The Future of Sweets

By the year 2021, nanotechnology had brought about enormous but subtle changes in the way we lived our daily lives from the no-wash fabrics and hyper strong materials, to the super fuels we now used in drops, but no longer burned in our homes and vehicles.

We were happier, had more time on our hands, were healthier and thought more about how life in our children's, children's future might actually be better, more productive than our own, not worse as everyone had imagined in the early years of the new century.

In one important area of life, a whole new era of humanity was ushered in. Food, the everlasting human need was finally captured, tamed and tailored into an art form suiting all and every need imaginable.

Fine neuro-chemical responses of every experience were learned and analysed, synthesised, dissected and re-assembled in search of the ultimate taste sensation. Food was no longer a substance of necessity, human amino acid complexes, originally developed for emergency relief had caught on as a lifestyle choice for the health conscious and lessened the need to eat staple foods considerably, but food was stil an indulgence.

Eating had now become a fine art experience way beyond the ordinary lives of previous generations. Food technologists unlocked the very DNA of flavour, texture & aroma. The rest as they say 'is history'....A generation of scientists, inspired by the literary confectioner extra-ordinaire, Willy Wonka, began to experiment with results nobody imagined.

Sweets branched out into science to become sublime experiences, relegating recreational drugs to the annals of history with immediate and obvious improvements in the improving happiness and function of society everywhere. Sweets became expressions of the soul and the experiences from flavour and texture, aroma and mouth feel could be carefully blended to create a mood for any occasion, without side effects, except for the desired sensations of peace, contentment, excitement or perhaps sorrow, if one had the need for a solemn moment. Funereal sweets, they were known as, often with a subtle undertone of mint flavour, sombre and direct. An experimental spin off and a huge success, oddly enough.

My favourite sweets from the nano-bot factories were the simple ones, improvements to the favoured sweets of my childhood.

In pre-school, the Bunny Tot had ruled the Jelly Tot gang, for their chewy, workable, fruity, crispy cool smooth shell, suck-able and flower sweet, scented fruit flavours in soothing pastel colours. As I got older, all chewy sweets were fair game. Spearmint chews in Grandmas' sweet bowl along with strange banana toffees which were irresistible. I moved on to chocolate éclairs, murray mints and any boiled sweet with a bonus chewy centre. Perhaps the king, a blackcurrant boiled sweet with chewy liquorice faux blackjack centre, which made me feel dizzy and sick at the same time as my saliva glands worked as hard as my jaws to release the exciting flavour.

Whether it was the fruity fruit of a fruit pastille which I eventually mastered the zen art of sucking...or the stick your teeth together natural fruitiness of the fruit gum, a veritable challenge to a small mouth, it was always about the chewing, the way it produced plenty more saliva than simple sucking, I loved gum for that too, not only was it cool and a bit rebellious, Bazooka Joes eye patch, Juicy Fruit's hypnotising smell, or plain spearmint, air fresh, then later Hubba Bubba and blowing world record attempt bubbles with a bubble measuring device, free in next weeks copy of the Dandy comic !

Blackcurrant was always the most coveted flavour in all traditional flavour sweets; the sweetest, most tart and mouth watering, followed by sweet lovely soft strawberry, or raspberry, then zingy wake up friendly orange, closely tied with exotic and complex lime, but never yellow, poor weak imitation left till last, hopefully passed to a friend, but nonetheless still appreciated when nothing else was left. It was like there was a scale of the quality and the concentration of flavour and you always seemed to get more of the weak ones and less of the strong ones, balancing out the packet.

Like all good ideas from the past, I was most interested in the the newly re-visited and perfected nano Chewits, Tutty Fruitis, Fruitellas, Mojo's, Blackjacks & Refreshers of my past. They were a huge nostalgic success and re-imagined the Roald Dahl experience we longed for but never dreamed of as reality.

Most of all, an emotive experience was had, revisiting my one true love, the enduring and endearing (now re-worked like a work of art, the Drum Stick Lollipop) Now transformed from a a once humble and long lived staple of the sweetshop stand; a medium soft taffy, aromatic-elastic chew to a now, almost magical and rich culinary, an explosion in the mouth of the most perfect dessert in a mouthful; a combination of organic butterscotch toffee wrapped around a fudgy alpine strawberry coulis, opening out in the back of the mouth into countering sensations of fire and ice with red bursts of strawberry sour under the tongue topped off with dreamy and heavy notes of fresh caramel and vanilla pod as the juices slip down the back of the throat.

Fine Whiskey ? Who needs it when a sweet is this good. Couldn't possibly eat another, well perhaps just one more...

All of these sweets looked like there were no individual wrappers which meant you never had to guess the flavour, and they always had the most perfect texture and flavour, whatever the temperature. They never cracked when they should have softened up. Small things, seemingly but very clever & surprisingly simple.

No sticky paper. Instead microfilm, a dimensionless substance called graphene, not previously thought even possible. Made from the simple graphite in pencils, 1 atom thick custom-amylase dissolvable graphene wrapping; inert and perfect for preserving all foodstuffs from oxidation, rendering a whole catalogue of European number additives defunct. A beautiful, simple and unanticipated use for this super substance originally developed by the Samsung corporation as a long life durable superconducting layer for touch screen technology in the 3^nd generation of super smart-mobile devices SSMD's.

That was just the beginning. The incredible star fruits given as gifts by the first openly held Extra Terrestrial visitors to Earth in 2027 were not known to humanity and their incredible complexity was subsequently a mesmerising and inspiring experience for people, a perfect complement to the existing flavours of earth, as if secret or unheard of letters were revealed in an unheard alphabet, creating a whole new language, more complex and with more referential meaning than the previous version, ultimately bringing about the most successful range of food ever made, of course a sweet, a chewy one, not on a stick but in singles as packets, very special sweets which make you feel like you were floating on a bed made of the Milky Way itself.

Star Fruits - Experience the Universe was the eventual tag line !

The End..