Banned.

Both of my parents work full time jobs. When I was younger this meant that during summer breaks from school, they needed to find somewhere my sister and I could go and stay out of too much trouble. (This would have been well advised during the long unsupervised afternoons I spent during junior high school, but that’s a different story.) So they did what any Jewish parents would do, they signed us up for day camp at the YMCA.
Summer camp at the Y was pretty fun. We played a lot of team sports and had hours of unstructured time on a variety of playgrounds around the greater Sacramento area. It’s not unusual to have weeks in Sacramento with temperatures over 100 degrees everyday. So each day at Y camp was capped off with a few hours at the pool. This is where I learned to do front flips off the high-dive, a feat that scares me to even think about today. It’s also where I was wrongfully accused of setting off a fire alarm, and later interrogated by the Fire Department. (Again, that’s a different story.)
Every Friday at the Y all the kids piled into a school bus and we set off for a variety of field trips. The field trips varied in their level of interest and fun; one week we went to the Waterslide Park in Manteca, the next week we would go to the man made lake in Lodi. But to me the most memorable was the trip to the Jelly Belly Factory in Fairfield.
It was at the Jelly Belly factory that I learned first hand about the dangers of mixing kids with industrial food manufacturing. (I mean, Oompa Loompa song based learning is great, but actually experiencing something for yourself is even better.)
We were about half way through our tour of the factory floor when we stopped in front of three huge cylinders. Each cylinder was at least six feet across and rotating while leaned on a slight tilt to the ground. The tops were open, and we could see inside to the churning mounds of brightly colored sugar mash. These were the raw ingredients of the jelly beans; the foundation for millions of flavored candies.
We stood there as a group and collectively stared into the spinning mass of pre-candy goop, mesmerized as if watching the rotating tumble of a load of laundry.
And then, without warning and completely unprovoked, one of the children (not me, I swear it was not me) spit a huge and glistening wad of saliva into one of the cylinders. We all watched, silent and stunned as the glob of spit arched through the air and disappeared into the whirling mix of partially hydrogenated corn starch and yellow number 5.
The rest of the day is something of a blur. I remember loud klaxons blaring as the whole production shuddered to a halt. The factory floor was suddenly swarmed with workers shouting at each other. We were quickly hustled out of the building and back to our bus.
And I remember a great sense of collective guilt settled over the bus on the drive back to the Y after we were hastily addressed by a representative from Jelly Belly, “The Sacramento YMCA is no longer welcome here. Ever.”