excerpt of candy: a century of panic and pleasure by samira kawash

7/27/2019 Excerpt of Candy: A Century of Panic and Pleasure by Samira Kawash

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It all started with the Jelly Bean Incident.

My daughter was three years old, and she loved jelly beans. A

baby fstul o the brightly colored morsels was just about the

biggest prize she could imagine, and at one tiny gram o sugar

per bean, it seemed to me—her caring, reasonably attentive

mother—to be a pretty harmless treat. So it was with the best o intentions that we decided one day to bring some jelly beans to

share or her playdate at Noah’s house.

Noah’s mom, Laura, stocked their pantry with normal kid

stu—Popsicles and juice boxes and eddy Grahams—so I didn’t

think much about oering the jelly beans. But Laura seemed

taken aback: “Well, he’s never really had that beore . . . I suppose

it couldn’t hurt.”

Couldn’t hurt? Could she really believe I was harming my

child, and threatening to harm hers, by holding out a ew tiny

pieces o candy? But greater condemnation was to ollow. Her

husband, Gary, had been listening to the exchange and with a

dark glare in my direction he hissed at Laura, “Oh, so I guess

you’ll start giving him crack now too?”

1 ╮ Evil or Just Misunderstood?



4 Candy

He might as well have shouted in my ace, “Bad mother!” I

was stunned—it was just a ew jelly beans, aer all.

I had already promised my daughter she could have some

candy—and to be honest, I like jelly beans too—so we snuck out

to the patio to enjoy our illicit treat. As we ate, though, I couldn’thelp but think, What i I’m wrong? Candy is certainly not a

“healthy” snack. But there I was, letting my three-year-old eat

the jelly beans, encouraging her, even. My own mother wouldn’t

have let me have them, that’s or sure—my childhood home was

a no-candy zone. Maybe I was a bad mother.

Tis moment was when I frst started paying attention to

candy, and especially to the ways people talk about eating or not

eating it. Just about everyone agrees that candy is a “junk ood”devoid o real nutrition, a source o “empty calories” that ruin

your appetite or better things like apples and chicken. But empty

calories alone couldn’t account or a reaction like Gary’s, which

made it seem like it was just a skip and a hop rom the innocence

o Pixy Stix to the dangerous and criminal world o street junkies.

And it isn’t just Gary who sees candy as some kind o juvenile

vice. Once I started paying attention, I noticed that a lot o stories

out there suggested disturbing connections between candy andcontrolled substances. In 2009, Te Wall Street Journal broke the

news that middle school kids were reaking out their parents by

inhaling and snorting the dust rom Smarties candies; Youube

“how to” videos were all the rage or a ew months.1 Even more

worrisome were exposés in 2010 on Detroit tele vision stations

about proto-alcoholic teens sneaking “drunken gummy bears”

into homerooms and movie theaters.2 And it can’t be an accident

that “rock” can be either candy or crack; “candy” was used as a

euphemism or cocaine as early as 1931.3 In the spring o 2012,

actor Bryan Cranston oered talk-show host David Letterman a

taste o “blue meth,” the superpotent methamphetamine that

drives the action in the AMC hit drama Breaking Bad . It wasn’t



Evil or Just Misunderstood? 5

real methamphetamine, o course, just a sugar prop, but candy

maker Debbie Hall, who created the V version, quickly started

selling the ice-blue rocks in little drug baggies to ans at her

Albuquerque shop the Candy Lady.4

Hall’s creation is just a novelty gag, but there are some peoplewho think that the sugar it’s made rom is as harmul as the meth

it’s imitating. Addiction researchers warn that the tasty plea-

sures o candy, cakes, potato chips, and the rest o the sweet, atty

indulgences we ondly know as “junk ood” light up the same

brain receptors as heroin and cocaine. A team at Yale showed pic-

tures o ice cream to women with symptoms o “ood addiction”

and ound that their brains resembled the brains o heroin ad-

dicts looking at drug paraphernalia.5

Te idea o ood addictionhas become part o the national anti-obesity conversation; even

Kathleen Sebelius, U.S. secretary o health and human ser vices,

announced in May 2012 that or some people, obesity is the re-

sult o “an addiction like smoking.”6

Te belie that craving a sugar fx is the same thing as jonesing

or a hit o something stronger depends in large part on one’s def-

nition o “addiction.” Representatives o the ood industry tend to

avor a more narrow designation. A study unded by the WorldSugar Research Organization concluded in 2010 that although

humans defnitely like to eat sugar, the way we eat it doesn’t

strictly qualiy as addiction.7 On the other hand, Dr. Nora D.

