sweet recycling

one of these i knew about, one of ’em i just learned about…

…but now that i know there’s a second, i’m wondering who else does it?

back in the 90’s when i worked at sundance records we sold “pricey” cigarettes, and by that i mean we sold nat sherman’s and american spirit’s and cloves and such. these were expensive compared to your more common camel and marlboro fare, but i put pricey in quotes because back then a pack of spirits could be had for three bucks (all in, tax included) whereas now the pretax price is over ten.

one of the smokable items we sold was called a “bidi”. coming from india, they were the indian smoke industry’s way of “going green” in the sense that a bidi was basically they sweepings off the tables where they rolled the smokes, then said sweepings were flavored, wrapped in a leaf, then tied with a string. the contents of said leaf were lab tested and found to me mainly tobacco, with some rat hair, roach legs, and human finger nails thrown in for…um…protein?

a couple years ago i was watching a documentary on candy and discovered that kit-kat does the same thing…

we all know it’s covered in chocolate, with peanut-buttery wafers in the middle, but what’s the goop between the wafers? well, it’s actually bits of OTHER wafers that broke during the manufacturing process, so those bits are crushed into a mush and used as filler between the wafers.

and the dum dum folks do it too. ever gotten a sucker where the flavor is a mystery? and sometimes it even looks like one?

that’s when one batch ends and another batch begins. rather than waste what’s left (or have to clean the machines) they just let the flavors meld into a “mystery flavor” that ends up like this.

i wonder who else does “sweet recycling”?