We all ate Play-Doh as a child. Anyone who says otherwise is lying — to themselves and everyone else. But there’s no reason to be ashamed! The makers of Play-Doh and its off-brand variants know that children (and if we’re being honest, adults) are going to want to stick every sort of candy-coloured goo they can get their hands on directly into their gaping maws. It’s why play dough is deliberately non-toxic and, unfortunately, wholly devoid of any flavour whatsoever. It doesn’t have to be that way though.
Children’s art and toy manufacturer, AMAV, has released an alternative to your more typical, tasteless doughy fare that has been approved for consumption by US authorities. The dough, dubbed Edible Sweet Art, comes five colours to a set and is positively bursting with more sugar than your child’s pancreas could possibly know what to do with. Each of the five colours (or one 60g serving size) comes in at 250 calories total thanks to a whopping 44g of sugar — or almost three times the maximum recommended daily allotment for kids aged four to eight.
But with all that delicious, diabetes-inducing sugar, the stuff must at least taste OK, right? That depends on your definition of “OK”. Also how much you enjoy downing cleaning products. We went around our office and fed the staff a sampling of the five colour/flavour combinations to varied results, to say the least. Some people actually liked it! Others could barely keep it down. The one thing everyone could agree on, though, is that the grainy, mouth-coating texture really, to use a direct quote, “sucked”.
What it was they were or weren’t enjoying, however, was a little less certain; other than chocolate (brown) and strawberry (pink), we finished our little experiment with no consensus on the three remaning flavours whatsoever. Was the blue coconut? Is yellow supposed to taste like Pine Sol? Why does white taste like poison? Who knows! Children would subsist on a diet of worms and other people’s fingernails if given the option, though, so there’s every possibility in the world that their coarse, uncultured palates would find the grainy-textured goop to be mouthwatering. But for everyone else over the age of 12 with visions of reliving their childhood except, you know, better, we recommend not trying to change the past. Never mess with a classic — you’re better off just eating Play-Doh.