Posts filed under ‘Health’
Back to School: Chocolate Milk Wars
So, it’s back to school already. And the milk wars are heating up. Today’s NYT Food section has a great feature on the fight over schools offering chocolate milk as part of a “nutritious lunch.” Kim Severson, “A School Fight Over Chocolate Milk”
Best quote of the article: “Saying we need to add sugar and flavoring to milk to get kids to drink it is like saying we need to feed kids apple pie if they don’t like apples.” Ann Cooper (she runs the Boulder CO school lunch program, one of the districts that is going back to school chocolate milk free).
The key to the whole fight comes down, as all else surrounding food, to money: the schools only get federal lunch funds if your school lunch offering includes a grain, a vegetable, a fruit and a protein. And milk. And you only get the funds if kids take three of these five offerings. So chocolate milk, being a popular choice with the kiddies, knocks out one of the three mandatory picks. Given that the easy chocolate milk provides more leeway for kids to pass on mystery meat and gray “green” beans, schools are crying foul at attempts to insist that milk is milk, and chocolate milk is something else entirely.
Back in November (2009), when the National Dairy Council started its campaign to save chocolate milk at the school lunch counter, I wrote a post somewhere else. It didn’t make it to Candy Professor then, but it seems just as timely now. So here it is, my two cents on the Chocolate Milk Wars:
Have you raised your hand for chocolate milk? Or have you raised your finger?
The National Dairy Council (farmers) has teamed up with the Milk Processor Education Program (processors) “to provide the latest facts and science on Chocolate Milk’s role in children’s diets.” Check USA Today (12 November 2009) for a full page ad, or the web site and petition at http://www.raiseyourhand4milk.com. Seems those pesky activists and parents and nutritionists have gotten together again, and this time they want to take the chocolate milk out of the school lunch room. How dare they! After all, they say, “chocolate milk is the most popular milk choice in schools and kids will drink less milk (and get fewer nutrients) if it’s taken away.”
Really? Would it be so bad if kids drank less chocolate milk? Yeah, I get that it’s made out of milk. But is it really food? Interestingly, the National Confectioners Association was what brought the chocolate milk promotion to my attention. You know, the candy industry.
I have been thinking about candy in relation to food in the wake of Michael Pollan’s “defense of food.” Pollan encourages us to eat real food, stuff made from plants and animals in traditional, pre-industrial, recognizable forms. The highly processed, the inert, the “fortified,” the refined: these are products of industry, and not food so much as “food like substances.”
Once we can discern the difference between food and “food-like substances,” our diet returns to something healthful and sustaining and simple. And if we are mostly eating food, then there is no harm in eating some candy. So long as we’re clear, that candy is not food, not a substitute for food, and not to replace or displace food. Candy is defensible as part of our diet only when we draw a sharp line between food, what we enjoy as we nourish our bodies, and candy, something we eat purely for pleasure.
Which brings me to chocolate milk. Is it food? or is it candy? Although nobody says it this way exactly, this question is really at the crux of this latest flare up. In fact, this is just the latest salvo in a long-standing fight over the role of candy in school lunches. This was one the candy industry was probably fated to lose, but believe it or not, there was a time when candy was on the “approved” list. Clearly, if the fight now is about chocolate milk rather than chocolate bars, times have changed. But the terms of the fight have stayed eerily constant.
Chocolate milk is an odd hybrid, with an interesting history of its own. In the nineteenth century, there really was no “chocolate milk” as we know it today. Chocolate in sweetened milk was for sick people, old people, people who couldn’t stomach much else. Chocolate was viewed as providing sustenance and strength to the weak and infirm, a sort of tonic with vaguely healthful properties.
Chocolate milk in the twentieth century came to be increasingly associated with childhood. Prior to the “chocolate milk revolution” in the 1950s, cold chocolate milk was not really feasible. Hot chocolate was the childhood equivalent of hot coffee, a combination of sweetness and milkiness that seemed essentially infantile. But hot chocolate required heating milk (a delicate operation) and measuring and mixing at the stove. Not difficult, but not something kids would do alone. Instant chocolate milk mix changed the playing field: Nestle, Carnation, Ovaltine were all introduced in the early 1950s, a time when food engineering introduced the TV dinner and other “convenience” monstrosities to the American table. Now children could enjoy delicious chocolate milk any time, with no mess and no trouble. Ads for these products feature cherubic children and pudgy hands mixing and drinking dark brown elixirs.
