Green cherry. Yellow watermelon. Uhm. I am not creative. I know why it's only blue raspberry that exists but come onnnnn it'd be REALLY funny to have more flavors like that!

Anyways this was just me ranting about candy colors. Because what else am I supposed to do when I can't eat a lot of good tasty candies because of dyes. At least I can eat chocolate still. Not m&ms unfortunately I'd have to waste the ones that are a red or red-adjacent color and that's both wasting money and food! Which is bad! I'd rather just eat chocolate with no red 40! Also does this even count as an autism post? Maybe? I don't think the average allistic would feel this strongly about having to not eat some candy flavors temporarily (one could argue I have to cut out more than just candy but the only thing I have in my kitchen that contains red 40 is strawberry jam and that's only the cheap kind, the slightly more expensive kind has no food dyes), and autistic people are most likely to understand my absolute hatred of having to cut out food I like from my diet. I'm sorry for the tangent this post is over now