Today’s local paper carries an opinion piece about blue raspberry–flavored foods. “When did blue raspberry become a thing?” asks Angie Quaale of the Langley Times, noting that food is not generally supposed to be blue.

Indeed, a blue hue often reliably indicates that food is off. Even blue food that’s ostensibly palatable, such as blue cheese and that weird potato-like thing that Arthur Dent sampled in the hull of a Vogon ship, gives plenty of consumers the dry heaves. Yet here we have a marketplace where blue raspberry everything shimmers and sparkles at us. You name it: Jell-O, kids’ lunch snacks and juices, and popsicles, the very product Angie tags as responsible for the incursion of blue raspberry into the marketplace.

More troublingly, Angie says blue raspberry is artificial.

I didn’t know this, my fellow inebriates. I just thought scientists had gone ahead and engineered blue raspberries. Why not? The other day the family ate yellow tomatoes and red peppers, and earlier at the bowling alley Miss V gobbled down a handful of blue M&Ms.

If they can make blue M&Ms, why couldn’t they engineer a blue raspberry? The two feats seem about equivalent, don’t they?

I pondered this briefly before deciding to make a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster. It’s supposed to be kind of bluish-green and taste like Jack Daniels with peach schnapps and blue curacao plus some orange juice. But you know the sorry state of our liquor cabinet, so I substituted gin for, well, all the ingredients—even the one item we had (best to save the OJ for the kiddies). Curiously enough, my Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster wasn’t bluish-green but clear. Given Douglas Adams’s description of the drink as “like having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped around a gold brick,” I’d say my version was close enough.