Volkow o the National Institute on Drug Abuse warns that “pro-

cessed sugar in certain individuals can produce . . . compulsive

patterns o intake.”8 Compulsion isn’t quite addiction, but there

are even more alarming reports o research at Princeton and the

University o Florida, where “sugar-binging rats show signs o

opiatelike withdrawal when their sugar is taken away—including

chattering teeth, tremoring orepaws and the shakes.”9 Rats plied

with a atty processed diet o Ho Hos, cheesecake, bacon, and

sausage at the Scripps Institute didn’t do too well either; the rats



6 Candy

quickly started overeating, and wouldn’t stop gorging them-

selves even when the scientists began zapping them with electri-

cal shocks. Te study’s authors concluded that “junk ood elicits

addictive behavior in rats similar to the behaviors o rats addicted

to heroin.”10

Call it addiction or craving or compulsion, it does seem cer-

tain that having a little candy causes many people to want to eat

more. What makes junk ood so irresistible, according to ormer

FDA commissioner David Kessler, is its “hyperpalatability.” In

his book Te End o Overeating , Kessler shows how the ood in-

dustry manipulates its products to make us want to keep eating

them. Te addition o large quantities o at, sugar, and salt is what

makes processed oods taste good. But these additives do morethan just make bland ingredients taste better. Sweetness, salti-

ness, and attiness, alone or in combination, may actually stimu-

late our appetites, and the more we eat, the more we crave. Tus,

this ood isn’t just palatable, it’s “hyperpalatable.” Te arts o the

ood chemist and the ood technologist bring us this experience

in ever more perect and irresistible orms. Witness the ood-

engineering marvel that is the Snickers bar as Kessler describes it:

“as we chew, the sugar dissolves, the at melts, and the caramel picksup the peanut pieces so the entire candy is carried out o the mouth

at the same time.”11 It’s a sensory symphony o at, sugar, and salt:

perectly delicious and completely impossible to re-create at home.

Hyperpalatability (i.e., extreme yumminess) plus aggressive

marketing by corporate parent Mars, Inc. explains Snickers’s

permanent perch at the top o the best-selling candy bar lists. Te

caramel, nougat, and peanut conection has been an American

avorite since its introduction in 1930; now it dominates the inter-

national markets too, with annual global sales projected to exceed

$3.5 billion.12 And Snickers is but one star in a globalized candy

universe; in 2012, total worldwide retail candy sales were esti-

mated at $118 billion.13 Hershey vies with Mars or top spot in

the United States, while global conglomerates Ferrero, Mars,




Kra, and Nestlé rule the traditional candy markets o Europe

and North America. New markets in ar-ung locales previously

innocent o American-style snack oods are getting bigger every

day. Russian sales o Snickers have doubled in the last fve years,

and in 2011 the emerging middle classes in Russia, Brazil, India,and China accounted or over hal the growth in retail candy

sales.14 In more and more places, people are eating candy in the

American style: as a snack, on the go, any day, or every day.

And candy in the United States is still going strong. It is true, as

Steve Almond so morosely recounted in Candyreak, that its prom-

inence in American lie today is much diminished rom its heyday

in the 1930s and 1940s. But though the parlor candy dish may have

passed out o ashion, plenty o candy is still fnding its way intoAmerican mouths. Despite the loss o variety (in American manu-

acture, at least) and the disappearance o many old-time avorites,

the quantity o candy sold on a per capita basis in the United States

is higher today than it has ever been. Retail sales amount to some

$32 billion per year and are growing, in good times and in bad,

even through the most recent recession. Susan Whiteside, vice

president o communications or the National Conectioners

Association, suggests a simple reason or candy’s success: “Wheneconomic times are tough, the things that bring you a lot o happi-

ness that don’t cost a lot o money tend to stay in your budget.”15

Candy is one o those simple pleasures that make people eel

good, and it’s a pleasure that’s never hard to fnd. Candy is con-

veniently located right next to the cash register in just about ev-

ery retail establishment, rom suburban megastores to urban

bodegas and every store in between, and sold rom vending ma-

chines in schools, libraries, athletic parks, and wherever else

people gather. It’s so plentiul and so ubiquitous that most o the

time we don’t even notice it. As to how we defne candy, I suspect

that most o us operate on a pornography principal—we know it

when we see it—but as I’ll explain later, the defnition o candy is

never quite so simple as one might think. For the time being,



8 Candy

however, when I say “candy,” I mean (somewhat tautologically)

those things that people commonly call candy, made by manu-

acturers who describe their business as the manuacture o

candy. People who think about these things every day, like inde-

atigable candy reviewer Cybele May, who posts at candyblog.net, sort candy rom not-candy with a ew specifc qualities in

mind: a sweet substance with a base o sugar, not liable to spoil-

age, ready to eat without preparation or utensils, and consumed

primarily or pleasure.16 Tis is pretty good, so ar as common-

sense defnitions go, but, as I hope to show, it is getting a lot more

di cult to say with confdence what sorts o oods ought to be

included in the broad category o candy.

Usually, i we think about candy at all, it’s as the stu o happy memories: cotton candy at the state air, the birthday party piñata,

the overowing Easter baskets and Halloween bags, the glittering

Hanukkah gelt, the comort o the lollipop at the doctor’s o ce,

the reward o M&M’s or potty training, the chocolates rom a

loved one on Valentine’s Day, or the prettily wrapped avors at

weddings. But even when candy is reely given to children, and

intended to heighten the pleasure o special events, it’s almost

always accompanied by a warning: don’t let all that candy spoilyour dinner, and remember to brush your teeth right aerward.