Chocolate milk was a big part of twentieth century childhood, to be sure. But chocolate milk at home as a snack or a treat in the context of all the other foods that mother has chosen is one thing. And for the most part, those 1950s kids were skinny and didn’t know a thing about diabetes or pediatric heart disease.
For most U.S. kids in the twenty first century, chocolate milk every day on the school lunch line is something else. For kids with serious food and health issues, the line between food and candy needs to be drawn, and it needs to be crystal clear. And we all need to acknowledge: chocolate milk is candy. That is to say, chocolate milk should be enjoyed as a treat, occasionally, not as a daily beverage.
They say kids won’t drink milk unless its flavored. They say at least chocolate milk has the nutrients of milk. They say it’s better than soda.
By this logic, I should have a screwdriver with my oatmeal every morning. Because otherwise, I just won’t drink that orange juice.
Teach kids to drink soda, they drink soda. Teach them soda is a bad choice, give them water, they’ll drink water. Chocolate milk is no different. Pandering to the lowest denominator, the sweet tooth, and insisting that children will do no better if given the chance is just patronizing. The school lunch programs are making huge improvements. In the New York City schools, they are eating the whole grain breads, they are learning about fresh fruits and vegetables. Alice Waters has her kids eating okra and kale, for pete’s sake. Will kids drink less milk when it’s not sweet chocolate? Some. But that’s because they had the chocolate to start with. We need a little re-education here. There is no reason they can’t learn to appreciate the difference between real food and nutritionally tarted-up candy.
1954 Fake Sugar Smack-Down
America’s love affair with artificial sweeteners started in the 1950s when cyclamate became widely available. Reports linking the sweet chemical to cancer in lab rats were decades away. Artificial sweeteners promised the triumph of chemistry over the messy stuff of appetite and fatness.
This all put actual sugar in a tricky spot. The marketing of artificial sweeteners didn’t mince words: sugar is fattening, fake sugar is not. Real sugar needed to find an angle.
The sugar trade group, Sugar Information Inc., came up with an ingenious solution. They embraced the idea of reducing, but turned sugar’s calories from a deficit into an advantage in the battle against the bulge.
In a massive advertising campaign launched in early 1954, Sugar Inc. told this story: Why do people get fat? They eat too much. Why do they eat too much? They are hungry. Why are they hungry? Their blood sugar has dropped. How to ward off that hunger that leads to overeating? Have a little sugar.
The idea of blood sugar and appetite regulation was cutting edge nutritional science in 1954. When Sugar Inc. started running these ads, the idea of appetite regulation and the relation to blood sugar was quite new, while the menace of caloric excess was widely recognized.
These sugar ads which ran as a series through 1954 in national publications such as LIFE, Saturday Evening Post, Ladies Home Journal, and New Yorker evoked “research scientists at a leading university” to explain the idea that “if you are overweight, a moderate use of sugar in your diet may actually be more effective in helping you reduce than no-calorie artificial sweeteners.”
In a statement to retailers and manufacturers, Sugar Information Inc. called this advertising a “nutritional bombshell”: “a mighty effective answer to the confused calorie claims that seek to undermine confidence in quality foods and beverages that you have helped to build up over the years.”
Ta da: sugar is transformed from waistline menace to the ultimate diet aid. Who needed “diet candy” when candy was the perfect diet pill? As madame exclaims in this ad for Refined Syrups and Sugars, Inc., “What! Eat candy and reduce? — Yes, here’s why…”
See more of the ads in LIFE Magazine: 18 Jan 1954; 5 April 1954; 12 July 1954
1954: The Plague of Overweight and the Salvation of Reduced Calorie Foods (Except Candy)
In the early 1950s, Americans were gripped by a renewed fervor for reducing.
