Here in Brooklyn Heights, my little elf and I journeyed hither and yon in search of your basic classic candy cane. You know the one I’m talking about: peppermint, white with red stripes. The Classic, to hang on our tree.

How many drug and grocery/food stores do you think we visited before we found this basic Yule-time staple? One? Three? Guess again.

We found the candy canes in store number NINE! Yes, eight stores, and nary a cane.

1. Duane Reade Drug Store: one box of Skittles brand fruit canes

2. Perlander Natural Foods: no holiday candy (hardly any candy at all, actually, but I was hoping for some “all natural” canes)

3. Key Food: Christmas? Who knew?

4. Sahadi’s Specialty Foods: Beautiful Hammond’s lollipops, but no canes

5. Rite Aid: one box Skittles brand canes, one Lifesavers, all lurid un-Christmasy colors.

6. Rite Aid (another one): large pink and white Barbie cane

7. Garden of Eden (expensive specialty foods): closest they had here was pretzels coated in white chocolate and peppermint crumbs.

8. Duane Reade (another one): a couple of boxes of Skittles brand and one other with green apple and strawberry flavored canes.

9. City Chemist: EUREKA! An independent store with a “old time” candy section, at last we find real Christmas candy canes. We almost missed them, though; they were stashed below some discounted boxes of Christmas cards, not even with the Christmas candy proper. No respect! But at $1.99 per dozen, and 30% off, we are happy.

Is it just that all the candy canes are sold out? Or is the old-fashioned hard peppermint just not hip enough for the Facebook generation? Any theories?

Cactus candy is now being made in Louisiana from the spineless cactus grown for cattle food. Tills Candy makes a palatable confection, with only a reasonable amount of sugar used, the cactus being peeled, dipped in hot sirup or molasses, and coated with granulated or powdered sugar. …  Cactus candy can be made by housewives on southern farms, using home supplies of cane sirup, a standard farm product of the south.

Add this to my “candy from anything” file… (see also: potatoes, lima beans, yams, garlic, cottonseed, alfalfa…)

Related Posts:

• Some Candies You Won’t Be Making for the Holidays
• Eat More, Weigh Less: Bulking up Candy With Vegetables

I have not actually seen this candy in person. I was at Harvard to look at a book, the NCA’s 1907 report on candy poisoning allegations called “Facts,” only one copy of which exists. It was totally worth the trip.

And then, poking around in the Business Library Historical Collection, I stumbled on a reference to a box containing “lozenges and labels” associated with business records of Ball & Fobes (which became Fobes & Hayward, which merged with a couple of others to become NECCO). Alas, the box was off-site in the depository, and I only was there for the day, so I couldn’t actually look in the box. But by a stroke of good luck, the very helpful reference librarians were able to track down pictures of the contents.

Amazing! They are pale pinkish and brownish flat opaque disks. The substance looks like Necco Wafers, chalky and dry. These style lozenges were the forerunners to our wafers. The shape is obviously machine made. They are round with scalloped edges. Each is stamped with a cameo-like bas relief. The detail on the images I looked at is murky, but they appear to be animal and classical type scenes; one looks like a woman holding a vase or urn, another looks like maybe a deer. I can’t tell what size these are, there is no scale reference.

Dating the lozenges: There are several labels that are in the same collection. It is impossible to know whether they are contemporaneous with the lozenge candies, but assuming they are, they provide some clues to dating. The labels read “Fobes & Hayward.” The puts the date after 1865, when when Ball & Fobes became Fobes & Hayward. The labels are for lozenges, comfits, and sugared cardamom and flagroot. These are candies that lean more toward the early nineteenth century than towards the developments of the 1880s. So I think it is unlikely that these lozenges are older that 1880, and I’d be comfortable putting them closer to 1870.

I can’t wait for my next trip up to Boston. I really want to see that box, and put my hands on, or at least near, such an amazing piece of candy history.

I talk to CBC’s Brent Bambury about Halloween fun, candy corn, kisses, and more on this morning’s radio show “Day 6.”

You can hear the pod cast here.

