One year for my birthday, when I was a kid, my grandma gifted me a red velvet bag of deluxe jelly beans.
The flavors ranged from the standard raspberry and peach to the kinds of flavors most people spend their lives actively trying to avoid, like rotten egg and “barf.” I loved poring over the attached flavor guide, matching the pictures to the candies spread out on the kitchen table in front of me and offering my brother the strangest flavors I could find without telling him he was about to eat a booger-flavored jelly bean. I wondered how it was possible to capture the essence of green apple or cantaloupe in the form of a tiny, plastic-y candy. As it turns out, it’s complicated.
