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Free Candy is Not So Free After All
I get a lot of offers for free candy samples, and mostly I say no. I want to focus on ideas and stories and history. I don’t think I should accept free things unless there is a possibility that I will write about them (not a promise, but a possibility). That after all is the reason someone is offering a sample. It’s not a matter of quid pro quo, but of good faith. They wouldn’t be offering me candy samples if I was running a rubber tire web site.
Even when it is not a matter of candy, I am suspicious of free stuff. There is always a catch. Because if it is something you want, you would pay for it. So when it comes free, do you want it because you want it, or because it’s free? People seem to get a little crazy around free stuff. Do you really want that logo key chain your bank is giving away? Do you really need another tote bag from your public radio station? Probably not. Probably you have too much stuff already. Probably you are going to take these things home and stuff them in the back of the closet. But around free stuff, we all seem to revert to atavistic hoarding behaviors. Mostly, I guess this is pretty harmless. Garage sales and thrift stores are easy purgative outlets for our tendency to accumulate. Eventually, all of it ends up at the dump. Waste, to be sure. Environmentally destructive, absolutely. But not likely to have an immediate effect on your health.
Free candy samples, on the other hand, are a serious menace in my household at the moment. Blame it on the candy show. The whole point of the candy show, of course, is to put candy into the hands of people who can help candy makers build their business: buyers, brokers, and even little bloggers like yours truly. Perhaps I did not fully appreciate that when I packed my bag to go to Chicago. I want looking for stories. I got some stories. But mostly what I got was free candy.
Some of this candy truly interests me. I have been happy to taste some new things. Having all that candy spread over three acres has given me lots of ideas. So overall, it’s been a good thing. The problem is, I somehow managed to bring home 20 pounds of free samples. Although I started with the best intentions of selectivity and restraint, somehow the more I could have the more I took. So I now have a huge quantity of candy sitting in bags next to my desk. And instead of stuffing it in the back of the closet, I seem to be stuffing it in my mouth. Waste, to be sure. Physically destructive, absolutely.
It’s not just me. We are a greedy people. Offered more, we take it, whether we need it or not. This is my conclusion, having spent much of the candy show watching perfectly respectable adults push others aside to snatch oversized handfuls of jellybean packets or furtively stuff their briefcases with mini-MilkyWays. You can buy this stuff for a couple of bucks at CVS if you want it. The grabbing and stuffing is about some more primordial instinct.
And this is normal and expected behavior in our culture. Yesterday I was in a chain bakery shop to buy three cookies for the three people in my family. The clerk points out a promotional deal: buy three get one free. I protest: I only want three cookies. The clerk looks at me like I’m from Mars. The fourth one is free, she insists. Don’t you want a free cookie? Well, no. I want three cookies. If I wanted four cookies, I would have ordered four cookies. But can I really turn down a cookie that I don’t have to pay for? After all, as the clerk points out, it is the same $3.75 whether I have three or four cookies in my sack. Clearly I should take the fourth cookie. In fact, based on the clerk’s incredulous and vaguely offended response to my efforts to demur, I seem to have incurred a social obligation to accept the fourth cookie. But now I have a problem: I have an extra cookie. I can try to give it away, but more likely is this: I’m going to eat it.
The truth is, when it comes to Cokes and cookies and candy, “free” is not free at all. Once I have it, I value it. It’s mine, and I’m not letting it go. And it’s not enough to hoard it in the cupboard. Food is not for saving (unless you’re expecting the apocalypse). Food is for eating. And make no mistake: the price may have been zero, but that fourth cookie costs me a lot when I eat it.
So what am I going to do about this pile of candy that has arrived unbidden and unpaid for? Sadly, I realize it’s time for some candy purging. Much as I hate to see so much good stuff go to waste, better the waste basket than the waistline.
CP on The End of Candy at TheAtlantic.com
When it’s all about the snacks, what happens to the sweets? I wax nostalgic for the days of just plain old candy in a post-Sweets and Snacks item for TheAtlantic.com: The End of Candy
Candy Land: Fun for Kids? or Not. (New Publication)
Ever wondered what the board game Candy Land has to do with polio, Hansel and Gretel, and rotten teeth? Now, thanks to the diligent efforts of the Candy Professor Research Labs, all your Candy Land questions are answered.