It seems paradoxical that the candy that gives us some o our

happiest experiences is the same candy that rots our teeth, ruins

our appetite, and sucks tender innocents into a desperate lie o

sugar addiction. Candy joins the ideas o pleasure and poison,

innocence and vice, in a way that’s unique and a bit puzzling. Te

older name or a candy maker is conectioner , which comes rom

Latin roots that mean, roughly, “making together” or “putting

together.” According to the Oxord En glish Dictionary , a conec-

tioner is “one who makes conections, sweetmeats, candies, cakes,

light pastry.” But there is another meaning or conectioner: a

“compounder o medicines, poisons.” It is a troubling thought:

sweetmeats and poison originating rom the same source.




Killer Candy

Once a year, when the leaves start to all rom the trees, the con-

tradictions between candy as treat and candy as poison become

impossible to avoid: Halloween—the high holy day o candy.When we get swept up in the spirit o the season, all the good

intentions to cut back on junky sweets and avoid the candy dish

come crashing down like a tower o Necco Waers.

Halloween wasn’t always a candy bacchanal. Up until around

1960, trick-or-treaters might receive just about any small desir-

able thing: candy to be sure, but also small toys, coins, nuts, home-

made cookies, or popcorn balls. oday, however, the sole treat

that every trick-or-treater demands is candy, in vast quantities.Tere’s always a neighborhood curmudgeon who insists on

handing out apples, a “virtuous” treat. Tey usually end up in the

garbage can. Halloween is not a time or healthy snacks.

But some see the giant sack o Halloween candy not only as

unhealthy but also as potentially deadly. When I was growing

up, parents everywhere were always on high alert or the evil

machinations o the “Halloween sadist,” the local psychopath

who was out to get the neighborhood kiddies with strychnine-laced Pixy Stix and razor blade–studded caramels. We couldn’t

touch our candy until Mom or Dad had inspected every piece or

signs o tampering. Local hospitals even volunteered their radi-

ology labs or post–trick-or-treat candy X-rays.

It turns out that the Halloween sadist is about 0.01 percent

act and 99.99 percent myth (I’ll get to the ull Halloween story

later, in chapter 12). Nevertheless, many parents are very, very

ner vous about leaving all that candy in the custody o their chil-

dren. Some go so ar as to seize the haul and confscate it. Most

kids in my neighborhood get to keep a ew morsels and then are

cajoled or orced into relinquishing the rest. Te irony, o course,

is that these parents who worry at the prospect o little Jayden

eating all that candy are the very same ones who likely sat at



10 Candy

their own ront doors dispensing mountains o Skittles packs

and Dum Dum pops to other people’s kids earlier that evening.

It has become a uniquely American overparenting ritual: we give

our kids candy, then we take it away. Even though people don’t

worry as much anymore about the hazards o needles or arseniclurking in the Halloween haul, there is still a nebulous eeling

that candy may be dangerous, perhaps even deadly.

Tese days, the menace o candy eared by parents looks less

like a child-hating sadist and more like a simple sugar cube. In

one o the most prominent recent attacks, Te New York imes

Magazine ran an April 2011 cover story titled “Sweet and Vicious:

Te Case Against Sugar.” Te article, by nutrition journalist Gary

aubes, publicized the work o biochemists who believe that sugaris not just “empty calories” but something ar more dangerous.

As aubes put it, “Sugar has unique characteristics, specifcally

in the way the human body metabolizes the ructose in it, that

may make it singularly harmul, at least i consumed in su cient

quantities.”17

Dr. Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist at the Univer-

sity o Caliornia at San Francisco, has become the most promi-

nent and credible spokesman or this view. He was eatured inApril 2012 on 60 Minutes in a segment titled “Is Sugar oxic?”

and nearly three million viewers on Youube have watched his

ninety-minute lecture called “Sugar: Te Bitter ruth,” which

explains the underlying science. Te biochemistry may be com-

plex, but his message is simple: sugar is a killer.

Te attention given to Lustig and others who are investigat-

ing the potential dangers o sugar heralds an epochal swing in

the dietary pendulum. Up until recently, the orthodoxy shared

by most experts in health and nutrition was what aubes has

called the “at hypothesis.” From the 1960s up through the 1990s,

the irreutable rise in chronic diet-related diseases aer the Second

World War was blamed on dietary at. But these days, it’s carbo-

hydrates in general, and sugar in particular, that are starting to




draw attention. In variations on what aubes calls the “carbohy-

drate hypothesis,” researchers are increasingly turning their at-

tention to the dangers o and damages caused by what used to be

called comort oods: refned our (goodbye, pasta and bread), re-

fned sugar (arewell, cakes and candies), and, most reviled o themall, high-ructose corn syrup (so long, sodas and sweet teas).18

Te latest fgures rom the USDA or total sweetener con-

sumption are about 130 pounds per capita per year, a signifcant

improvement compared to the 150 or so pounds ingested by

each American in the late 1990s but still a substantial increase

over the approximate 110-pound consumption in the 1960s.

Candy accounts or only about 6 percent o the total sugar in

the overly sweetened American diet—most comes rom pro-cessed oods and so drinks—but it has the misortune o lack-

ing a oodish alibi behind which to hide its saccharine ways.19 I

added sugar is our main dietary villain, then candy is among the

most obvious culprits; unlike high-ructose-corn-syrup-laced

hot dog buns or ketchup, candy shows its sugar on the outside.

