Black Licorice

It is 2022, heading into Thanksgiving. I haven’t eaten any Halloween candy, but seeing the little boxes of Dots gumdrops somehow awakened in me a craving for black licorice. I realize not everyone likes black licorice. It’s one of those tastes that are just popular enough for the market to keep supplying it. I seem to like a lot of things that a lot of people don’t like, like Brussels sprouts, skydiving, and Ayn Rand. Some of those tastes, like the one for cruciferous vegetables, may be genetic. Do I like things because so many don’t? I don’t think so, but I have come to enjoy my sense of uniqueness.

I’m selective about my licorice, as with everything I eat. A few years ago, when my daughter brought me some back after her trip to Europe, I tried a Scandinavian licorice, which was salty and not sweet. I didn’t care for it. There are a lot of licorice candies that I don’t consider wholesome enough to eat, even sparingly. They have ingredients such as refined sugar and gelatin that I avoid. My long time favorite is Panda brand, from Finland, but I haven’t had any in a few years. We went to Rite-Aid to buy some, and there was Red Vines brand sugar free licorice on special next to it. Upon checking the ingredients and nutritional information panel, it looked wholesome enough to eat in small portions, so I picked it up.

Both of these brands consider a serving to be 100 calories. To me, that’s a lot of licorice, and I generally eat no more than half a serving in a day, and not every day. The “sugar free” thing is mostly marketing. It uses “maltitol syrup” for its sweetener. This is a sugar alcohol along the lines of xylitol, sorbitol, and erythritol. It is technically a carbohydrate with about half the calories of sugar, and does not promote tooth decay. In contrast, Panda brand gets its sweetness from molasses, which, nutritionally, is basically sugar. Both taste good, and to my palate, are quite sweet, Red Vines being somewhat sweeter.

It is 2022 and a “NyQuil chicken” fad makes the rounds on TikTok. I only hear about it because of multiple news outlets passing on the message from the FDA not to cook chicken in NyQuil. Original green NyQuil is licorice flavored, and tastes a bit like anisette liqueur. Both make me sleepy. When I first tried NyQuil, many years ago, I had a hard time identifying the flavor. The deep emerald color threw me off. I wonder how many faddists trying NyQuil chicken would be attracted to “sweet licorice chicken” or “chicken anisette,” which is a real thing, according to my internet search.