You can read the full story in the latest issue of The American Journal of Play. My article is called “Polio comes Home: Pleasure and Paralysis in Candy Land.” Since you probably don’t have a subscription yet, here is a handy link to my article.
The article is a bit of an octopus, I start with the origins of the game and then spin out to make connections with candy, literature, parenting, cold-war culture, education, disease and health. It was fun to write (and my apologies if it isn’t as fun to read as this blog, it is a bit, ahem, academic).
I started researching Candy Land because of the candy, of course. But the candy is not the whole story. This game is one of the most successful board games ever. So why is it that most people find it so boring, not fun at all? I began my research with the small fact that Candy Land was invented by a school teacher who was recovering from polio. This led me to consider the connections between the game and broader ideas about childhood, safety, learning, and play. Despite the huge commercial success of Candy Land, I’m not convinced the game has much to do with real kids or fun. Instead, I think the game tells us a lot about adult ideas about children: what children should like, what they should do, how they should play safely.
Keeping kids safe seems to be the major theme of parenting these days. It is so interesting to me that Candy Land repeats this theme both as a game and in the candy image. Better to keep the kids busy with a board game and send their imaginary pawns on an imaginary adventure than let them roam the vicious streets! And better to keep they sated with imaginary pictures of candy than to let them eat the real stuff.
It isn’t just Candy Land of course. It’s helmets and padding and fenced yards and organic snacks and Wii. It’s “don’t” and “be careful” and “you might fall” and “no.” It’s adults who can’t just leave kids to be kids. Candy Land looks fun, but it is a totally fake kind of fun: nothing to do, and no candy to eat. Safe and boring. As far as I’m concerned, Candy Land is a perfect metaphor for the rip-off that is contemporary childhood.
Your thoughts? I’d love to hear comments on this project.
Please Don’t Eat the Art (or, CVS plus Chelsea Gallery plus Art Historian plus Fine Artist = Sticky Masterpieces)
If you like candy and you like art, there’s a gallery show here in New York City that you can’t miss:
Nicole Root is an art historian and Paul Shore is a visual artist. Over beers one night a few years ago, they started musing on the sculptural forms of mass produced candies like Good and Plenty’s and Rolo’s. They pondered the notion that the same impulse toward pure forms and masses that inspired twentieth century modernist sculpture seemed to be expressed, on a smaller and sweeter scale, in Starburst cubes and Tic Tac ovoids. Is a Ring Pop so different from the pop art of Jeff Koons? And thus was born one of the most interesting candy art projects in my recollection.
Root and Shore eventually produced over 70 candy parodies of iconic contemporary sculptures. Here are a few, so you can get the basic idea:
Chair (after Yayoi Kusama); Necco Circle (after Richard Long); Addendum (after Eva Hesse)
Candy is a tricky artists’ medium. It comes in lots of textures and colors, and it isn’t expensive. But it doesn’t age well. And you have to be careful not to eat the art. So what we have is the photographic documentation of the original sculptures, which were archived for a time in Paul’s refrigerator and now have gone to the great candy resting place in the sky.
My favorite piece of the show is “Torqued Taffy (after Richard Serra),” a re-vision of Richard Serra’s monumental steel sculpture. Richard Serra is known for working with immense sheets of steel that he bends into ellipses, spirals, and curves. This work is not so much seen as felt; you stand near one or pass through one and feel a sort of oppressive, looming presence. They aren’t really for indoor use, unless you live in an airplane hangar. Mostly you’ll find them outside, where they sprout out of the ground like mysterious monoliths, evoking ancient religions and mysterious rites. Often the steel surface is left untreated, so that natural rust and corrosion slowly transform the piece. They seem timeless and eternal.
Richard Serra, T.E.U.C.L.A. (Torqued Ellipse at UCLA) [via framboise on Flikr
Where Serra’s work feels permanent and indestructible, the candy version is already melting away. The candy version is maybe one inch high; but when it is rendered like this in a photograph, you can imagine it as an enormous piece. That sort of faux-monumentality is enhanced by the sag and droop of the taffy, which give a sense of gravity and time passing. I also like the way the taffy still has the imprint of the wrapper. This makes the work especially intriguing to me: you can’t forget that this is candy from a wrapper, but at the same time you are fully immersed in the sculptural form. The taffy has a visible body and texture, it is grainy and irregular and stretched or pinched in ways that may or may not be deliberate. Compared to the machined steel of Serra’s work, the taffy seems more alive and more responsive as a medium.
