Can I have a lolly?

The Challenges of Raising a Supertaster Child

My son is a supertaster, he tastes every little ingredient in everything which is so overwhelming for him. This is why he sticks to plain, familiar things. We have a number of foods he eats and one of them is a spiral lolly from Aldi. He is (or was) currently having around 2-3 of these lollies a day. He absolutely loved them. Watching him eat one of these lollies was fascinating because he took so much joy from them. But during the Easter holidays, disaster struck. We were down to our last lolly. I raced to Aldi, grabbed two more boxes (I debated getting three, but no — just two), brought them home, and stashed them in the freezer without a second thought until my son asked….

“Can I have a lolly?”

I went and got one out of the freezer, unwrapped it, ran it under the tap to get rid of the ice (that’s how he likes it!) and brought it in and handed it to my son. He took it off and sniffed it, not that unusual he does have a habit of sniffing things a lot, but he immediately said…

“This isn’t right”

It didn’t surprise me that he knew that off one sniff.

He licked it.

“This is different.”

He inspected it further. And then declared…

“It’s longer than usual. The red bit isn’t as red. And the stick…the stick is different.”

And my heart sank. Because we’ve been here before. Flashback to the watermelon lollies. Originally, he liked the Aldi ones — until I bought the Rowntree’s version. The Rowntree ones were red, not pink, and “watermelon is red,” as he pointed out. So those became the new favourites.

But then they changed. The Rowntree lollies turned pink. He rejected them instantly. He was devastated. He wanted me to keep buying more boxes, just to check — just in case there was one box somewhere that hadn’t changed. I bought Aldi ones, Rowntree ones, any others I could find — and every single one was rejected. It caused so much distress, and every time I saw watermelon lollies in a freezer aisle, I felt physically ill. I vowed never to buy them again and I never did. Honestly, they put me off watermelon for life.

So now, here we were again — this time with the spiral lollies. I knew I had to handle this carefully.

Thankfully, we still had one of the old lollies in the freezer. I got it out, and we compared. He was of course right, the new lolly was half a cm longer than the old lolly. The red bit was not as red and the stick had been changed to paper from wood. I did a taste test and I have to confess I wasn’t sure they tasted different but I am not a super taster like my son and all the other changes were enough to put him off anyway.

I declared I was going to the recycling bin to check that I had gotten the right lollies so I went to the bin and took a picture of the box. It was the right lollies and there was a big round blue circle on the box stating “New Recipe”. I took a picture of it, marched into the house and declared to my son that we could never shop at Aldi again if this was what they did.

I was very dramatic with it, almost over the top with it and made a big show of telling my husband all about it. My son got very involved and we all laughed about it. This was a good sign. As annoying as this is I could tell my son wasn’t as upset as when the watermelon lollies changed. My husband understood the enormity of this though and offered to go to Aldi and search right at the bottom of the freezer to see if there were any old boxes left at the bottom. My son loved this idea and so off they both went to Aldi to try and find some of the old lollies.

After a while, they came back. My son walked in first, beaming.

“We’re sorted,” he said confidently.

I was buzzing — they’d found the old lollies! I was so relieved.

Then my husband walked in, looking incredibly pleased with himself. “They didn’t have any of the old ones,” he said, “but we found something else…”

You guessed it.

The watermelon lollies.

I was almost sick.