Candy as Food

I you’ve read Michael Pollan’s excellent book Te Omnivore’s

Dilemma, then you already know that when you eat conventional

bee, you’re mostly eating corn. But do you know you are eating

candy too? Tere is an entire underworld o ood salvage that

sells “secondhand” ood to livestock owners: things like bakery

scraps and restaurant scrapings, along with expired and disfg-

ured but still edible candy (wrappers and all—the expense o

separating the wrappers would raise the price too much).

Te eedlot operators are quite sanguine about it: “It has been

a practice going on or decades,” livestock nutritionist Ki Fan-

ning told a CNN reporter in October 2012, “and is a very good

way or producers to reduce eed cost, and to provide less

expensive ood or consumers.” Since the price o corn started



12 Candy

rising in 2009, even more o the relatively cheaper salvage candy

is ending up in cattle eed mixes, a development that prompted

CNN’s investigation, which was headlined “Kentucky Cows Chow

Down on Candy.” Te story eatures eedlot owner Joseph Watson,

who praises the virtues o his candy blend. He says it attens hiscattle up nicely, with “a higher ratio o at than actually eeding

straight corn.” Farmer Mike Yoder claims that eeding ice cream

sprinkles to his dairy cows has increased milk production.

Chuck Hurst, a livestock nutritionist in Idaho, explains that the

sugar in candy provides “the same kind o energy as corn,” but

he is silent on the possible eects o the candy wrappers.20

Tere’s something deeply unsettling about this story. Despite

the reassurances that candy is really the same as corn, commonsense rebels. Cows shouldn’t be eating candy (much less candy

wrappers). Candy is just . . . not ood. As or humans, well, maybe

a little candy is okay, but with all the warnings about sugar and

worries about obesity, we know we probably shouldn’t eat too

much. We, like cows, should eat ood. Sounds simple enough.

Te problem or us humans is that unlike the captive cows in

the eedlot, we have to choose what to eat. And in the grocery

store, we are surrounded by an array o choices our grand-mothers would never have dreamed o. Tere are con venience

oods promising to eliminate kitchen drudgery and “unc-

tional” oods promising health-enhancing benefts, low-at and

low-carb oods that will put our diets back on track, rozen oods

and shel-stable oods to hoard against the Apocalypse—a cor-

nucopia o modern ood engineering and packaging. Michael

Pollan calls them “edible ood-like substances”: we can eat them,

but their relation to oods like resh spinach and grandma’s

meatballs is a little sketchy. It is practically impossible to escape

these ubiquitous oodlike substances, even at the ancy natural

grocery store. Labels that say organic, all-natural , and whole

grain all sound very reassuring, but even the supervirtuous spe-

cialty oods like Annie’s Homegrown Organic Berry Fruit Snack




or Earth’s Best Organic Crunchin’ Grahams Apple Cinnamon

Stick are versions o Pollan’s “edible ood-like substances.” Tey

do, however, look a lot more like real ood when compared with

something that is clearly not ood at all. Something like candy.

Te idea that there is a hard line separating candy rom oodmight be reassuring, but reality is never so simple. I’ve already

suggested that it might be di cult even to defne candy. So what

about ood? For millions o years, our hominid ancestors had no

problem fguring out that anything they ate that didn’t kill them

or make them sick must be ood. oday, however, it’s impossible

to talk about ood without talking about nutrition, about how

dierent oods may be more or less benefcial, about which oods

are better and which worse or healthul living. We know allabout calories; we study nutrition labels to see how much at, pro-

tein, and carbs are in our ood; and we worry about increasingly

arcane ood elements like trans ats and soluble fbers. Nutri-

tional experts caution us to avoid the “empty calories” ound in

junk ood like soda, chips, and candy, calories that add nothing

but inches to our waistlines. Instead, we are taught to seek out

“nutritious” ood that will provide our bodies with the optimal

materials or health and vitality.Tis idea o ood as a delivery device or nutrients is a result

o the way o thinking that Pollan and others have called “nutri-

tionism.”21 Nutritionism reduces every edible substance to its

components (those we know about, at any rate) and then com-

pares and measures and evaluates those components in isolation.

So we don’t have meat or apples or bread; we have ats and carbs

and proteins and vitamins and minerals and fber. Te ats and

carbs and protein in meat or apples or bread are the same as the

ats and carbs and protein in a bottle o Ensure, or in a package

o PowerBars, or in a Swanson’s V dinner. In the modern nutri-

tional ramework, ood isn’t ood so much as a modular accre-

tion o chemical building blocks.

Nutritionism is what makes it so easy to blur the lines between



14 Candy

ood and candy. Looking at ood in terms o calories and carbo-

hydrates puts gumdrops in the same category as both apples and

dinner rolls: they may have more or less o this or that nutrient,

but they’re not undamentally dierent.

Spelling out the consequences o nutritionism this way seemsan aront to contemporary common sense, but there was a time

when this logic would have appeared quite sound and candy was

widely accepted as a very good kind o ood. As I’ll show, the

idea that candy could be good ood laid the groundwork or the

idea that all sorts o other manuactured, artifcial, highly pro-

cessed stu could also be good ood. And rom the resultant

conusion about what ood actually ought to be originates much

o our current dietary woe.

