Confectionology (CANDY) with Susan Benjamin

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Oh, hey, it's that guy that you work with who somehow has has like eight pairs of cool glasses.

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Allie Ward.

Here we are, Spooktober.

Spooktober is always full of like scary, creepy things.

And now this one is terrifying for your teeth and your pancreas, but not your tongues or your hearts.

So let's get into it.

This is just pure fun, candy.

So there are very few candy researchers and historians in the world.

And we hunted down the best one and had one of my favorite conversations in the history of this podcast.

What a treat.

And it was only tricky to make because there's so much information that I could not keep to myself.

So this is pretty comprehensive, but it's also not comprehensive because candy is a huge world.

So we're going to get into it in a sec.

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Okay, confectiology.

It is a term that comes from the Latin for to confect or to make by mixing, especially a medicinal preparation.

We'll get into it.

And this expert is a journalist, a former journalism professor, the author of over 10 books, including 2016's Sweet as Sin, The Unwrapped Story of How Candy Became America's Favorite Pleasure.

And she also has this year's recent book release, Fun Foods of America, Outrageous Delights, Celebrated Brands, and Iconic Recipes.

Now, for the last 15 years, she's also owned the nation's only historic candy company.

It's called True Treats.

Ships all over the map and has a store in Harpers Ferry, Virginia.

And True Treats was once an answer on Jeopardy.

Pretty big deal.

This Ologist has appeared on so many radio and TV outlets to educate people about the historical and cultural relevance of candy.

It took us months to book her for this special Spooktober, but not scary, just fun episode.

And honestly, this is one of the most spirited, blissful chats we've ever done with some revelations at the end which shook me.

Shook.

I'm still laughing about it.

So stick around till the very end because it's the best.

Okay, on to everything from divisive candies, apothecary origin stories, military-grade chocolate, the warheads that could save you, the polarization of licorice root, having Hoarhound on hand, sugar sources from beet to corn, Turkish temptations, Roman flim flam, Marzipan mini sculptures, the sourest of the sour balls, sugar plum ballets, your great aunt's purse, vegan candy controversies, what she gives out for Halloween candy, and the best way to enjoy treats if you're trying to stay healthy with author, journalist, and candy historian, confectiologist Susan Benjamin.

My name is Susan Benjamin.

I use she, her.

Right before we started recording, you were telling me that there are very few candy experts in the world.

I think perhaps you are the only one, right?

What I do is scholarly research.

The history of candy is really interesting because it's about the people who ate it.

So candy is unique though because there's so little scholarly research done and there's so many misconceptions.

and it so reveals things about our culture and who we are and how we treat each other and our relationship to food, sex, fun, the environment, name it.

It's always remarkable.

It's always remarkable.

I'm fascinated by this.

And I feel like every time I go into one of those candy stores, it has a bunch of barrels full of taffy and

swirls.

And, you know, you walk in there and it smells like sarsaparilla.

You feel like you're stepping back into old times.

And I've always been so curious about it.

And I'm also wondering, when did we start calling it candy?

When did it go from a medicinal lozenge to like, I'm just eating this because I want to?

So I don't know how far back you want me to go because my research starts prehistory.

Love it.

And it goes all the way up through the ages.

And then the part of candy history you're talking about, which is what most people think of, is the so-called retro candy.

So if you want to look at when did it become candy, and those taffies that you mentioned, you really need to start looking at how people use cane sugar, which goes back to the old spice trade, and that was the beginning of what would then become pulled sugars and other things in the 1400s.

And then made the way to the 1500s and then became useful to enslave people who didn't have access to things, but they used what they had and were able to pull molasses, which is the dregs of the sugar, for example, and use sorghum.

And that was the origin of what then became the taffy, and that has its own story.

More on taffy later because it's bonkers, but back to prehistory.

There are Swedish scientists who found, oh, millennia ago, people were chewing tree resins as gum, and scientists have found teeth marks in the gum indicating that.

And they were, at least, some of the samples were from teenagers, from teenagers, so you can imagine, like way back, these kids chewing gum and the mother, yeah, spit it out, but they spit it out and then flash forward and we got it.

But what's interesting is that those tars and resins that they chewed and they chewed for their teeth and they became the foundation of today's chewing gum and literally are still used in some chewing gums as the base.

And up until World War II, people were chewing resins just as resins or as softer gums.

