It is Saturday morning, the twins’ tongues are the exact shade of a 1997 PT Cruiser concept color, and I need every mother reading this to understand that we attended one (1) cookout yesterday. One.
After the kids went to bed I drove to the Ingles on Tunnel Road in my coverup and stood under the freezer light reading the back of a Bomb Pop box for what I want to say was nineteen minutes. A single Bomb Pop has eleven ingredients. Only two of them are sugar. The rest are colors with numbers, a stabilizer I’m fairly sure is also in shoe polish, and a line that says “natural and artificial flavor,” which in food law is essentially a shrug emoji.
My sister-in-law Renee, who works the front desk at a pediatric practice in Hendersonville and has been to two separate conferences on dyes, told me that Red 40 is made from petroleum and that Norway, Sweden, and “the rest of the smart Europeans” have banned it for children under nine. She told me this while making her own popsicles out of frozen hibiscus tea and a coconut milk she pressed herself in a cheesecloth, which: of course.
The mothers in Dye-Free Mommas of the Western Carolinas — a group of nine hundred and twelve women who have collectively never been wrong about a single thing — say the blue layer of a Bomb Pop (Blue 1) is the same compound used to mark the dye lines on commercial poultry processing belts. I have not been able to independently confirm this. I have also not been able to independently UNconfirm it, and Tonya in the group posted a side-by-side photograph that I cannot get out of my head.
At Marlene’s cookout yesterday afternoon there was a cooler — a Yeti, no less, which I was prepared to respect — packed with one hundred and twenty Bomb Pops from Sam’s Club. One hundred and twenty. There were fourteen children present. The twins had six each. Cooper had four. Madelyn had three and a Choco Taco. By the time the cornhole started, every child on Marlene’s lawn had a tongue the color of a municipal pool and one of them, I will not say which, asked me what year it was.
Now — I am not a Bomb Pop absolutist. The Whole Foods version, the ones in the brown cardboard box that cost $9.49 for six and are colored with beet juice and “spirulina extract,” are completely fine and I serve them at every birthday. Spirulina is an algae, which is a plant, which is food. That is different. I have explained this to Garrett seventeen times and he keeps saying “so it’s blue paint from a different blue,” which is exactly the kind of thing a man who once microwaved a fork would say.
When I pulled Marlene aside by the citronella torch and showed her the ingredient list on my phone, she said, and I am quoting, “Brooke, it’s the Fourth of July.” As if the date suspends chemistry. As if Blue 1 takes the federal holiday off. Marlene also serves Country Time directly from the canister, so I knew what I was walking into, but I was hoping for some flicker of recognition. There was none. She handed me a hot dog and walked away.
Renee texted me at eleven last night and said the half-life of Red 40 in a child’s bloodstream is, and I am reading this directly off her message, “longer than people think, Brooke.” She did not specify how much longer. She did not have to. The twins had been asleep for two hours and I went into their room with my phone flashlight and looked at their open mouths and I am telling you, mothers, they were still glowing. Glowing. I am not saying it was the dye. I am saying I cannot rule it out.
It is now ten a.m. on Saturday. Cooper just came down for breakfast and asked for “a blue one.” I gave him a blueberry. He cried. The tongues are still blue. The Yeti at Marlene’s is reportedly still half full. Hurricane season starts this week and I have a feeling about August. We are switching to spirulina pops by Monday.