Life insurance studies had suggested that as many as 5 million Americans were obese, and another 20 million overweight. According to these measures, weight problems afflicted nearly 1 in 5 of the total population. Public health officials began sounding the alarm in 1952, and by 1954, even mainstream publications like LIFE Magazine had joined in promoting the new view on America’s waistline: ‘The most serious health problem in the U.S. today is obesity.” Sound familiar?
Today scientists are looking to high fructose corn syrup, estrogen disruptors, carbohydrate overload, and metabolic disorders to understand why, despite half a century of diet and exercise, despite lo-cal and lo-fat and lo-carb and hi-fiber, Americans keep getting fatter. Overeating just doesn’t explain the whole problem.
But in the 1950s, the problem was firmly located in individual behavior. Fatness was explicitly associated with weakness, venality, sin. LIFE Magazine put it plainly: “The uncompromising truth is that obesity is caused by gluttony.” The solution? Eat less. Less food, to be sure. But in an age dominated by the precision of science, the real measure of “less” was not volume but calories.
The food industry was quick to respond to the new market for reduced-calorie foods. Saccharine had been available since the late 1800s, prescribed by doctors for diabetic use but occasionally “abused” by dieters. Saccharine was of limited appeal, as it had a bitter and unpleasant aftertaste and was not easily adapted to cooking and canning processes. But a new synthetic sweetener, cylcamate, became available in 1950 under the trade name Sucaryl. Where saccharine had primarily been sold over the counter in pharmacies, cyclamate was quickly adopted by food processors, especially canned food and beverages. Saccharine sweetened drinks had been around since the 1920s but were not widespread or popular. But between 1950 and 1954, artificially sweetened drinks exploded. Well known brands like Lo-Cal and No-Cal were selling millions of cases, and there were something like 150 brands of cyclamate and saccharine sodas and drinks on the market. And “diet” foods including canned fruits and vegetables, skim milk, and lo-cal desserts moved out of the fringes of specialty “health” stores and into the aisles of mainstream grocery markets.
The marketing of artificial sweeteners was agressive and played directly into America’s new obsession with calorie counting. The consumer campaign for Sucaryl used lines like: “You can save a lot of calories by sweetening with Sucaryl and you can’t taste the difference.” And: “If you are not counting calories, you don’t need this new, non-fattening sweetener. If you are, you do.”
In this ad you can see how “eat less” doesn’t mean eat less food. The low calorie dessert looks and (presumably) tastes the same as its full calorie counterpart. Sucaryl makes reducing seem almost magical: you can’t see or even notice what is different about the Sucaryl dessert. Just make the right choice of sweeteners, and your weight problem is solved.
Sucaryl proclaimed itself “the new non-fattening sweetener that tastes just like sugar.” Which is to say, sugar is the fattening sweetener. Who was going to want to eat what was fattening? By implication, everyone needed to be counting calories to stave off the dread overweight, and so everyone should be using Sucaryl.
It was a shot fired over the bow, make that the bowl, of sugar. And candy was directly in the line of fire.
Saccharine and cyclamate made sweetness distinct from fattening. So America could have its sweet sodas and pies and canned peaches. But nobody knew how to make candy out of saccharine or cyclamate. Candy sweetness was sugar sweetness. What was a candy lover to do? The line seemed clear: candy — sugar — fattening — gluttony — sin.
Next time: candy redemption.
“Those Foods for Dieters,” Kiplingers Personal Finance, Jan 1954 p. 13-15. “The Plague of Overweight,” LIFE Magazine, 8 March 1954, p. 120-124. Sucaryl ad, LIFE Magazine 5 Dec. 1955 p. 110
More Smokin’ Candy
Color me flabbergasted.
It’s the “edible Puff Pop.” It is a lollipop. And a pipe. You eat it and you smoke it. And it does not appear to be a joke.
It’s made by a New Jersey outfit called Smokeclear, Inc. You can see the press release here.
Now there have always been all kinds of candy pipes and candy cigarettes. But they were just candy. You pretended to smoke them. Pretended, get it? And maybe kids acted all cool and mature and maybe these candy smokes led to all kinds of delinquency, and maybe not. But there was no actual smoke involved.