So for the same reason, people thought it was good for the teeth, freshened your breath, gave you something to do.

So yes, ancient teens smack and chaw, according to a 2019 paper titled Ancient DNA from Mastics, solidifies connection between material culture and genetics of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers in Scandinavia.

And they were of the late Mesolithic period, about 10,000 years ago.

And wads of chewed birch bark pitch found at an archaeological site based on the tooth wear and the molar placement suggest that the chewers were both male and female and around 12 to 14 years old.

But there was this 2024 follow-up study called Metagenomic Analysis of Mesolithic Chewed Pitch Reveals Poor Oral Health Among Stone Age Individuals.

And it went further into those wads of gum and they were able to extract DNA to see what those kiddos were eating.

And the scientists identified DNA sequences from species such as red fox, hazelnut, red deer, and apple.

But honestly, chewing gum could have its own episode.

So we're going to get back to candy.

You mentioned a little bit about using the dregs, using molasses and sorghum.

What typically have candies been composed of?

Has it changed a lot from things like honeys and waxes to cane sugar, to corn syrup?

Do you see kind of an evolution in composition?

So within the universe, say, of sugars, there was cane sugar.

There was some honey, not as much as people think.

And in North America, of course, honey, the honey bee didn't get hit till the 150, 1600s, so it's brand new.

But people use sugars from maple.

That would be the Native Americans, and they would use it from fruits.

And as we discussed in the melatology and indigenous melatology episodes about beekeeping and native bees, respectively.

So the cultivated honey bees that you see in North America are feral from livestock populations brought over by European colonizers.

They're not native here, but in Central America, as far back as 3,000 years, indigenous populations in the Yucatan Peninsula hunted and collected wild honey, and they kept populations of this stingless honey-producing bee called Melapona beachii, which is now nearly extinct in the region.

And there was this 2010 paper titled Ancient Maya Beekeeping, and it notes that bees and their honey were considered sacred and valuable.

But yeah, in North America, when you just see a regular old honeybee, Apis mellifera, you are looking at essentially a feral cat or a pigeon.

And for more on those, you can see the Columbidology Pigeon episodes and the Phelanology episodes, of course.

But yeah, Susan is here for the history and what it says about culture.

So I want to know what every, like, what were women in a rural setting using for food and what kind of sugars?

What was their idea of celebration and fun?

And so you go to these newspapers and then you get the letters to the editors or you have these intrepid reporters who are out there interviewing enslaved people while they were enslaved.

So if you want to say what is the difference between candy and say baked goods or other foods, it is that it's based in sugar of some sort, right?

And that's what I see as the difference.

Also culturally, how is candy different?

So candy is something that we eat for fun and it makes us feel good, but it's also something that we give to people as a gift of love and has not that many other uses, but it didn't start that way.

So originally, candy was something that had a lot of sugar in it and was based in sugar, but like everything, really, it had some health or medicinal value to it.

And so sugar was used both as a medicine in itself and then as a disguise.

So the Industrial Revolutions, where goods went from individually handmade to machine-produced, that started around the mid-1700s, and it spanned until the mid-1800s, thanks in part to the development and the refinement of the steam engine.

And people were like,

you guys, let's make more shit for people to buy.

So, by the time we got to the industrial age, to the, let's say, mid-1800s, right?

Now we see people have the opportunity to make more things because of the Industrial Revolution, and they're able to market it.

So they can make things that they can market and that they can bring to untapped audiences and sell.

So candy came about, as we know it today, as serving that purpose, but it never quite left the medicinal world behind.

So candy was candy, as you know it in the industrial sense, was made for working class kids as one of the primary audiences.

They never had enough money to buy anything.

They were able to get a penny, a halfpenny, whatever.

And marketers targeted working class kids to buy their goods.

And this is pivotal, in my opinion.

And the sales of candy.

enabled working class kids for the first time ever to see themselves as part of the economy of America and to see themselves as empowered or in being able to at some point fully live in this environment of who we are as Americans as not a supporting actor but as a principal actor in all of that.

And it was be you're able to go and have commerce that

so

mattered.

to the role of candy.

The well-to-do really hated that.

There has always been a tremendous amount of classism that now is subverted, but was really blatant.

And if you look at the old writings about candy, they say these urchins think if they can go buy something, they'll have power and they can't.

They would blame candy on murders.

They would blame candy on deaths, fires, robberies.

