Victorian Americans were horrified by jelly beans — eat too much of them, critics warned, and you might end up an alcoholic or even a chronic masturbator.
Today, of course, candy has been linked to obesity, hyperactivity and even cancer. Meanwhile, addiction research has shown that the same receptors in the brain activate when we indulge in junk food, like candy corn, as when heroin addicts get a fix. Like wild beasts, once we start eating sugar, many of us just can’t stop. And stop we haven’t. The average American will eat about 130 pounds of sugar a year.
But wait, says writer Samira Kawash. Only 6% of the added sugar we consume comes from candy. Why has it become the bad guy?
That’s the question that popped into Kawash’s head during a mid-afternoon trip to a playground with her 5-year-old daughter in her Park Slope neighborhood five years ago.
Kawash, a former cultural studies professor at Rutgers University, offered her daughter a small Dum Dum lollipop as a treat. Her friend, another girl her age, asked for one, too.
“She can’t have one,” her grandmother explained. “It will ruin her appetite for dinner.”
Kawash was tickled by this reaction. “How could this tiny morsel of candy be so threatening?” she asked herself.
“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 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.”
She found that even the word confectioner has a “troubling” double-meaning: Most commonly it means one who makes candies, but it also means “a compounder of medicines and poisons.”
She dug deeper into America’s relationship with confections, but found very little in the way of rigorous academic study. The “sweet stuff” seemed to be too trivial for the history books. So she decided to write her own.
Now Kawash runs a blog called the Candy Professor — “which is admittedly a bit tongue-in-cheek” — and will be publishing a nearly 400-page book on the subject called “Candy: A Century of Panic and Pleasure,” out next month.
In it, she argues that the history of candy is far from sweet or trivial — in fact, it’s the story of the American food movement and with it many of modern era’s anxieties and troubles.
It all began in Britain. (One historian even says that you can trace the rise of candy consumption in Britain by charting how royal teeth had decayed).
“England was candy-centered very early on,” explains food lecturer Andrew F. Smith, who is currently at work on “Sugar: A Global History.” “The whole idea of a sweet at the end of a meal is thoroughly British. The English just fell in love with sugar and added it to everything, even beef.”
But sweets remained a food for the elites until the mid-1800s, when steam-power helped to reduce the price of sugar and ushered in a new era of factory-made food. Sugar sciences also expanded as researchers discovered novel ways of preserving foods and converting starches into sugars.
The first candy machine made in America was created by pharmacist Oliver Chase in 1847. His job was to prepare medicinal lozenges made from a paste of uncooked sugar and gum and then pressed flat into discs. The lozenges were such a big hit — even with the healthy — that he devised a machine that would churn out lozenges faster and more evenly sized. They were later named Necco Wafers.
Another early candy success story — Kawash says it’s impossible to find the first candy, “The question is like, Who was the first human being?” she says— started in the early 1890s when Milton Hershey watched German-made machinery in action at the Chicago Expo.
Hershey got his start in caramels and at first only used his milk chocolate to cover them, but the chocolate became so popular that he began to sell it on its own.
But one thing made his unique: the packaging. Every one of his chocolate bars came with the HERSHEY label. They were an instant success. His first bar hit the market in 1899. By the next year, he stopped making caramels all together, and by 1907 annuals sales hit $2 million.
Candy was no longer made in house by a local confectioner — it was big business. The per-capita consumption of candy leapt from 2 pounds a year in 1900 to 15 pounds in 1923.
By 1907, America was known as “a great candy eating nation.”
And Brooklyn was its epicenter. In 1908 alone, Kings County produced 130 million pounds of confectionery and chocolate a year — at $10 million. Sugar refineries dotted the waterfront (many of which are now condos, Kawash points out) and during its height Brooklyn shipped more candy than any other state in the union.
Yet, even this early on, many people were uneasy with this new kind of “non-food.”
“Candy was the first food that bore no resemblance to things found in nature or made in the kitchen. The candy industry worked hard to present candy as food, but there was a deep suspicion about it,” Kawash says.
Confectioners were accused of offering “poisonous” candy to children and, briefly, candy was connected to polio.
Food reformers began to rally against the “dangers” of early artificial food which isn’t too far a cry from the organic food movement we see today.
Puritan thought argued that excess candy consumption would lead to other moral turpitudes — smoking, alcoholism, sex.
“Historically, Americans have problems with pleasure. Ideas about food and morality — the ways that some foods were godly and some foods would drive your body into sinfulness date back to the 19th century. And candy, a source of so much stimulating pleasure, became highly suspect,” Kawash says.
