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?”

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 4 Candy

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

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 Evil or Just Misunderstood? 5

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 plea-
sures 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 pic-
tures of ice cream to women with symptoms of “food addiction”
and found that their brains resembled the brains of heroin ad-
dicts 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 ser vices,
announced in May 2012 that for some people, obesity is the re-
sult 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 defi-
nition 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 “pro-
cessed 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

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 6 Candy

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

selves even when the scientists began zapping them with electri-
cal 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 cer-
tain 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 in-
dustry 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, salti-
ness, and fattiness, alone or in combination, may actually stimu-
late 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 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 for top spot in
the United States, while global conglomerates Ferrero, Mars,

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 Evil or Just Misunderstood? 7

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
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 Candyfreak, that its prom-
inence in American life today is much diminished from its heyday
in the 1930s and 1940s. But though the parlor candy dish may have
passed out of fashion, plenty of candy is still finding its way into
American mouths. Despite the loss of variety (in American manu-
facture, at least) and the disappearance of many old-time favorites,
the quantity of 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 of communications for the National Confectioners
Association, suggests a simple reason for candy’s success: “When
economic times are tough, the things that bring you a lot of happi-
ness that don’t cost a lot of money tend to stay in your budget.”15
Candy is one of those simple pleasures that make people feel
good, and it’s a pleasure that’s never hard to find. Candy is con-
veniently located right next to the cash register in just about ev-
ery retail establishment, from suburban megastores to urban
bodegas and every store in between, and sold from vending ma-
chines in schools, libraries, athletic parks, and wherever else
people gather. It’s so plentiful and so ubiquitous that most of the
time we don’t even notice it. As to how we define candy, I suspect
that most of us operate on a pornography principal—we know it
when we see it—but as I’ll explain later, the definition of candy is
never quite so simple as one might think. For the time being,

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

those things that people commonly call candy, made by manu-
facturers who describe their business as the manufacture of
candy. People who think about these things every day, like inde-
fatigable candy reviewer Cybele May, who posts at candyblog
.net, sort candy from not-candy with a few specific qualities in
mind: a sweet substance with a base of sugar, not liable to spoil-
age, ready to eat without preparation or utensils, and consumed
primarily for pleasure.16 This is pretty good, so far as common-
sense definitions go, but, as I hope to show, it is getting a lot more
difficult to say with confidence what sorts of foods ought to be
included in the broad category of candy.
Usually, if we think about candy at all, it’s as the stuff of happy
memories: cotton candy at the state fair, the birthday party piñata,
the overflowing Easter baskets and Halloween bags, the glittering
Hanukkah gelt, the comfort of the lollipop at the doctor’s office,
the reward of M&M’s for potty training, the chocolates from a
loved one on Valentine’s Day, or the prettily wrapped favors at
weddings. But even when candy is freely given to children, and
intended to heighten the pleasure of special events, it’s almost
always accompanied by a warning: don’t let all that candy spoil
your dinner, and remember to brush your teeth right afterward.
It seems paradoxical that the candy that gives us some of our
happiest experiences is the same candy that rots our teeth, ruins
our appetite, and sucks tender innocents into a desperate life of
sugar addiction. Candy joins the ideas of pleasure and poison,
innocence and vice, in a way that’s unique and a bit puzzling. The
older name for a candy maker is confectioner, which comes from
Latin roots that mean, roughly, “making together” or “putting
together.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a confec-
tioner is “one who makes confections, sweetmeats, candies, cakes,
light pastry.” But there is another meaning for confectioner: a
“compounder of medicines, poisons.” It is a troubling thought:
sweetmeats and poison originating from the same source.

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