Monumental sculpture is meant to be one of our most exalted forms of cultural expression. Mass produced candy, on the other hand, is our most degraded and junky form of food. Sculpture, at least traditional sculpture, shows the traces of the hand of the individual artist. In contrast, mass produced candy is punched out over and over by machine. I like the way candy art upends these solid distinctions. And I like the way this work isn’t afraid to have fun with the high seriousness of art history. I’m hoping to see “Torqued Taffy” on the cover of Art Forum one day soon!
All images courtesy Paul Shore and Nicole Root except where noted.
“Licked Sucked Stacked Sucked” on view at Jim Kempner Fine Arts, 501 W 23 St, New York until June 18.
Related: for more on what I think is a new movement in candy aesthetics, see my review of Dylan Lauren’s Dylan’s Candy Bar: Unwrap Your Sweet Life
Is Sugar Toxic? A Reply to Gary Taubes.
You have probably seen the alarming story by now: front page of the NYTimes Magazine on April 17, titled “Sweet and Vicious: The Case Against Sugar.“ The article is by Gary Taubes, author of Good Calories, Bad Calories, a gripping book that examines the evidence for the dangers of refined sugar and flour.
By the time you got to the end of the NYTimes article, it is likely that you swore off candy forever. But don’t panic! Here at Candy Professor, we hope to pour some calming oil on these troubled candy waters.
Mostly, I agree with Taubes. In fact, I agree with almost everything in the article. But I don’t think eating candy is the problem, and I don’t think forbidding candy is the solution. I’ll explain why in a moment.
First Taubes’ argument, in brief:
–sugar (sucrose) and high-fructose corn syrup are chemically and metabolically identical. Both are about half glucose and half fructose.
–Our bodies use glucose for fuel; it goes directly in the blood stream and from there into every cell. Fructose must be metabolized by the liver. Taubes summarizes: “Consuming sugar (fructose and glucose) means more work for the liver than if you consumed the same number of calories of starch (glucose).”
–Americans consume huge amounts of added sugars, both as sucrose and as HFCS.
So far, just basic scientific facts. Next comes the scary hypothesis:
–the strain of excess fructose metabolism on the liver leads to fatty liver leads to insulin resistance leads to metabolic syndrome (diabetes, heart disease, obesity).
And therefore, the alarming conclusion:
–Sugar is toxic to the liver and leads to chronic disease conditions that result, ultimately, in death.
Well, there are a lot of links on that chain. But if you follow Taubes’ bouncing ball, you end up as he has, a sugar tee-totaller. That means, obviously, no candy. But is there another way to look at it?
Here’s my spin.
I absolutely agree that the amount of added sugar in the average American diet is excessive. The majority of those added sugars come in processed foods and sweetened beverages. If you want to dramatically reduce the amount of added sugar and the strain on your system, you can best do so by avoiding processed foods and beverages: stuff in boxes, cans, cartons and tubes.
So now you are shopping the perimeter of the grocery store. You are eating eggs, chicken legs, salad, apples, oatmeal and yogurt. You are drinking water and milk. Do you like candy? You should eat some. Because the amount of added sugar in a small portion of candy is actually not enormous, especially in composite candies that include chocolate, nuts, nougats, raisins, coconut and the like.
This is my view: No single food is evil, or toxic. It is the aggregation of added sugars in ALL the foods we are eating through the course of the day, week or lifetime that adds up to a pathogenic diet.
On the other hand, let us just grant for the sake of argument that at the end of the day Taubes is absolutely right, any amount of added (refined) sugar is damaging to our liver and our bodies. Here’s the problem: we can’t go back to cave-man days. This isn’t just about sugar. We fly in airplanes that might crash, we brush our teeth with fluoride toothpaste that might strengthen our tooth enamel but might also poison our bones, we drink water laced with chlorine to kill the bacteria that also might kill us. There is no place to hide.