The Puff Pop, on the other hand, is a functional smoking implement. The round lollipop has a bowl and a hole and you put your stuff in it and light it and smoke it through the hard candy. Stuff…I don’t know what, surely legal tobacco and not any other wacky weeds…
These Puff Pops have been tried and tested: the bowl won’t crack or melt when you light your stuff on fire. And they come in yummy flavors: grape, lemon/lime, green apple, blueberry cola and strawberry. It is, as the manufacturer puts it, “an edible pipe that’s user friendly.” Smokeclear expects they will sell in smoke shops, but also in convenience stores. And candy shops, no doubt.
Because that’s a good idea: edible lollipop pipes. I’ve just spent two weeks researching lollipops and their associations with children, and now this. People, WHAT are you thinking?!
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Tobacco Candy
So now we have tobacco candy: Camel Orbs, a compressed tobacco tablet that tastes and looks like a breath mint. Orbs delivers nicotine. So does nicotine gum. But unlike nicotine gums, Orbs contains tobacco. More important, Orbs is meant to take the place of a cigarette, not to help you quit.
Orbs have been test marketed in select states for a few months, but now they have caught the attention of the FDA. In a Feb. 1 letter to R.J. Reynolds, the director of the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products (CTP) expressed concern “that children and adolescents may find dissolvable tobacco products particularly appealing, given the brightly colored packaging, candy-like appearance and easily concealable size of many of these products.” (reported here)
The FDA’s worry has two parts: one, that tobacco packaged as candy encourages young people to take up smoking. And two, that the candy-like appearance of products like Orbs might appeal to children and endanger them if they think it is actually candy. It’s that second idea that has pitched Orbs into the newspapers this past week. Pediatrics, a medical journal, published a study on April 19, 2010 detailing the risks of nicotine poisoning to children who accidentally eat Orbs and similar candy-like tobacco products. Since then, the news media has been abuzz with news and debate about this latest salvo in the tobacco wars. (msnbc.com coverage here; New York Times article here; Q&A from The Week here).
Despite everything we know about the dangers of tobacco, smoking is legal, and other tobacco products are legal, but only if you’re over 18. We’ve decided as a society that nicotine use and addiction is tolerable for adults, but not for children. Like alcohol, nicotine is a recreational drug that our society tolerates within certain limits. But while adults are deemed competent to choose drug use, children generally are not. So the concern that children will confuse candy, which they can have, with nicotine, which they cannot have, is understandable.
The worries about Orbs, though, seem uniquely contradictory. On the one hand, there is the worry that children will accidentally ingest a dangerous drug disguised as candy. On the other hand, there is the worry that children will conceal their drug abuse by hiding these little candy-like packages and discretely popping nicotine pills under the guise of enjoying a breath freshener.
So are children innocent victims, or pathological drug-abusers? Somehow, when it comes to candy, they are both.
The combination of candy and children has always carried with it an intertwined idea of innocence and corruption. Candy and children seem to go together naturally: children find candy irresistible, and candy, especially simple sugar candy, is for the kids. But if children can’t resist candy, there is something disturbing about that desire. Candy is a lure, a trap, that draws children in. And hidden behind candy’s sweet surface is something potentially harmful, something perhaps deadly. In the 1890s, it was “adulterants” like glue and clay that would harm candy eating children. In the 1970s, it was razor blades hiding in the Halloween candy. In every decade, there have been stories of children “poisoned” by something in the candy they eat.
Candy, it seems, is always concealing something dangerous, let’s call it “factor X.” Every era has its own “factor X,” but the historical continuity of candy danger tells us that alarms about candy poisonings, whether due to artificial colors or nicotine, are not entirely connected to the actual, measured danger. The image of poison candy is a powerful one: candy is innocence, and the hidden poison, whatever it is, is the seed of corruption.
The latest “factor X” is tobacco, or nicotine. As the tobacco industry defenders have insisted, the actual danger posed by Orbs in the household is pretty minor compared with all the other hazards to the unsupervised child, cleansers, medicines, and the like. The packaging for Orbs and related products is claimed to be child-proof, and the product is sold with warnings, just like aspirin or cold medicine. The latest report suggests something like 600 children a year experience “mild nicotine poisoning.” Hypothetically, if a very young child were to eat a lot of these candies, it could be lethal. But we could say that about a lot of ordinary substances, starting with aspirin. This too is part of the historical pattern: in every era, the intensity of coverage of alleged candy poisoning is far in excess of the actual incidence of real harm.