One newspaper article, going on the “scientific” evidence that candy fermented in the belly, warned: “Candy Same as Alcohol.”
Not everyone jumped on the anti-candy bandwagon. Around the same time, sugar had developed a reputation as a handy fatigue fighter, and armies (starting with the Germans during the Prussian War) began to gobble it up.
By World War I, emergency rations of chocolates were delivered to US troops but were “so tasty that the men would eat it shortly after issue.”
From September 1917 to March 1919, the US Army consumed 225 million pounds of sugar, at around a quarter of a pound per man a day.
When the boys returned, they still wanted their sugar fix, ushering in what Steven Almond, author of “Candy Freak” (Algonquin), calls the “golden age of candy bars.”
And it was then that candy bars, each individually wrapped and much heftier, became a “cheap source of nutrition and quick energy — a fast food, basically,” Almond tells The Post.
The first “combination” (as in many ingredients) candy bar was the Goo Goo Cluster created in Nashville, Tenn. A mound of peanuts, caramel, marshmallow and milk chocolate, it was sold locally until the 1920s when it was wrapped and went national.
Soon the industry was awash in candy bars. It was estimated at the time that in 1927, there were 15,000 candy bars on the market. The names ran the gamut from funny to raunchy: Snirkles, Cold Turkey, Old Nick, Red Hot Liza, Big Dick, Black Bottom, Sloppie Sally and Fat Emma.
Beyond the names, now candy makers began to overtly push their confections as meal replacements. One was even named “Chicken Dinner,” another “Club Sandwich.” Hershey even added a catch phrase to its marketing campaign: “More sustaining than meat.”
One nickel candy bar gave an option to put the bar “between two slices of buttered bread in the form of a sandwich.”
Perhaps they could do the trick if you took size (not nutritional value) into account. The Baby Ruth weighed in at a quarter pound at the time (which didn’t deter Baby Ruth’s creator from dropping bars from planes in cities in 40 US states).
Then from a wartime high of 20.5 pounds per person in 1944, candy consumption fell 25% to a low of 15.5 pounds in 1955. America, it seemed, was getting fat and candy became Enemy No. 1.
Out of the new obesity fears — at the time 25% of people were overweight (now that number is closer to 40% according to the CDC) — came a wide range of artificial sweeteners, all promising to deliver the goods without the calories.
The market expanded rapidly, jumping from 5.7 million pounds of artificial sweetener sold in 1960 to 17.5 million pounds sold in 1967.
A nascent health-food movement began to expand, led by British biochemist John Yudkin, who released the damning book, “Pure, White, and Deadly” about — you guessed it — the dangers of sugar. Yudkin might have gone a little far with his pronouncements,linking sugar with tooth decay, obesity, acne, and also arthritis, ulcers, diabetes and cancer.
The threat of cavities shocked the nation in particular. Especially when Mike Wallace announced in 1966 that “Experiments have shown that people who eat lots of sweets get three to four times as many cavities as those who don’t.”
One doctor even encouraged Congress to take a page from the recent tobacco legislation calling for warning labels to be affixed to all sweets.
As a result, fluoride was added to the water supply and candy took yet another knocking.
What followed — and continues to this day — is what Kawash calls the “decandification” of candy, or the growth of the “snack bar” market.
Now foods labeled as “healthy or organic,” like fruit bars, cereal bars, granola bars, breakfast bars, energy bars, diet bars and so on, began to take on candy’s role as a midday pick-me-up and are now a $6 billion a year industry.
“It’s easy to be fooled by virtuous sounding words like ‘whole grain’ and ‘granola’ and ‘fiber.’ But when you read the label, you realize that the snack bar makers know the truth: what people really want is a candy bar,” says Kawash.
A 2011 study showed the foolishness of such eating behavior. When people were told that jelly beans were fruit chews, they ate an average of 25% more. But as Kawash sees it, candy is “no worse than any of those other ultra-processed foods,” in fact, it might be more virtuous, because it’s “honest.”
“[Candy] says what it is. But this honesty also makes candy an easy target. By blaming candy for bad nutrition, cavities, and obesity, we can keep buying without worry the foods that stock the rest of the grocery store aisles.
“That little jelly bean is just a jelly bean: it won’t rot your teeth, or make you fat, or drive you to drink, or give you cancer. Candy is just candy, a sweet morsel without any supernatural powers.”