And let us acknowledge that plastics and pharmaceuticals and chemical engineering and the rest of it have brought us enormous advantages. (As has food processing; I suspect that without the food processing industry, the U.S. population would be dramatically smaller–but that is another topic.) Some will decide that the only possible response to the dangers of modern life is to opt out, to go off the grid. The rest of us, when we can, when we have the means and opportunity, we mitigate.
Most of us don’t want the path of total abstention, any more than we want to live without cell phones or laundry detergent. Counteract the harm of refined sugar and HFCS by knowing what you eat, and choosing deliberately when and how much sugar to consume. Be mindful, and make those added sugars occasional rather than part of every meal. If Taubes’ most extreme fears are true, maybe even a little is risky. But so is getting out of bed in the morning. How do you want to live? That is really the question.
Coda: I am left with a puzzle after reading Taubes: what of glucose as an added sweetener? Corn syrup is an important candy ingredient, and candy makers have frequently used corn-derived dextrose (glucose) in the place of cane or beet sugar. The research Taubes focuses on singles out fructose as uniquely damaging. Will we be seeing “all-glucose” candy formulations in the future?
Oh Henry! Stuffed Tomatoes
I have been trying to track down the 1926 Oh Henry! candy bar cook book for a while now. It’s called 60 New Ways to Serve a Famous Candy Bar: 60 recipes for delicious cookery with Oh Henry! I just have to find it.
I got close when I stumbled on Jennifer Tribe’s blog Yesterday’s Clues. She collects paper ephemera. She recently posted a 1926 ad from Ladies Home Journal extolling the cook book and giving a recipe for fruit salad with shredded candy bar mixed in. Check out her blog and the ad here.
Now I found the next-best-thing to the motherlode. The late Ray Broekel, famous candy bar enthusiast, collected wrappers and other candy related ephemera. I got a copy of his 1985 book The Chocolate Chronicles just yesterday, and there it is, the introduction and almost 20 of the recipes and images. Yahoo!
For your delectation, I propose: Oh Henry! Stuffed Tomatoes
2 bars Oh Henry!
3 medium size tomatoes
2 tablespoons mayonnaise
salt
lettuce
Cut the Oh Henry! into small pieces. Remove the skins from the tomatoes, cut a slice from the top of each and carefully hollow out the centers. Dice these, drain off all the liquid, add the Oh Henry!, blend with the mayonnaise and salt, and use to refill the tomato shells. Chill and serve on lettuce.
Will you dare try the recipe? Maybe I’ll whip some up for lunch this weekend and enjoy it with a nice mug of hot Coca Cola.
Candy Cures Catatonic Schizophrenia
Every once in a while I come across a jaw-dropper. This is one of those.
1952, Arkansas. Psychologist Henry Peters is working with patients at the Little Rock Veterans Hospital who suffer from what is known in that day as “catatonic schizophrenia.” They sit still and silent the day long, conscious and withdrawn. They are difficult to treat. Electroshock therapy is just about the best anyone can do, and we know that’s no picnic.
Dr. Peters has another approach. The most popular theory in the day is that catatonic schizophrenics are so beaten down by frustration and failure that they have just given up, hence the withdrawal and immobility. So Peters comes up with the idea of simple puzzles that even a catatonic schizophrenic can solve–success!
But why should the immobile patient bother even trying? We need an incentive, something really powerful, a reward at the end of the puzzle. What else but…CANDY! And just to be sure that the patients really are feeling the crave for sweet, Dr. Peters juices them up with insulin before the puzzle session. (Wait, he’s dosing them with insulin to make them crave candy? I guess Dr. Peters wasn’t carrying his copy of the Hippocratic Oath that day…)
Here is one patient getting his fudge treat:
Dr. Peters claimed success with this unconventional treatment. Out of ten patients in his group, two gained sufficient confidence from their candy puzzle triumphs that they were able to go outside the hospital, and one was released for further treatment at home.
“Incentives Help Insane,” LIFE Magazine 20 Oct 1952
Paris Candy, High and Low
If you dream of beautiful chocolates, Paris is the place to be. Any street worth its commercial zoning will have at least one place storefront dedicated to the pleasures of cacao.
And here I offer my Candy Professor confession: I don’t actually love chocolate that much. I’ll enjoy something exquisite, but Hershey’s is good too. I’m the same with coffee: that paper cup from the street cart tastes just fine to me. Reverse-snob effect, I suspect.