The other charge critics make is that R.J. Reynolds is involved in a deliberate attempt to appeal to children and hook them on tobacco at a young age. The implication seems to be, if it’ s candy, it must be for children. Although the form of this tobacco candy is more like Tic Tacs, which kids don’t particularly go for, and not like, say, Sour Warhead Gummis.
R.J. Reynolds knows very well that tobacco is only allowed for adults. If they make a tobacco candy, it is not because they expect to profit from illegal or accidental sales to children. They expect to profit from legal and successful marketing and sales to adults. It is adults who are seen as wanting a “candy” drug, a drug made to seem innocuous because it takes the form of a candy. In today’s youth obsessed culture, the marketing of this product as hip and cool and fun seems aimed at 20 and 30-somethings (it reminds me of the new Wonka campaign). When we have generations of “kiddults” still acting and living like teens, I’m not sure that such marketing indicates a sinister plot to capture kids, as critics have charged, so much as it points out how confused we have become about the differences between adults and children.
I suspect that a lot of the clamor against the idea of tobacco candy has quite a lot to do with our deep Puritan moralism when it comes to drugs and pleasure. If people are going to be addicted to tobacco, they should suffer for it. The idea that there is a benign, pleasant, socially acceptable way to get your tobacco fix seems just wrong.
Transforming a cigarette into a breath mint seems a brilliant solution for a tobacco industry threatened by changing perceptions of their key product. Cigarette smoking has become almost intolerable in many places in our society, and cigarette smokers the new pariahs. Smoking causes premature aging, wrinkles, death. But candy? Candy is about fun, and innocence, and youth. If you could trade in the reviled cigarette for an innocent candy, wouldn’t you?
These days, a lot of smokers would rather not be “smokers.” Everybody, smokers especially, knows how cigarettes damage your body and your health, as well as, in many cases, your career and your social life. Tobacco candy seems the ideal solution: pleasant tasting, no body is bothered, no embarrassing scene of sucking on a “cancer stick” outside the office building. And as candy, that most innocuous of substances, alternatives like Orbs seem perfectly safe. It’s easy to forget that it’s still tobacco, and still carries significant risks of gum cancer, mouth cancer, and heart disease.
Tobacco candy is just the latest entry in the race to turn everything into candy. When it’s calcium candy or fiber candy or xylitol candy, everybody seems pretty happy. But when it’s tobacco candy, we can begin to discern the problems of making candy something other than candy. Tobacco candy is potentially harmful in a way that calcium candy probably is not, to be sure. But tobacco candy is really just the dark cousin of those more benign drug-candies. Drugs and poisons get mixed in a confusing stew with pleasures and the appearance of innocence.
So far, the test marketing of Orbs hasn’t been very successful. Anecdotal reports from test markets suggest slow sales, and there are no current plans for a national roll-out. It may just be the case that most tobacco users prefer to keep tobacco a little less pleasant, a little less candy like. It may not be as good as quitting, but at least it’ s honest.
Lollipops from the Dentist
I went to the dentist yesterday. School is out for break, so there were kids there too. Kids with lollipops. Lollipops which they appeared to have been given by none other than the dentist.
What? For at least one hundred years, dentists have been hammering the point: candy causes cavities!
So here’s a dentist giving out a lollipop as a reward for enduring the visit. And I’m thinking, wow, this dentist is really out there. But then I took a closer look.
The lollipop was “Dr. John’s Xylitol Lollipop.” Xylitol, in case you haven’t heard, is a sugar alcohol that diminishes the effects of the bad bacteria in your mouth that lead to cavities. So in theory, the xylitol lollipop would not promote tooth decay. Dentist friendly candy! And Dr. John’s website, although it doesn’t actually say it, is obviously inviting that idea: the logo for Dr. John includes a dental mirror.
So the lollipop that kiddies get at the store is BAD. And the lollipop that comes from the dentist is GOOD. But for a kid, isn’t a lollipop a lollipop? Mixed messages, people.