So yeah, in 1852, a doctor by the name of James Redfield asserted that as sugar was refined from its natural sources, it was another stage in the downhill course of deception and mockery, of cowardice, cruelty, and degradation.

And a century later, in 1955, Edward Podolsky, who was an American doctor, also a sexologist, wrote in the paper, The Chemical Brew of Criminal Behavior, that there is an intimate relationship between the amount of sugar present in the blood and man's social behavior and cited a list of crimes committed either under the influence of insulin or in a state of spontaneous low blood sugar, including everything from assault and battery to homicide, various sexual perversions, false fire alarms, petty larceny, arson, and traffic infractions.

And some delinquents, he said, have a tendency to hypoglycemia.

And the lower the sugar level falls, the greater is the tendency to commit a criminal act.

Now, as for blood sugar, it can definitely affect your mood.

And in my case, my sanity.

Now, some people mentally associate eating a lot of sugar with high blood glucose and hyperactive children scaling the drapes.

But it should also be noted that some folks, in response to a spike in glucose, produce a really quick rush of insulin, which sends the glucose into the cells.

Thus, their blood sugar actually crashes.

And this is called reactive hypoglycemia or postprandial hyperinsulinemia.

And I know that because apparently I have it and I had to take like a five-hour blood test at the doctors.

I'm one of those people, in my case, when I eat sugar, sugar, it was helpful because I can cry on a dime.

It's really weird, but at least it's not petty larceny.

But there was also this 2009 British Journal of Psychiatry paper titled Confectionary Consumption in Childhood and Adult Violence, citing correlations between candy consumption in childhood and violent crime later in life.

But there were a ton of critics of this study, citing that permissive parenting may have had the key role.

And I imagine 15 years later, researchers would also now look at neurodivergence and dopamine seeking, as well as chronic PTSD from poor accommodations.

But what the hell do I know?

Less than an ADHD expert.

And Dr.

Russell Barkley is in our three-part ADHD episode, and he does touch on impulsivity and inadequate childhood interventions for neurodivergent kids and how that affects adulthood.

So, yes, what's a response to social structures that are simply inequitable?

And what's dietary?

And what can our little ape bodies and our lizard brains even handle either way when poor kids had penny candy people were like lock your doors hell's gonna break loose they treated it almost as we would today as say somebody who's all hopped up on coke right um i mean ironically the coke and opium in those days were in the pharmacies but not in the candy but yeah it's really important and it's really good and it served a really valuable purpose to these kids who could purchase it and that leap from pharmacy to candy counter, are we seeing the hard candies that we're used to seeing?

Did those start as lozenges?

What are some of the types of candy that the industry recognizes from confections to taffies to suckers to bonbons to hard candies?

Like what kind of array, how do you classify them?

That's a good question.

I would classify them by their purpose and who's eating them.

And so the hard candies that you're talking about, the boiled sugars, go back forever.

A marot candy, for example, has got to be, I don't know, you know, at least two millennia old.

But it was always used as it is today for sore throat.

And it's of its own kind of thing, similar to, say, the sugar plums.

And the sugar plums you see coming around the 1400, 1500s, which were little cedar nut.

put in a balancing pan over a fire with sugar syrup or some something of that sort in it, rolled around, let to sit, put back, rolled around, let to sit, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

They were for well-to-do European women and then well-to-do American women who would eat them after a meal as a digestive and refreshment for their breath, right?

Those became turn of century with the machinery that that's a panning machine that you know looked kind of like a cement mixer or is kind of like when you wear it rolled around.

They became the jawbreaker.

Boy, howdy.

It went from being from the very well-to-do and something very uppercrest and took a great deal of skill to make to being something that little kids or even older, you know, could go and buy, put it in their pocket, and have it.

That's hard candy.

And just a really quick chemistry lesson.

So, candy has different terms depending on the temperature that the sugar is cooked at.

And according to this very handy article titled The Cold Water Candy Test from exploratorium.org, my favorite childhood museum in San Francisco.

So you've got the soft ball stage.

This starts around 240 degrees Fahrenheit or 115 Celsius, and this will result in a texture like fudge or pralines.

Next up is the firm ball stage, which you'll get caramel texture.

The hard ball stage will get you textures like nougat, marshmallows, and gummies.