A Hidden History

Although candy was frst mass-produced in England in the 1850s,

the great candy industry o the early twentieth century was an

American phenomenon. Candy as we know it today is a result o

the antastic powers unleashed by the Industrial Revolution, and

it was one o the frst actory-produced oods in the late nine-teenth century. Subsequent developments led to the spread o

American-style candy throughout the world, beginning with the

empires built by Mars and Hershey in the 1920s and 1930s, and

aided by the American military troops who traveled the globe

during World War II, their rations packed ull o candy, making

new “riends” by passing out Baby Ruth bars and ootsie Rolls.

By the second hal o the twentieth century, America was

exporting not only its candy bars but also its eating habits. Candy

paved the way or a panoply o other highly processed oods that,

like candy, were con venient, portable, palatable, and cheap. Some

nutritionists and reormers now believe that the undamental

problem o the current ood system is the excessive consumption




o highly processed oods. Tis is a global issue, and the question

o how to improve the accessibility o less-processed and more

nutritious ood is a complex one. I don’t pretend to have a solu-

tion. But I do believe that understanding how we got here is a

good way to start.When I frst began researching the history o American candy,

I read every book I could fnd about the great candy companies,

along with books about the history o candy making (you’ll fnd

a list o essential books in the bibliography). Tese books were

interesting, but I wanted to understand how candy ft into the

broader picture o ood in general. I knew that manuacturing—

and consumption—had grown quickly in the early 1900s, and

I assumed that ood historians would have something to say about the growing place o candy in the American diet. I was very

wrong.

One o the frst books I read was the classic work by Waverley

Root and Richard de Rochemont, Eating in America: A History .

Tis 1976 study aims to cover it all, rom the Pilgrims to the

present. I turned eagerly to chapter 29, “Te Great American

Sweet ooth,” and ound . . . two pages on chewing gum. Tat’s it.

Te rest is soda, ice cream, and sugar as a condiment. Do Amer-icans eat candy? You wouldn’t know it rom this history. My

cravings were not much more satisfed by the next “big book” on

the shel, Richard J. Hooker’s 1981 history titled Food and Drink

in America. Hooker does manage to amass material or a ull

two pages on candies, but it is his contention that “most candies

were made in the home.”22 Focusing on udge parties and tay

pulls, domestic entertainments popular at the turn o the cen-

tury, he leaves the reader to conclude that America’s interest in

candy has been confned to tittering girls in the drawing room.

More recent ood histories do nothing to fll in the gaps.

Carole Counihan’s 2002 anthology Food in the U.S.A. is pretty

comprehensive, a good textbook or a ood studies course. Alas,



16 Candy

as or candy, not a peep. Andrew Smith describes thirty “turning

points” in American ood history in his book Eating History ; the

rise o industrial candy is not one o them, though the chapter on

Cracker Jack comes tantalizingly close, and to be air, Smith does

pause or two pages to talk about chocolate. You won’t fnd candy in Harvey Levenstein’s Revolution at the able or Paradox o Plenty ,

or in Laura Shapiro’s Perection Salad or Something rom the

Oven. Tese are essential works or understanding how our ood

got to be the way it is today. But somehow they leave out the part

about the candy. It can’t be that these experts are unaware o the

millions o pounds o candy consumed each year, yet the way

they defne their subject matter makes candy irrelevant—they

don’t consider candy a ood.I think they’re wrong. When you start looking at its history,

candy isn’t separate rom ood at all. Te story o ood in America

looks to me like one o those jacquard-woven beach towels. A

colorul pattern shows on one side, and when you ip it over, the

colors reverse. Tis is candy’s relationship to ood history: on the

top side, intended to be displayed to the world, candy doesn’t

show. But when you peek underneath, you see the candy thread

is an essential part o the whole story.

Sweet

im Richardson, the author o a comprehensive history o sweets

rom a British perspective, believes that the deaening silence

surrounding candy is because it exists in a “culinary limbo.”23

Candy isn’t a staple or a necessity, it isn’t part o ordinary meals

or ood rituals, and most o the time it isn’t even considered

ood. When it’s eaten with a meal, it’s given its own separate

category—dessert—and when eaten at other times o day, it be-

comes a snack, as i calling it something else means it doesn’t

really count. (But why should when we eat something have any




eect on what it actually is?) Nutritionists make quick work o

candy as “empty calories,” while anthropologists and ood histo-

rians tend to consign such trivial morsels to scholarly oblivion.

But there are perhaps also more subtle reasons or candy’s

relegation to the sidelines. Tink about the meaning o the wordsweet : it isn’t just a avor, it’s a personality trait. Sweet people are

nice, pleasant, kind, and helpul. Tey put others’ needs beore

their own. But calling someone sweet isn’t always a compliment.

Men are almost never reerred to as sweet. Sweetness implies

smallness and unimportance, like candy. And who are the people

we reer to as “sweet”? Women and children.

How did the taste o candy come to be connected to stereo-

types about the character o women and children? Wendy Wolo-son, author o Refned astes: Sugar, Conectionery and Consumers

in Nineteenth-Century America, argues that the association o

emininity and weakness with sweet-tasting oods has to do with

the changing value o sugar. In the seventeenth and eighteenth

centuries, sugar plantations were sources o immense wealth, and

whoever controlled the sugar trade also wielded substantial politi-

cal and economic power. Sugar was dear, and sweet oods costly.

