Mailbag: Fruit Snacks, Waterbeds, and Lobster Tanks

Decoder Ring

Slate Podcasts

Documentary, History, Society & Culture

4.6 • 2K Ratings

🗓️ 18 December 2024

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

It’s our annual mailbag episode! We get a lot of wonderful reader emails suggesting topics for the show — and at the end of the year we try to answer some of them. This year, we’re tackling four fascinating questions. Why do grocery stores keep live lobsters in tanks, unlike any other animal? How did candy get rebranded as “fruit snacks” when fruit is already a snack? Whatever happened to perfumed ads in magazines? And what was the waterbed all about? We’ll get an answer from the waterbed’s inventor who still has four of them. You’ll hear from Ray Shalhoub of Joray Fruit Rolls, consumer lawyer Steve Gardner, Jessica Murphy, aka the “Perfume Professor,” inventor Charlie Hall, restaurant historian Jan Whitaker, and the CEO of Crustacean Compassion, Dr. Ben Sturgeon. This episode was produced by Max Freedman and Sofie Kodner. Decoder Ring is also produced by Willa Paskin, Evan Chung, and Katie Shepherd. Derek John is Executive Producer. Merritt Jacob is Senior Technical Director. If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, email us at [email protected]. Want more Decoder Ring? Subscribe to Slate Plus to unlock exclusive bonus episodes. Plus, you’ll access ad-free listening across all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts by clicking “Try Free” at the top of the Decoder Ring show page. Or, visit slate.com/decoderplus to get access wherever you listen. Disclosure in Podcast Description: A Bond Account is a self-directed brokerage account with Public Investing, member FINRA/SIPC. Deposits into this account are used to purchase 10 investment-grade and high-yield bonds. As of 9/26/24, the average, annualized yield to worst (YTW) across the Bond Account is greater than 6%. A bond’s yield is a function of its market price, which can fluctuate; therefore, a bond’s YTW is not “locked in” until the bond is purchased, and your yield at time of purchase may be different from the yield shown here. The “locked in” YTW is not guaranteed; you may receive less than the YTW of the bonds in the Bond Account if you sell any of the bonds before maturity or if the issuer defaults on the bond. Public Investing charges a markup on each bond trade. See our Fee Schedule. Bond Accounts are not recommendations of individual bonds or default allocations. The bonds in the Bond Account have not been selected based on your needs or risk profile. See https://public.com/disclosures/bond-account to learn more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:31.9	Steve Woods grew up in the late 1980s and early 1990s and he has fond memories of a food he ate as often as oranges
0:39.5	and strange cheese. Fruit snacks. There were like a couple solid years, like maybe fourth, fifth
0:46.0	grade, where I had them with me every day. Fruit snacks are pouches of colorful little fruit
0:52.5	flavored drops that when Steve was growing up were made by a number
0:55.9	of companies and shaped like everything from fruits to animals to Mickey Mouse and Scooby-Doo.
1:01.4	The thing that most comes to mind is shark bites, which were the king of fruit snacks back in the day.
1:07.0	Just when you thought it was safe to eat fruit snacks, here comes shark bites, a feeding frenzy, a fruity fun, hammerhand.
1:13.6	The Great White was the biggest of the shark bites, so he was like the king, right?
1:18.6	And then you had like the Mako and the tiger shark and they all had different flavors.
1:22.6	And like I would take those shark bite fruit snacks and play with them.
1:26.6	You know, they were kind of like a toy, too, right?
1:29.2	Shark bites have since been discontinued, but fruity bites and pouches have not,
1:33.3	and Steve still buys them sometimes, not as a toy, because they still seem wholesome to him.
	...

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