And what does it mean to say only doctors can give us candy? I’m looking around and seeing gummy vitamins, gummy fiber supplements, gummy Omega-3s, this xylitol candy (which, by the way, for full cavity fighting effect, needs to be consumed several times a day). You or your child could spend the whole day eating gummy bears and sucking lollipops, and say “but it’s not candy!” You know what? It is.
Of course, the truth is that it’s not the candy that causes cavities. It’s bacteria that feed on carbohydrates (including, but not only, sugars) that stick to your teeth. Those could come from candy, of course, but they could come from pasta, or bread, or potato chips. And just because you eat candy doesn’t mean the sugars will stick to your teeth, or that the levels of bacteria in your mouth will lead to decay.
Notice how no one ever says “bread causes cavities”? Because in our cultural lexicon of foods, bread is good, the staff of life. How could it possibly be harmful? On the other hand, “don’t eat candy” is a simple message, one that fits with our cultural suspicion of candy as pleasure for the sake of pleasure. But the big picture is a lot more complicated.
And one other thing: xylitol, like mannitol and other sugar alcohols, can have side effects. The folks at http://www.yourdentistryguide.com/xylitol/ explain:
Taking more than the recommended six to eight grams for oral care may cause stomach discomfort; taking more than 40 grams a day as a sweetener might cause some people to initially experience diarrhea, but this typically subsides with continued use.
Well, if its only a little diarrhea, I guess it’s ok.
And now it’s only fair to give you a warning: Candy Professor Soapbox ahead…
Here’s what I think. Hiding candy under a medical disguise just confuses the issue. Food should be food, medicine should be medicine, candy should be candy. When we make our medicine into candy, and deny ourselves candy for its own pleasures, what have we become?
Dr. John’s Xylitol Lollipops: this is where I would put the link, but I don’t think I will. You can find them yourself if you’re looking.
Fruits, Candies, and Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound
Some time ago, when I was poking around in the dusty archives looking for candy cookbooks with recipes for vegetable candy, I came across a curious item: Fruits and Candies, a recipe booklet from the early 1900s. It was published as a promotion for Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound, a popular women’s “medicinal tonic” in the early 1900s consisting of various herbs and alcohol (18-20 percent, stronger than a big California Cabernet but about half as strong as Bacardi white rum).
This booklet features two sorts of entries: recipes for candies and sweet fruit desserts, and testimonials from ladies whose “female complaints” have been cured by a regular dosing with the Vegetable Compound. So one page offers a recipe for Maple Fondant, followed by a testimonial on the sorrows of childlessness and their alleviation with Lydia Pinkham’s. Another page gives instructions for Buttercups and Molasses Candy, and then a discursus on Painful Monthly Periods and the use of Vegetable Compound to alleviate them.
What struck me when I first saw this booklet was the complete strangeness of this juxtaposition. I filed this away under “hmmm.” Surely this odd combination must mean something, but what it meant I couldn’t yet fathom.
Now I think I have a much better idea. I have been reading about the “pure food” reformers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and particularly the women’s groups that organized against alcohol, drug abuse, and tainted food. These are the grass roots activists whose efforts brought us both Prohibition (something of a catastrophe) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (the FDA–not perfect, but one of the better consumer protection success stories of our time).
One big worry of many reformers in that era was the “patent” medicines: tonics and concoctions made of who-knows-what, peddled in carts and storefronts and by mail, and often containing narcotics (morphine, laudenum, cocaine, alcohol) that led the unsuspecting user who was just looking for a little “pick-me-up” down the merry path of addiction and ruin. The abuse of what the reformers called “habit-forming poisons” was not the intentional and direct narcotic abuse of opium dens or seamy city streets. Customers for the patent formulas were fancy ladies looking for a boost after a night on the town, exhausted mothers just trying to cope, women considered “nervous” or “weak” who saw in the tonics a cure for the mysterious ailments of femininity.
So one thing the Fruits and Candies booklet tells us is that the “target market” for Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound was just those middle class women with the leisure and inclination to dabble in home confections. Somehow, these same women were the ones with numerous and sundry female complaints. And this is the interesting part, to me at least: the connection between middle class leisure, feminine complaint, and confectionery.
