The winter is here, which means the roads are icier, snowier and more slippery than usual. Most cities use salt on their roads and highways, some others use sand, but has anyone stopped to think that maybe skittles are the most efficient way to deal with snow? A town from Wisconsin might have just inadvertently tested this approach thanks to a harmless accident.
Somewhere in the rural Dodge County, Wisconsin, officials found hundreds of thousands of skittles scattered across a highway. The mystery deepened when, upon closer inspection, they saw that they were all red.
“At 8:51pm on Tuesday night, the Dodge County Sheriff’s Office came across unusual items that were left in the road,” Sheriff’s Office reported via their Facebook page. “Hundreds of thousands of Skittles were spilled on County Highway S near Blackbird Road. It is unclear who may have spilled the skittles on the road. The Dodge County Highway Department was asked to clean them off the road.”
In this case, people were advised to refrain from experiencing the rainbow, or tasting the rainbow, not only because they were covered in dirt and driven over by cars, but also because the police later found out where the mystery skittles had come from. The answer involves cows, making this story even more puzzling.
The Sheriff’s department later updated the story with the source of the red skittles spill. They had fallen off a truck that was transporting skittles that were unfit for packaging. Their final destination? They were going to be used as cattle feed.
A former farmer told WBAY that candy factories and bakeries sell their sugary rejects to farms because they provide cheap carbs for their animals. The practice has been going on for years, decades in fact, and in 2012 the use of candy in cattle feed went up because farmers were looking for a cheaper way to keep their cows and livestock full of calories.
Putting the whole “Are we giving diabetes to our food before we even eat it?” issue aside, it seems that the red skittles worked well as a salt substitute. Drivers and the Dodge County highway commissioner reported that the bumpy candy provided a lot of needed traction on the early morning roads.
