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I used to love Peanut M&Ms.  They were one of my favorite candies, and I could eat them by the handfuls, but I actually took care to not overindulge, and ate them in slow quantities.  Because they were chocolate-coated peanuts I could pretend they were an almost healthy snack.

My wife used to keep me stocked up with those square tubs of Peanut M&Ms from Costco.  I could make one last for months, so my wife usually presented my next tub as a gift for Fathers' Day, Christmas, or my birthday.  Once she even found a surplus sale and picked me up two huge boxes of all-purple M&Ms.

The last tub of M&Ms I ever had tasted different.  As it took me a while to finish the previous tub, this next one was definitely from a different batch.  It's possible the manufacturer had changed the recipe, which is not unusual in the candy industry as manufacturers strive to use the cheapest ingredients they can find, but this was I think in 2022, in the middle of the worldwide supression of human rights as governments arbitrarily disallowed people from earning a living while mass-printing money to pay others to stay home.  Every supply chain for every industry was interrupted, so I wouldn't be surprised if Mars skipped over “cheaper” ingredients and dove headfirst into the “ultra-cheapest” bin of normally rejected ingredients.

It's difficult to describe what M&Ms taste like now; it's some kind of nasty.  They used to taste sweet and chocolatey, but now they're nasty.  I know it's not my imagination because they even have a weird, industrial chemical smell about them, while the empty tub from my previous batch of M&Ms still smelled like chocolate.

My dad loves M&Ms too, so I took my tub of nasty to his house and had him try some, but he couldn't tell the difference.  I could though, so I let him keep the tub.  I haven't bought any M&Ms since.

I debated with myself, considering the possibility it was maybe one or two batches that were off, and maybe if I patiently waited a while the market would be cleared of the nasty batches and then M&Ms would taste good again.  However, every time a packet of Peanut M&Ms has fallen into my hands, the candy has had a weird chemical smell, and the taste is still wrong.

I had a porcelain mug with the yellow Peanut M&M character on it, with has hand up in a waving gesture.  While I was still trying to decide whether to give M&Ms another chance, my kids broke the mug.  The pieces ended up in the kitchen garbage, with the image of “Peanut” mostly intact on a piece that had landed face-up.  As I looked down at the remnants of the mug in the trash bin, it was like Peanut was waving goodbye to me.  That was when I realized I was done with M&Ms.

Goodbye, M&Ms.