The reformers looked at Lidia Pinkham and the rest and saw addictive potions that would only make things worse. What these women needed was fresh air, good food, and exercise, not 20 percent alcohol “tonics.” One reformer in particular stands out: Ella Kellogg (1853-1920). Ella was the wife of Dr. John Harvey Kellogg (he who brought us corn flakes breakfast cereal), and like her husband she took a strong interest in the importance of good nutrition. Ella believed that it was just those dainty confections that were causing all that nervous female illness. For Ella Kellogg, it was poor nutrition that led to the complaints that caused women to seek relief in the tonics.
Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound and candy-making: to Ella Kellogg, the connection would have been quite clear. All that candy eating was making women sick, and sick women were turning to Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound. To the innocent eye, Fruits and Candies is just advertising packaged to appeal to women by including women’s recipes. To Ella Kellogg and her sisters-in-arms, Fruits and Candies was everything that was wrong with American women.
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More: You can browse a full digitized version of Fruits and Candies at Duke University Special Collections. For more on Ella Kellogg’s views of the relation between nutrition and the “patent” medicines so popular in the late nineteenth century, see Lorine Swainston Goodwin, The Pure Food, Drink, and Drug Crusaders, 1879-1914 (1999) (Sorry, this one is a paper book only, no link. Aren’t you glad we still have actual libraries? I am).
Image source: Vanderbilt Medical Center, via Wikipedia.
Ye Olde Poison Candy
In the early years of the twentieth century, as today, children seemed vulnerable. They ate a lot of candy. Bad candy. Penny candies in particular were blamed for endangering children’s health with “adulterants,” non-food ingrediants including such alarming substances as furniture glue, coal tar, and all sorts of chemicals, that were clearly not meant for human consumption.
It was obvious to every one in the 1900s that candy was dangerous. Or was it?
In New York City in 1899, three year old Robert Wilkerson and his five year old sister Lucy fell ill, supposedly as a result of eating poisoned candy. The boy died, but a doctor who examined Lucy “thought the symptoms were more like meningitis than poisoning.”
Two years later, the parents of two children who died blamed “candy, apples and sour milk.” The doctor had a different explaination: “meningitis, resulting from ptomaine poisoning.”
In 1906, the Times reported the announcement of the examining coroner who concluded that the death of a ten year old girl, Christina Klewin, “of what was supposed to be candy poisoning, was a victim of spinal meningitis.”
And in 1914, after New York papers charged that seven year old Willie Oppenland had been killed by poison color adulterants in his candy, an autopsy revealed that he had in fact died of cerebro-spinal meningitis.
The candy industry would spend huge amounts of money trying to combat the notion that there was something unwholesome about candy itself. The National Confectioners Association (NCA), the main candy trade group, was organized in the late 1800s with the primary goal of refuting accusations of candy adulteration and encouraging better manufacturing practices to raise the standards of the trade. Each report of “candy poisoning” was met with aggressive investigation and in most cases, alternative explanations ranging from overeating to deliberate attempts at murder.
So far in my research, I have not encountered a single credible case of illness or death caused by shoddy or criminal candy manufacture. But that didn’t mean candy couldn’t be a killer. Here’s another version of the candy poisoning tale, this one from 1913:
Dying from hailstones he had eaten, thinking them candy, a five-year-old boy Luther Quinn, met with an unfortunate end at South Orange NJ recently. The boy went outdoors after a storm and gathered hailstones. They looked so much like candy that we was tempted to eat them. [He died two days later due to indigestion] caused by the sudden and violent chilling of the hailstones.
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Sources: “Two Children Poisoned,” New York Times 24 February 1899; “Another Kruger Child Dead,” New York Times 10 January 1901; “Meningitis, Not Candy Poisoning,” New York Times 9 March 1906; “Poison Candy Charges Fail,” International Confectioner March 1914, p. 42; “Blame it on Candy,” Confectioners Journal May 1913, p. 71.
Candy is for Humans, not Cows
I have recently been learning about the virtues of grass-fed beef, milk, cheese and butter. Industrial meat has always made me a little queasy. Here’s one more reason to choose and support farms that feed cows the food cows were meant to eat.