And then as the temperatures increase that you're cooking the sugar at, the moisture goes down, the sugar quotient increases, and you have the soft crack stage.

that's like saltwater taffy and butterscotch, and then the hard crack stage of nut brittles and lollipops and hard candies and toffees.

So your candy is a chemistry experiment.

So side note on those sugar plums, sometimes they did have a little prune center, but more often than not, they just tended to be oval shaped.

So just think of plum-shaped sugar balls more than prunes dusted in sugar powder, which is what I always thought that sugar plums were.

No, they're like hard candies.

Also, you know the sugar plum fairy in the Tchaikovsky Ballet, the Nutcracker?

Okay, so she's the ruler of the land of sweets while the prince is away, I guess.

She's like a deputy governor, but in a tutu.

Also, it would be so good to see like a Halloween adaptation of the nutcracker, but instead of the sugar plum fairy, it's like the jawbreaker goblin.

Someone get some funding for that.

Would those women suck on it for a little bit and put it back in a drawer or would they eat the whole sugar plum at one time?

Well, what I'm talking about is a teeny little sugar plum

but they did have say sour balls right so you're too young but my grandmother and all of my great aunts had these purses and

and in the purses they had these black purses every anybody my age and going going on 67 will know what i'm talking about They would have candy bowls, or they had purses, and they would sit there talking, talking, talking, talking.

And in the bottom of their purses were lifesavers and sour balls and things of that sort and you didn't even have to ask you just go in and you could just rummage in or they were just offered to you and it didn't matter you could have all that you wanted it was great they were bite size The bridge mix, the little chocolate covered raisins, they were deliberately made bite size so that you could say play cards with one hand and just sort of eat your your candies with the other.

They were mad for decorum no matter who was eating it.

Candy bars are a different story.

We don't talk about those when we talk about good manners.

Yeah, you're not playing

gin rummy and eating a Snickers, probably.

Let's put it this way.

Your grandmother would never have a candy bar on the bottom of her purse.

She'd have a little lifesaver that you had pulled over the top, but she would not have a Snickers watch.

So there are those hard candies, there are sours.

Yeah, what are some other types of candies?

There are hard candies, there are taffies, there are fizzes, there are chocolates, there are filled chocolates,

there are soft paste candies like the NECA wafer, which was made, by the way, in the

1847, one of the first

candies to be made out of an apothecary.

And just a side note, so the NECA wafer inventor, who's this Boston apothecary, had a brother, and his brother invented this other chalky candy you've had in your pocket or your mouth, Valentine's Day Conversation Hearts, which explains why they taste so much alike.

Also, if you've ever read the Chronicles of Narnia and you could not pay attention to the narrative because you just kept wondering what the fuck Turkish delights were, they were like a wiggly jelly cube, but rose and almond and pistachio or any fruit flavor.

And they emerged, of course, in Turkey in an apothecary.

And they were also called locum, which means to rest your throat.

And the irony of me doing this episode while sick is not lost on me.

It's brutal.

But Turkish delights began to spread worldwide in the 1700s and eventually, like a smaller candy-coated version, became our modern-day jelly bean.

Now, as for C.S.

Lewis making locum the locus of downfall in the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, there's this historian, Kara Strickland, who wrote an essay titled, Why Was Turkish Delight C.S.

Lewis's Guilty Pleasure?

And it poses the hypothesis that the book was written during World War II when confections were rationed and these exotic treasures were hard to come by for nearly a decade.

So he maybe wrote the whole book just Jones and for candy.

But let's turn our attention to some gummier matters.

Something that just walloped me was learning that Haribo, the makers of gummy bears, that's a German company and it comes from the founder's name, Hans Riegelbon, Harry Bow.

And this entire time, I thought Haribo was Japanese because when it comes to weird candy, Japan hits us in the face with its gloves and we take it.

So I would say what other kinds?

The gummy candies, which originated many think I think from the Turkish delight year 900.

But the gummy candies, which are its own kind of existence.

There are all sorts of creams, French creams, those creamy things that just melt in your mouth.

My grandma's preference was a dish of buttermints, which are the ones that look like a stale mini marshmallow, but then they dissolve into like a peppermint paste in your mouth.

And Susan said that those were also used to cover booze breath in saloons.

So on the topic of less innocent confections.

The candies that we're talking about had a lot,

not the ones my grandmother had, God forbid, but they had a lot to do with sex.

What?

Yeah, and they still do today.

