The M&M Munchies: How Banned American Candy Opened a Black Hole of Hunger

A couple of weeks ago, our giant shipment from the US finally arrived. Side note: the shippers clearly mistook our only piece of furniture for a stress-test dummy, because they broke it. Thanks, guys! Anyway, among the truly essential, life-sustaining items we shipped were peanut butter M&Ms. You can find the basic, sensible M&Ms here: regular, peanut, crispy. You can even get the bizarrely terrible peanut butter and jelly ones if you are willing to travel to the UK (seriously, don't ask). But the glorious, life-altering peanut butter ones? Banned. So, as the M&M connoisseurs that we are, we imported approximately 10 pounds of them in the container we shipped. We're not hoarders, we're strategists.

Naturally, our first order of business after unpacking was to commence the great Peanut Butter M&M Consumption Event of 2025. We were all in sugar coma heaven! But after a few days of indulging in these chocolatey-slightly-salty contraband items, we noticed a couple of things.

First, this candy is clearly made with some kind of hyper-addictive chemical compound. Once you’ve had a few, the bag basically becomes a gravitational force pulling your hand back in. Your brain knows you’re full, your stomach is protesting, but your hand has decided to pursue a higher purpose.

Second, they seem to have an ancillary effect, which I’m calling "The M&M Munchies." After just a couple of days, I found myself generally hungrier. I was getting seconds at dinner, which is something I NEVER do. I seriously considered checking myself for tapeworms. Noticing this, I decided to go cold turkey for a few days. Sure enough, I was back to normal dinner portions. When I mentioned it to Mike, he said he had also been mysteriously hungrier on the days following M&M consumption. We've basically become human case studies in the snack's nefarious power.

In the past few months, I’ve been thinking a lot about Big Food and Big Pharma. I’ve developed a totally-not-a-conspiracy-theory that Big Food gets Americans hooked on hyper-palatable snacks (like, say, a certain peanut butter candy), which makes us unhealthy, which, in turn, means we need more drugs. And guess what? A lot of those drugs make us gain weight (from eating more food), and the cycle continues. Capitalism at its finest.

I have no idea why peanut butter M&Ms are banned in Europe, but a small, paranoid part of me wonders if the EU caught wind of some secret ingredient, a chemical agent designed not just to make you eat a ton of them now, but to open up a black hole of hunger later. Does Europe know about this chemical? And are they protecting their citizens from becoming victims to it?

This doesn’t mean I will never eat peanut butter M&Ms again. But next time I do, I’m freezing small portions in blocks of ice and treating the consumption like a strictly controlled science experiment. My stomach (and my dinner portions) will thank me.

And now that I’ve totally put you off of food….have a great Thanksgiving!