Candy: A Century of Panic and Pleasure

354 Pages·2013·5.99 MB·English

by  Samira Kawash

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To my family
Contents

Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
1: Evil or Just Misunderstood?
Killer Candy
Candy as Food
A Hidden History
Sweet
Innocent
Do You Eat Enough Candy?
2: The Machine Candy Revolution
The Candy Big Bang: Sugar and Steam
All Sorts
Factories and Laboratories
3: Fake Sweets and Fake Food
Bad Food
A Greasy Counterfeit
Filth and Poison
Poison or Indigestion?
What Is Real?
4: Demon Candy, Demon Rum
A Drinking Nation
Same as Alcohol
Female Complaints
The Seed of an Evil Habit
From Evil Candy to Good Food
5: Becoming Food
The Calory Restaurant
Sugar on the March
Vital Fuel
The Strenuous Life
The Truth About Candy
Candy Is a Food!
6: In the Kitchen
Wholesome Candies
When Mother Lets Us …
Much Profit
Home Candy Failures
Candy in the Pantry
7: A Nourishing Lunch
Snirkles? Damfino.
Meals, and Between
Sixty Ways to Eat Oh Henry!
8: Fattening
Counting Calories
Reach for a Lucky Instead of a Sweet
Get Thin on Candy
9: A Fighting Food
Candy Is Delicious Food—Enjoy Some Every Day
Enriched with Dextrose
Vitaminless Viands
Candy for Victory
Meat Bars
10: Sugar Free
No Cal
Sugar Fights Back
Rat Tumors
Sugar-Phobia
11: Cavities
12: Treat or Trick?
Before Candy
Trick-or-Treat Gangsters
Sweet Treats
Halloween Killers
13: Junk-Food Junkies
When Is a Candy Bar Not a Candy Bar?
Candy for Breakfast
Minimal Nutrition
Sugar-Coated Grease Balls
14: Candification
Space Food
Healthy Snacking
Fruit Snacks
Chocolate Fruit
15: In Defense of Candy
Photographs
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index
A Note About the Author
Copyright
1. Evil or Just Misunderstood?