You go every day after school to see what kinds of candy you can buy. You examine the sizes, the varieties, the colors. You think very hard about what you like, what other kids like, what would be good to give to big kids and what would be fine for little kids.

You buy a little candy today, a little another day. You dump it all out on the floor each time you buy more. You admire it. You count it, you sort it, you think about whether you really have enough for all the kids.

You contemplate which kids might like which ones. You consider whether you should hand out these first or those, or whether you should mix them all up and just reach in and hand out which ever you grab.

You think about the candy in its big sack, in an unobtrusive corner. When other kids come over, you remember it but don’t mention it, because they might want some. And its not for eating. Not now.

You wait for Halloween to come. You wait and wait. You ask your Mom every day, how many weeks? How many days?

You might have to try one piece. Just one. After all, it’s your favorite.

It’s called Dr. Pepper Ten, and its NOT FOR WOMEN.

This is where marketing has taken us, people. A “manly” diet soda that surrounds itself with monster trucks and beefy plaid-clad pecs. The can looks like a bullet. Suck it up guys! 10 calories! That’s real stuff!

Manly man voice over: “Hey ladies. Enjoying the film? Of course not. Because this is our movie and this is our soda. You can keep the romantic comedies and lady drinks. We’re good.”

Over on Facebook, they won’t even let women onto their special man page.

Ten has real calories and 2 grams of real sugar, manly virile stuff. That regular Diet Dr. Pepper, with zero calories, is just so femmy, so frilly, so embarassing for a calorie-counting sort of guy.

Unfortunately, I can’t put the video of the commercial here, because everybody who has tried to upload it has been slammed by Dr. Pepper Snapple Group for copyright infringement. Which is kind of  a funny way to get the word out. Especially when the whole point of the campaign is to create social “buzz” and controversy (what! no women!)

How long do you think this product will last? I of course immediately think of another “not for women” line: Yorkie Chocolate Bar. Or, as we call it in my candy-discriminating household, Yukkie. After spitting it out, I concluded that it is not for women because women are too smart to eat such bad candy. As for Dr. Pepper Ten, well, I guess they’ll try anything.

This lawsuit is a shot fired across the bow of all those healthy looking processed foods that populate your grocery aisles. Read my take on fruit snack justice at TheAtlantic.com: The Candification of our  Food: The Case of the Fruitless Fruit Snack.

In the spirit of semiotics, then, I offer this candy-related thought, dedicated to my fond memory of grad school in the late 1980s. Here it is, the missing link between Theory and Candy, with a shout-out to Baudrillard:

Processed food is an imitation that promises to surpass the real or original: Swanson’s Chicken Pot Pie will be so much better than Grandma’s.

Candy, too, is processed food, but processed food with out reference to any original. Candy is the pure simulacrum, copy without origin.

As Baudrillard learned from Derrida, there is no “real” or “original,” only always already a copy. Grandma’s pot pie was an attempt to re-create the one she had at the Roadhouse Restaurant back in 1942, which was a version of the owner’s mother’s recipe, which was… No real food, always copies.

Candy as simulacrum cuts loose from the chain of origins and descent. It’s fake, and unashamed of its fakeness and therefore not in need of connecting itself to some legitimating narrative of ancestry and origin.

So candy as fake food is more true than food that disguises its fakery. Candy, perfect post-modern food.  Make that “food.”

Got all that? Hmm. Not sure I miss those 1980s so much.

(AP) FOND DU LAC, Wis. – A Fond du Lac man got his hand stuck in a car’s gas tank after he reached in to try to retrieve a Snicker’s candy bar he saw inside.

The Fond du Lac Reporter says firefighters freed 20-year-old Earr Stokes on Tuesday afternoon.

Tip to Mr. Stokes next time this happens: JUST LET GO!

(About the monkeys, in case you don’t know, this is how you catch one: put some peanuts (or Snickers bar, perhaps) in a box or coconut with a small opening. Monkey wanders over, discovers delicious treat just in reach, grabs hold but now can’t get full fist out. You’ve got yourself a monkey.)

Here’s the link:

http://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/gf/gf110604hollywood_bowl_picni