Powerul hosts would display their wealth at banquets withsumptuous sugar-spun centerpieces, a orm o conspicuous con-

sumption made all the more excessive by the act that the sugar

would go to waste. As production became more mechanized in

the nineteenth century, the price o sugar ell. By the second hal

o the nineteenth century, sugar was both cheap and widely avail-

able. As a result, Woloson suggests, sugar “became linked with

emininity: its economic devaluation coincided with its cultural

demotion.”24 Sweets were banished to the margins o the table,

just as women and children were banished to drawing rooms

and nurseries.

It is a common belie that women and children are the ones

who crave candy—the masculinity o a man who likes candy too



18 Candy

much is oen seen as somewhat suspect. Tis turns out not to be

the whole story; historically men have also eaten their share and

have even, at some points during the last century, been the pri-

mary market or it. But perhaps ood historians have paid so little

attention to candy because o this cultural connection betweensweet, trivial people, i.e., women and children, and sweet, trivial

candy.

Yet despite the act that it seems so unimportant, candy pro-

vokes strong eelings in many people, eelings that seem much

larger and more complex than the simple substance itsel. Sweet-

ness is just the beginning o these intense cultural associations.

As I discovered with the jelly bean incident, many people ear

the eects o candy on their children, and sometimes those earscan seem all out o proportion to the actual potential or harm.

Adults also oen act ambivalent about the pleasure they take in

candy. Despite the act that the actual physical substance o

candy is airly simple and, when broken down into individual

ingredients, not that dierent rom many other oods, somehow

the meanings associated with it are extremely complicated and

contradictory.

Te language o candy spoken by many adults is the languageo sin: guilty pleasure, temptation, indulgence. People apologize

or eating candy, hide their stash in drawers and closets, eat it

alone where no one will see, coness their cravings as though

seeking absolution. It seems ironic; our culture aspires to be reso-

lutely post-shame, as the rankness surrounding sexuality and

sexual pleasure reminds us every day. Sometimes it seems like

the guilt ormerly reserved or sex has returned in our attitude

toward conectionery. For some—perhaps women in particular—

even previously unspeakable orms o sexual pleasure are less

shameul than a midnight raid on the chocolate box.

Chocolate has long been associated with seduction, its exotic

origins and sensual pleasures making it an easy metaphor or




courtship, and when given as a gi, it’s an obvious token o de-

sire. It is a long-standing tradition: men give women chocolates,

with the implication that they will be given reciprocal pleasures

in turn. But increasingly in the posteminist era, chocolate is be-

ing marketed directly to women, as an easy indulgence and es-cape rom everyday pressures and worries. As the luxury chocolate

market has expanded, eating chocolates has been depicted as

a orm o emale “sel-love,” a private enjoyment that women

choose and control. Te “My moment. My Dove” ad campaign,

which ran rom 2005 to 2010, depicted women in private settings

writhing in pleasure as they savored a morsel o Dove chocolate.

And this is how Pepperidge Farm described the delights o a 2012

European-style chocolate biscuit called Signatures ChocolateMedallion Cookies Milk Chocolate Caramel: “Savor richness . . .

ollowed by lightness . . . and a hidden silky caramel flling. aste

waves o pleasure, building to the Signatures sensation. Ten revel

in the aerglow o . . . Chocolateness.” Aer that experience, you’ll

probably want a cigarette.

In the wake o the sexual revolution, women supposedly have

the ull right to their bodies and their desires. And yet, where

candy eating is concerned, the plea sure seems all too oen tobring with it a dose o guilt. Perhaps chocolate pleasure is not a

sin against God, but it is certainly a sin against Diet. Te indul-

gence demands penance. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to eat

that Snickers bar or lunch, but we promise ourselves we’ll make

up or it later with salad or dinner, no dressing. It’s the amiliar

binge-and-purge, sin-and-sel-agellation rhythm o perpetual

dieting: chocolate pleasure today, mortifcation o the esh to-

morrow. No one would deny that candy has a lot o calories. But

the language o candy eating goes ar beyond the rational realms

o science and nutrition. Candy is the apple in the garden, and we,

particularly women, are the allen who were too weak to resist

temptation.



20 Candy

Innocent

Women, allen rom dietary grace, may experience shame and

regret in connection with their conectionery longings. But what

about those true innocents, the children? Increasingly, there aremore and more people like Gary, who would say that giving candy

to a toddler amounts to some kind o alimentary child abuse.

Food reormers have been making arguments about the damag-

ing eects o candy on children since the beginning o commer-

cial candy. But the current language o child abuse, and the

association o eeding the wrong oods with physical assault, is

gaining popularity. When ood activist and che Jamie Oliver ap-

peared on Oprah in early 2010, she asked him point-blank: “Doyou eel that parents who consistently eed their children junk

ood are practicing child abuse?” Jamie didn’t inch. “Absolutely,”

he replied.

As adults, we make our own choices about when and what

and how to eat, and we acknowledge that our own bodies bear

the consequences o those choices. But we view the bodies—

and choices—o children dierently. As adults, and especially as

parents, we bear the responsibility or the health and well-beingo our children’s bodies. We are responsible or nourishing them,

providing rest and physical comort, oering opportunities or

play and exercise to make their bodies strong. So candy poses

a serious complication to the issues o adult responsibility or

children and also adult control o children. We are told that we

should never give candy to children because it’s bad or them, but

also that we shouldn’t deny our children what they want (who-

ever came up with the expression that something easy is “like

taking candy rom a baby” never tried to pry some rom the bone-

cracking grip o a toddler’s hand). It is incredibly di cult to

navigate through this thicket o contradiction and ear.