In an item titled “Feedlot Cattle Fattened on Stale Gummy Bears,” the website EatWild exposes the sticky underside of commerical cattle feedlot practices. It turns out that alongside bakery scraps and plate scrapings and ground up who knows what, some commercial feedlots are feeding stale candy to cattle in an effort to reduce costs.
Here’s what a recent report by a University of Wisconsin Extension Nutritionist has to say about candy in dairy cattle diets:
Milk chocolate and candy are often economical sources of nutrients, particularly fat. They may be high in sugar and/or fat content. Milk chocolate and candy may contain 48% and 22% fat, respectively. They are sometimes fed in their wrappers. Candies, such as cull gummy bears, lemon drops, or gum drops are high in sugar content. … Upper feeding limits for candy or candy blends and chocolate are 5 and 2 lb. per cow per day, respectively.
Needless to say, all that candy is not so good for the cows. Cows, as you may recall from fourth grade, are vegetarian ruminants: they are designed to eat grass and similar “rough” vegetative matter, which they chew and digest slowly. When cows eat grass, the vegetable nutrients are transformed into essential fats and proteins in the milk and muscle. When cows eat candy, there’s less of that good nutrition in their meat. It’s still calories, but not much else.
Candy should not be part of a nutritious cow breakfast, or lunch or dinner for that matter. As for us humans, some candy every so often seems quite fine.
PS. I recently had my first taste of “raw” cow’s milk from pastured cows, cold but fresh, unprocessed and pure. WOW. Doesn’t need candy or sugar, it is sweet and delicious all on its own.
Source: http://www.eatwild.com/healthbenefits.htm reporting on “By-Product Feedstuffs in Dairy Cattle Diets in the Upper Midwest” Randy D. Shaver, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Extension Nutritionist, Department of Dairy Science, College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, University of Wisconsin. Link: http://www.uwex.edu/ces/dairynutrition/documents/byproductfeedsrevised2008.pdf
Eat More Candy! or not?
Happy New Year! If your New Year’s Resolutions include a more nutritious diet, you are probably planning to cut down on candy.
Of course, in different times there have been different ideas about nutrition. Early food science in the late nineteenth century introduced the idea of the “calorie” as a measure of the energy content of food, and recognized three major components of the diet: protein, fat, and carbohydrate.Back in the early 1900s, this food science provided an outstanding rationale for eating more candy.
For example, one food expert wrote:
It will be seen that candy has a high energy value–higher than meat, fish and vegetables. From a laboratory point of view, half a pound of chocolate creams, supplemented by a small bag of peanuts, contain all the dietetic elements that are essential for a wholesome and nourishing day’s diet. Three meals can be obtained from the chocolates and peanuts, and the body’s needs be met and the appetite satisfied.
The craving for sweets also could be framed in scientific terms suggested by ideas of “instinct” and evolutionary utility. A physician offered this explanation:
Sweets are the necessities of childhood and youth, hence Providence has wisely implanted in the young an insatiable desire for sugar. Without this element largely mingled with its food the healthiest born infant would die in a month. In vain would it nestle on its mother’s bosom, in vain its exposure to the warm sunshine, and in vain the softest blankets and warmest furs to encase its body. For the warmth which sustains human life comes from within, and must be generated by the internal combustion of carbonaceous food as found in all sweets and fats. It is the most inveterate of all prejudices in civilized life that sweets hurt children. On the contarary, they are a prime necessity, and to deprive them of those, if made pure, is downright barbarism.
Where science led, advertising followed. One candy shop asked:
Are you eating Candy Enough? The hunger for sweets is natural. The normal man or woman who is not eating a reasonable amount of candy daily is not being properly fed. Recognizing the wholesomeness of the candy DEMAND, we have equipped our store to meet it with a wholesome SUPPLY.
For us in the twenty-first century, candy is clearly an indulgence, a treat, a little something extra. But the story of candy in the twentieth century was often dominated by a struggle to persuade or prove otherwise, that candy was wholesome and nutritious food. Is it?
Sources: “Pure Candy is Healthful–Sound the Slogan,” Confectioners Journal Oct 1916, p. 86; “Infancy Dependent Upon Sweets,” Confectioners Journal May 1915, p. 68; Viedts advertisement, Confectioners Journal October 1916, p. 83.
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