Feb 7, 2020 3 min read

There’s a food version of binge-watching a Netflix show, and you can find it in a clear plastic bag on a shelf at Trader Joe’s.

I first came across my new munchie habit while perusing the trail mix aisle. Just to the left of the bagged nuts were the dried fruits. Now, I wouldn’t cross the street for a box of raisins, and those figs-on-ropes are just weird. But oranges? Oh, yes.

Tossed a pack of the dried mandarins into the cart. Before I pulled into the driveway at home 15 minutes later, half of them were gone. They were chewy and tart and sweet, and they popped when I bit into them. I’d kicked my gummy bear jones years ago, but this was a way by which I could recapture some of my chewy-fruity-sour youth.

They’re oranges, after all. Each bag looked to hold about three oranges worth of the chewy bits. And what’s wrong with eating three oranges a day? These bags of dried mandarins seemed to fit nicely into the five-fruits-and-vegetables-per-day nutritional guidelines.

I found myself veering the car into the store’s parking lot on my way home from work, heading straight for the aisle where my orange pals lived. Once, midway through my parched citrus dependency spell, I arrived to find the shelf empty. No oranges! And for that I had circled the lot three times to find a parking space and then navigated the scrum at the flower aisle. How could you, Joe?

It was the same empty feeling I got while bingeing on Netflix that week. I’d enjoyed the show “Grace and Frankie” all the first seasons, but this last one? As desiccated and flat as an old prune.

The disappointment about the oranges was about to get worse. For all the time I was chomping away on my dried mandarins, I was thinking healthy produce when, in fact, I was eating candy.

Had I read the bag I would have noticed that one of the first listed ingredients is sugar. The factories are sucking the life out of the orange segments and replacing them with sugar. In my defense, the ingredient print is teeny, and I didn’t have my reader glasses. By the time I’d taken my dive into the bag that first time, I was hooked.

We all remember the ’90s, when that fitness person Susan Powter said the key to good health and staying skinny is to eat no fat. Those were the days we all scraped the cheese off our pizza and ate the naked crust with impunity. We believed her when she said it’s better to eat nine bagels than one bite of bacon. How I miss those carby, misguided days. The diet gurus now tell us bacon is good and bagels are bad. But the one constant has been that sugar is to be avoided.

I thought about rinsing the sugar off my dried mandarins, but wouldn’t that rehydrate them? And if that’s the case, I might as well just eat a couple of fresh oranges.

After a year’s worth of vitamin C and probably five pounds, I’ve bought my last bag of dried mandarins. Also, I’ve watched my last episode of “Grace and Frankie,” bailing before the season finale. The writers got lazy. Some things end up not being worth the time – or the calories.

But it was so much tasty fun while it lasted.