Te worries don’t stop with the eects o candy consump-

tion. As ambivalent as we might be about when or how much




candy to give our children, there is one thing everybody can

agree on: children should never, ever, take candy rom strangers.

Candy is known as the secret weapon o the child snatcher, the

pedophile, the local psychopath who tries to lure little girls and

boys with lollipops. We’re always on the lookout or predatory men in white panel vans roving the neighborhood with sacks

o sweets. But, as with the urban legends o Halloween candy

poisoners, this ear turns out to be only tangentially related to

reality. As FBI agent April Brooks o the Crimes Against Children

Unit explains, “Most children are taken by people they know.

Out o the many thousands o cases we see each year, only a ew

hundred are stranger abductions.”25 Despite this act, the potent

image o the candy-wielding child snatcher says a lot about how our society views children: they are innocent and thereore un-

able to tell the dierence between generosity and malevolence,

and they also are oolish and thereore easily lured by the simple

pleasure o a candy treat into doing something their parents have

warned them not to do. Children have not always been seen this

way, and we might pause to wonder whether our own children

are necessarily as naïve and gullible as we think they are.

But perhaps our ears about the sinister stranger luring in-nocents with candy also reect something o our own vulnera-

bility. Can we trust our senses? Like the child who can’t tell the

dierence between malevolent stranger and benevolent neigh-

bor, we are oen unsure i the enticing things that surround us

are really good or us, whether we’re talking about candy or other

oods. “Candy rom strangers” might be a good metaphor or

everything we eat. We don’t really know what most ood we buy

is, where it came rom, or who made it. Is it as good as it looks?

Or does the alluring surace hide something harmul? As adults,

we’re supposed to know enough to tell the dierence, but per-

haps we are more like children aced with a proered lollipop, so

distracted by the sticky promise o pleasure that we ignore the

warning signs.



22 Candy

Do You Eat Enough Candy?

It was over a century ago that America came to be known, in

the immortal words o one 1907 visitor, as “a great candy eating

nation.”26 In the next several chapters, I’ll show how candy grabbed hold o the American imagination and stomach in the

early decades o the twentieth century, aer developments in

manuacturing technology and ood science made it possible

to create mass quantities o increasingly complex conections.

Candy stories rom the frst part o the century are ull o a

sense o adventure and possibility: athletes who swore on the

perormance-boosting powers o candy, aviators surviving record-

breaking ights on chocolate bars, sober scientists insisting thatcandy could uel the nation to greatness. During the frst two

decades o the century, the popularity o manuactured candy

encouraged many women to take up home candy making and

then to start cooking with candy. Soon home cooks were add-

ing marshmallows to omelets and stu ng chopped-up candy

bars into tomatoes. (Tese intrepid pioneers inspired me to

attempt some practical experiments; in chapter 6, you’ll learn

what happened when I went to candy school to try my hand atboiling sugar, and why lima beans might be the next big thing in

conectionery.)

Te rivolous un o candy might seem to have little to do

with the serious stu o international conict; yet as I’ll explain,

war has had a tremendous impact on the growth o candy’s im-

portance in American lie. Te First World War inspired new

methods o manuacturing which, when the war was over, un-

leashed a renzy o candy bar innovation. Te candy bar craze o

the 1920s and 1930s brought into existence thousands o brands

o bars: rom the jazzy delights o Black Bottom and Gypsy bar

(in honor o stripper Gypsy Rose Lee) to the delicious-sounding

Chicken Dinner and Denver Sandwich—named or a meal, with

a size and he to match. Te golden age o the candy bar ushered




in a whole new style o eating. Tis was the era that gave us Ad-

miral Byrd loading up his ship with ten thousand candy bars or

vital ood energy on his polar expedition, Shirley emple war-

bling about the “Good Ship Lollipop” in the movie Bright Eyes,

and magazine ads that queried anxiously, “Do you eat enoughcandy?” (plate 1).

And yet, as I’ll show, there was a dark side to all that candy

un. From the mid-nineteenth century onward, many Ameri-

cans voiced worries about the potentially sinister eects o in-

dulgence. In the late 1800s, conectioners were repeatedly accused

o selling to children candies that were “adulterated” with fllers

and toxins, including nasty things like “white earth” and oor

scrapings. Candy—with its deliberately unnatural orms and sur-prising colors—was also exhibit number one or ood reormers

who railed against the dangers o artifcial oods. When a child

got sick in the early 1900s, newspapers were quick to post head-

lines blaring “Poisoned by Candy”—much to the outrage o

candy makers, who went to great lengths to deend their product.

