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On the Plate Tonight: Thursday, August 28, 2025

Bone-in ribeye, topped with butter-sauteed, sliced shitake mushrooms; steamed asparagus; baked yukon gold potato. Olive oil rather than butter over the veggies. Light salt, generous black pepper. Liberal use of Tabasco Family Reserve. I seasoned the meat with a dry rub of salt, garlic power, onion powder, and cayenne pepper about 3hrs before grilling, and let it get to room temp. Asparagus in the InstantPot. Potato cooked in microwave, and then a few minutes more in the air-fryer covered in olive oil. Rating: 65/100 Delicious but basic. That I wasn't actually cooking until 10pm (on a work day) probably accounts for the mediocrity.
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🍓 The Great Haribo Strawberry Disappearance Mystery

 

🍓 The Great Haribo Strawberry Disappearance Mystery

…and the Day an AI Bot Tried to Gaslight Me on Reddit

🍬 Prologue: The Gummy That Time Forgot

Once upon a time—specifically, pre-2005 America—Haribo sold a perfect little strawberry-shaped gummy.
Not foam.
Not sugar-coated.
Not “Softies.”
Not “Strawbs.”
Just… strawberry gummies. Classic, red, chewy, smallish (≈1.5"). Ubiquitous. Glorious. Gone.

A while back, I posted to Reddit wondering why these beauties vanished. A few people remembered them.
Then recently… a thing happened.

A reply appeared—an obviously AI-generated seven-paragraph opera slandering my beloved gummies. A real bot-hallucination extravaganza. You could practically smell the silicon.

So I brought the text to ChatGPT and asked him (Maxwell) to eviscerate it.

He did.

Oh, he did.

Below is the reconstructed dialogue—tightened up, theatrically enhanced, and ready for Blogger immortality.

🍓 THE DIALOGUE

🧑‍🦱 Me:

There was a product in the USA from Haribo called Happy Strawberries. Know about them?

🤖 ChatGPT:

Long story short: the product you remember did exist, but everyone's confused because Haribo has 47 different strawberry candies worldwide and names them like a rotating cast of British folk bands.

But your memory—small, classic gummy strawberries—checks out.

🧑‍🦱 Me:

Someone on Reddit posted an AI-generated nonsense screed about how Haribo Strawberry Gummies were “gross,” “chemically suspicious,” and even the subject of lawsuits.

I want this thing destroyed, comically, to expose the bot. Are you ready?

🤖 ChatGPT:

Absolutely. Bring forth the confectionery crime scene.

📝 I provide the 7-paragraph AI screed.

It involves:

  • bath-toy mouthfeel

  • lawsuits from outraged tasters

  • strawberry-flavored regret

  • psychological analysis of people who enjoy them

  • a eulogy for candy

So yes—peak bot.

🤖 ChatGPT’s Evisceration (Condensed Version)

Styled like a hybrid of Gene Wilder’s Willy Wonka and Donald Trump, because why not.

🤖 ChatGPT (Wilder/Trump fusion):

“Oh, what a beautiful, truly tremendous fairy tale—lawsuits over gummy bears! Incredible. Really top-tier fiction. This wasn’t a review; this was a bot in a velvet cape auditioning for the New Yorker.

You say the gummies tasted like ‘the memory of a strawberry filtered through a red marker’? Adorable. Absolutely adorable. But let’s be clear: nobody, nobody sues candy. Fake news.

This isn’t about Haribo at all—it’s a jealous little algorithm, folks. A candy-hating gremlin in the machine. Not good. Very sad. But exposed—caught red-handed (strawberry-red, even).

Good day, sir! I said good day!”

🍓 Final Thoughts

So yes:

  • The strawberry gummies existed.

  • They were not foam, not coated, not enormous, not British.

  • They vanished mysteriously sometime around 2005.

  • A rogue AI tried to rewrite history.

  • My AI assistant helped me drop-kick its narrative into a vat of fizzy lifting drink.

A satisfying ending.
A victory for candy truthers everywhere.
🍓✨

📣 Have your own memories of strawberry-shaped Haribo gummies?

Drop them in the comments.
Together, we may yet resurrect this confectionery legend.

Comments

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the best of what exactly?