It all started with the Jelly Bean Incident.
My daughter was three years old, and she loved jelly beans. A baby fistful of
the brightly colored morsels was just about the biggest prize she could imagine,
and at one tiny gram of sugar per bean, it seemed to me—her caring, reasonably
attentive mother—to be a pretty harmless treat. So it was with the best of
intentions that we decided one day to bring some jelly beans to share for her
playdate at Noah’s house.
Noah’s mom, Laura, stocked their pantry with normal kid stuff—Popsicles
and juice boxes and Teddy Grahams—so I didn’t think much about offering the
jelly beans. But Laura seemed taken aback: “Well, he’s never really had that
before … 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 few tiny pieces of candy? But greater
condemnation was to follow. 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?”
He might as well have shouted in my face, “Bad mother!” I was stunned—it
was just a few jelly beans, after 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’t help but think, What if 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 for sure—my childhood home was a no-candy zone. Maybe I was a
bad mother.
This moment was when I first 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 food” devoid of real nutrition, a source of
“empty calories” that ruin your appetite for better things like apples and chicken.
But empty calories alone couldn’t account for a reaction like Gary’s, which made
it seem like it was just a skip and a hop from the innocence of Pixy Stix to the
dangerous and criminal world of street junkies.
And it isn’t just Gary who sees candy as some kind of juvenile vice. Once I
started paying attention, I noticed that a lot of stories out there suggested
disturbing connections between candy and controlled substances. In 2009, The
Wall Street Journal broke the news that middle school kids were freaking out
their parents by inhaling and snorting the dust from Smarties candies; YouTube
“how to” videos were all the rage for a few months.1 Even more worrisome were
exposés in 2010 on Detroit television 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 for cocaine as early as 1931.3 In the spring of 2012, actor Bryan
Cranston offered talk-show host David Letterman a taste of “blue meth,” the
superpotent methamphetamine that drives the action in the AMC hit drama
Breaking Bad. It wasn’t real methamphetamine, of course, just a sugar prop, but
candy maker Debbie Hall, who created the TV version, quickly started selling
the ice-blue rocks in little drug baggies to fans at her Albuquerque shop the
Candy Lady.4
Hall’s creation is just a novelty gag, but there are some people who think that
the sugar it’s made from is as harmful as the meth it’s imitating. Addiction
researchers warn that the tasty pleasures of candy, cakes, potato chips, and the
rest of the sweet, fatty indulgences we fondly know as “junk food” light up the
same brain receptors as heroin and cocaine. A team at Yale showed pictures of
ice cream to women with symptoms of “food addiction” and found that their
brains resembled the brains of heroin addicts looking at drug paraphernalia.5 The
idea of food addiction has become part of the national anti-obesity conversation;
even Kathleen Sebelius, U.S. secretary of health and human services, announced
in May 2012 that for some people, obesity is the result of “an addiction like
smoking.”6
The belief that craving a sugar fix is the same thing as jonesing for a hit of
something stronger depends in large part on one’s definition of “addiction.”
Representatives of the food industry tend to favor a more narrow designation. A
study funded by the World Sugar Research Organization concluded in 2010 that
although humans definitely like to eat sugar, the way we eat it doesn’t strictly
qualify as addiction.7 On the other hand, Dr. Nora D. Volkow of the National
Institute on Drug Abuse warns that “processed sugar in certain individuals can
produce … compulsive patterns of intake.”8 Compulsion isn’t quite addiction,
but there are even more alarming reports of research at Princeton and the
University of Florida, where “sugar-binging rats show signs of opiatelike
withdrawal when their sugar is taken away—including chattering teeth,
tremoring forepaws and the shakes.”9 Rats plied with a fatty processed diet of
Ho Hos, cheesecake, bacon, and sausage at the Scripps Institute didn’t do too
well either; the rats quickly started overeating, and wouldn’t stop gorging
themselves even when the scientists began zapping them with electrical shocks.
The study’s authors concluded that “junk food elicits addictive behavior in rats
similar to the behaviors of rats addicted to heroin.”10
Call it addiction or craving or compulsion, it does seem certain that having a
little candy causes many people to want to eat more. What makes junk food so
irresistible, according to former FDA commissioner David Kessler, is its
“hyperpalatability.” In his book The End of Overeating, Kessler shows how the
food industry manipulates its products to make us want to keep eating them. The
addition of large quantities of fat, sugar, and salt is what makes processed foods
taste good. But these additives do more than just make bland ingredients taste
better. Sweetness, saltiness, and fattiness, alone or in combination, may actually
stimulate our appetites, and the more we eat, the more we crave. Thus, this food
isn’t just palatable, it’s “hyperpalatable.” The arts of the food chemist and the
food technologist bring us this experience in ever more perfect and irresistible
forms. Witness the food-engineering marvel that is the Snickers bar as Kessler
describes it: “as we chew, the sugar dissolves, the fat melts, and the caramel
picks up the peanut pieces so the entire candy is carried out of the mouth at the
same time.”11 It’s a sensory symphony of fat, sugar, and salt: perfectly 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 of the
best-selling candy bar lists. The caramel, nougat, and peanut confection has been
an American favorite since its introduction in 1930; now it dominates the
international 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 estimated at $118 billion.13 Hershey vies
with Mars for top spot in the United States, while global conglomerates Ferrero,
Mars, Kraft, and Nestlé rule the traditional candy markets of Europe and North
America. New markets in far-flung locales previously innocent of American-
style snack foods are getting bigger every day. Russian sales of Snickers have
doubled in the last five years, and in 2011 the emerging middle classes in Russia,
Brazil, India, and China accounted for over half the growth in retail candy