So when I was in Paris this past fall, the siren call of the chocolatier was drowned out by the tacky lure of the candy stand:
I ran across this stand at the Odeon metro stop on the Left Bank. Who’s more excited, me or my seven year old? There were gummies, marshmallows, licorice, caramels, and lots of strange new candy creatures I couldn’t identify but just had to try. This was the Paris version of the penny candy counter.
Two things I learned: 1. Don’t buy chocolate anything from the cheap candy stand. I suppose if I were paying more attention to chocolate (see above) this would have been obvious. 2. European cheap candy is way more interesting than the American equivalent. The variety of shapes, flavors, textures, and sugar effects was stunning. Maybe I’m just jaded by over-familiarity, but my impression is that the contemporary American equivalent candy array has less raw variety and the choices are more like: which color M&M, which flavor jelly bean.
But despite my reverse-snob candy attitude, I wasn’t going to completely miss out on the best Paris has to offer. One confiserie (fancy French word for “candy store”) that I didn’t want to miss was A La Mere de Famille. This is one of the few candy makers in Paris that specializes in non-chocolate confections. They are especially known for their caramels, pate de fruits, calissons, and marshmallow. The original shop opened on Rue de Faubourg Montmartre in 1761 to serve fashionable Parisians who wanted to eat candies like the court at Versailles. It’s still there, so I made a candy pilgrimage.
Displayed here are marshmallow in a variety of flavors (lavender, apricot, anise) and below, dragees. These dragees are the descendants of one of the oldest festal candies, known in English as “sugar plums” (I wrote about these for TheAtlantic.com). I spent a lot of money in this shop! The most interesting thing I tried was something they called “harlequins,” a sort of candy sandwich with pate de fruits between two layers of flavored marzipan. Pretty and delicious!
I was always impressed with the beauty of display at Parisian candy and chocolate counters. In the U.S., dragees or comfits are mostly confined to Jordan almonds as wedding favors and those hard sugar balls we sprinkle on cakes. But in Paris they are popular and beautifully presented, as in this display of dragees and sugared flower petals at the food hall in Bon Marche department store:
And here are some gorgeous Japanese chocolates which suggest painting as much as eating. Flavors include passion, yuzu, and sesame:
I suspect that for Parisians, this gorgeous candy is as much about looking as it is about eating. Truth be told, I never did see anyone eat the stuff.
See’s Candy and a Box of Coal
I’ve been out of my routine this winter. Ususally I’m at my desk at home in Brooklyn, but the last four weeks have found me in California, back in my childhood home. It has been a difficult season in my family, but there has been one bright spot: See’s Candy.
See’s is a California institution; their crisp and shiny white shops punctuate the main commercial artery connecting San Francisco and San Jose. The road is called “El Camino Real,” Spanish for the royal highway, surely made more royal by the presence of See’s.
Normally my family has a little one pound box around the holidays. This year, I started making trips to the local See’s, and pretty soon we had big two pound boxes strewn around the house. Somehow those chewy nougats and divinity creams have soothed us through a very challenging time.
Several years ago, I was in New York and I wanted to send my father in California a box of candy. He is, I believe, the ancestral source of my sweet tooth. He loves candy even more than I do. I wanted to send him the best, the very best candy I could think of. See’s, of course! He got the candy, but he was not impressed. “See’s! Why, we can get that any where,” he complained. “Why don’t you send me some really special candy if you’re going to all that trouble.”
I guess candy is a state of mind and a matter of geography. Out in New York, See’s is about as special as it gets, since we don’t have it. But everyone has a right to their own pleasures, so since then I’ve sent Belgian chocolates. I confess, despite the inflated price tag I find the Belgian and French confections inferior to my beloved See’s. But I guess I see my father’s point; you don’t bring coals to Newcastle, after all, and when you’re living in the Newcastle of American candy, you might mistake the most excellent candy of all for a box of coal.
Celebrating “Best Blog Food Writing of 2010″
FineCooking.com has named Candy Professor one of the Best of the Blogs 2010.
Today’s featured blogs are … the Shakespeares of the blog world. Let’s face it: The pictures get our attention, but it’s the writing that keeps us coming back day after day, post after post.
Thanks for this recognition, Fine Cooking. I’ll keep writing in 2011, I hope you’ll keep reading!
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