Many o the social and moral ills blamed on candy in the early

twentieth century are surprising today. Te temperance move-

ment, or example, railed against alcohol and warned the nationo the dangers o drunkenness. But many Americans also believed

there were signifcant similarities between alcohol and sugar (an

impression perhaps enhanced by the vibrant trade in rum)—

candy seemed perilously close to booze. As the nation moved

toward national prohibition o alcohol, a controversy ensued:

Would eating more candy distract rom drinking, or would it

actually stimulate the body to a state o drunkenness? Children’s

indulgence in candy was o special concern to reormers some-

times derided as “Sunday school” moralists, who saw chocolate

cigars as but the frst step on a slippery slope toward the worst

kinds o vices. Smoking, drinking, gambling, even masturba-

tion might be the soul-crushing results o an early candy habit.

Writers painted in vivid hues the horrors that would beall the



24 Candy

child who ate too much. As or overindulging adults, the conse-

quences were all too visible. Diet popularizer Lulu Hunt Peters

went so ar as to declare chocolate creams a mortal sin against

the waistline.

Candy inamed passions on every side, yet despite all thepanic and controversy, it has never been as harmul as the worst

critics have charged. From our enlightened perch, it’s easy to

laugh at the seemingly irrational belie that the stimulating

powers o candy would provoke paroxysms o sexual desire or

induce intoxication in a manner akin to liquor. But to this day,

many o the other suspicions about candy’s damaging eects

persist more or less unquestioned. For example, when I started

researching this book I believed that there really was such athing as “poison candy” back in the early days. But when I looked

careully, I was surprised to discover that the charges leveled

against early American candy makers were mostly the result o

prejudice and abulation. In act, the most disturbing stories that

I’ll share in this book aren’t about bad candy, but about people

who have used candy to do bad things: parents who hid poison

in their children’s treats, spurned lovers who took revenge with

a tainted box o chocolates, scientists who subjected mentally disabled hospital patients to gruesome experiments to test the

eects o excessive candy consumption.

American candy soared to new heights during the Second

World War, when Uncle Sam bought up one-quarter o the

actories’ production to send to the troops, or everything rom

daily rations to emergency survival kits. A new advertising slogan

captured the mood perectly: “Candy Is Delicious Food—Enjoy

Some Every Day!” But in the period o peace and prosperity that

ollowed, the perception and the importance o candy shied dra-

matically, as ideas about it became tangled up in broad-ranging

social controversies about saety, nutrition, and health. Candy

was part o the story o how we got uoride in our water, and o

how the artifcial sweetener cyclamate came to be seen frst as




diet salvation and then as cancer-causing menace. Changing

views o ood pushed people away rom eating as much candy in

the 1960s and 1970s as they had beore the war. Artifcial sweet-

eners made candy seem that much more attening, “sugarphobes”

warned that the sweet white powder might be just another drug,dentists gained new ammunition in their charge that candy was

the primary culprit in tooth decay, and the growing popularity

o “health oods” made “junk oods” like candy look that much

unhealthier in comparison.

Candy didn’t go away under this pressure, it just changed its

ace. In the second part o the twentieth century, candy ended up

everywhere, rom the breakast table to outer space. And in our

own day, we are surrounded by all sorts o never beore imag-ined versions o candy, even i words like ruit and vitamins have

the eect o making candy seem to magically disappear.

In these pages, I’ll argue that candy was at the leading edge o

a broader transormation in ood processing that, over the course

o the twentieth century, would completely upend traditional as-

sumptions o what to eat, when to eat, and how to eat it. Candy

was the frst ready-to-eat processed ood, the original ancestor o

all our ast, con venient, un, imperishable, tasty, highly adver-tised brand-name snacks and meals. Candy bars were the frst

packaged snacks, the frst kind o ood that was made to be eaten

on the go and that could serve as a meal in a pinch. Te idea that

candy was a ood that could be eaten anytime and anywhere

planted the seeds o what we now call the “culture o snacking.”

And the goals o candy makers— variety, novelty, deliciousness,

with nutrition as a low priority—have become the universal

guiding principles o processed-ood innovators.

While candy shares much with its processed-ood kin, candy

is the one kind o processed ood that proclaims its allegiance to

the artifcial, the processed, the unhealthy. Tis is something

I really like about candy: it’s honest. It says what it is. But this

honesty also makes candy an easy target. By blaming candy or



26 Candy

bad nutrition, cavities, and obesity, we can keep buying without

worry the oods that stock the rest o the grocery store aisles.

Te ease with which all the other oodish stu gets let o the

hook is what makes candy scapegoating especially troubling to

me. Beyond a ew cosmetic “resh ood” trappings, the oods thatline the grocery shelves and are served up in ast-ood and con-

venience outlets today are what Brazilian nutrition researcher

Carlos Montiero has called “ultra-processed oods,” oods pro-

cessed so ar beyond their original orm as to be better described

as abricated rather than grown.27 Tese hyperpalatable prod-

ucts get the bulk o their calories rom a ew cheap commodities

(corn, soy, wheat) avored with cheap ats and cheap sweeteners.

Te ancestral relation between candy and today’s ultraprocessedoods is a compelling reason to look a little more closely at the

rise o the candy industry and the controversies and worries that

accompanied it. Te story o candy in America is a story o how

the processed, the artifcial, and the ake came to be embraced as

real ood. And it’s also the story o how it happened that so much

o what we call ood today is really candy.

So what about that handul o jelly beans? Are they evil

or just misunderstood?

28

Te tale o how we came to be askingthis question is a strange and ascinating one. For the answer,

read on.

excerpt of candy: a century of panic and pleasure by samira kawash

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