Haven't you ever had a creamy chocolate?

Ooh.

Yeah.

So

truffles are a good example.

They were really came into being in France around the time of the Moulin Rouge.

And if you look at the paintings of, say, Toulouse-Lautrec, which are very sexual and very sensual and amazing, and if he didn't come from such a well-to-do family, he probably would have been prisoned for them.

But he didn't, they were just gorgeous.

They were comparable art to what the Truffle was.

And so the Truffle was a gift that you would go when you're going out to meet with somebody, if you're a man in particular, although the Toulouse Lautrec version would be men with men and women with women, but the commercial version was a man meeting a woman and would have a box of chocolates.

And that was,

in our opinions, as a Victorian culture, a gift of fondness.

And really, they were a gift of sex.

And come on, let's go have some sex.

They were very sensual.

The roses and the swirls and so forth were just, I mean, you know, a gynecologist would recognize a lot of their use,

how they're done.

So they're also really sexual.

I mean, it's been so multi-purpose.

Were there certain ingredients in candy that were considered aphrodisiacs and for adults and

like sour things that were for kids?

Like, are there certain flavor profiles that target different demographics?

I would say

that for kids, it really was the cheapness of the candy.

So, you know,

the little kiss candies, which Hershey did not invent.

It was the name of a candy.

It's a little kiss, it's a little piece.

He used it.

It was Hershey's version of the kiss.

And

now, the company of, I don't know how long ago, not like four or five years ago, got to own it.

And everybody thinks Hershey invented the kiss.

And there were a million kinds of kisses.

And little kids would go, and grown-ups too, they would go buy a bag of kisses.

And it could have been Wilbur Bud, which was a kiss, or it could have been any number of marshmallows or taffies.

They were little pieces.

So yes, H.O.

Wilbur developed this drop-shaped candy from the way that the nozzle kisses the sheet underneath it.

And then about 13 years later, Milton Hershey was like, that's a great idea.

I love that.

And it wasn't until the turn of the century, 2000, Y2K, that Hershey finally won the trademark to kisses.

And they had to do this.

in court by proving that when the public hears chocolate kisses, they think Hershey's kisses.

So sorry, Wilbur, you lose.

But I don't know if it matters because the Wilbur family business has since been acquired by this multinational food giant called Cargill.

However, they still have a Wilbur chocolate storefront in Lidditz, Pennsylvania, where you can get some Wilbur buds, which is what they're called now.

Don't call them kisses.

Don't do it.

It's petty.

It's mean.

So kids would get that and they would get little cheap chocolates.

But it was the well-to-do who would have these sumptuous chocolates that were just made with no wax and skilled hands put them together and there was a great art to creating them and they were for sex.

I had no idea that they were so sexy.

Well, can I tell you?

Yeah.

Yes.

May I tell you a bit of the past?

Yes, please.

All right, as you know, through most of time, explorers were really just raiding the cultures and the foodways of everybody.

So of course, a number of explorers, including Hernandez, I think it was.

So So, this is Hernán Cortés, a Spanish conquistador who very famously had major beef with the emperor of the Aztec Empire in the late 1400s and the early 1500s that led to the emperor's downfall and Cortez losing most of his looted treasure.

But later, Cortes had a child with the emperor's daughter, who's only 17.

So, I cannot imagine it was a consensual love affair.

But anyway, back to this conquistador's arrival in the Aztec Empire.

So, Hernán Cortés wound up in Mexico, and with him was this man who was writing, taking notes on what he saw.

And there they saw, now, you know, what these people are like from Europe, right?

I mean, in 110-degree heat, they're going to wear layers of clothes.

And there they see this Montezuma with very few clothes and all sorts of feathers, and very well clothed in his own beautiful way.

And so he's drinking this cacao.

And he has all these wives and all these half-naked women going around.

And so somehow they figured out, and it wasn't even true, that he drank 50 chalices of chocolate.

a day to placate his many wives.

So A, I don't think he cared less about placating his wives.

And B, the chalices of chocolate were available to everybody and he just really liked them.

And they were meant to be healthy and good for you.

And they were for stamina and virility, but it wasn't necessarily sex.

But of course, you got these guys from Europe who don't even want to talk about it.

They'll do it.

But,

you know, they have all these code words for it.

And so on.

And he is Montezuma.

So they go back, they bring the chocolate back to them to Spain, and the Spanish people harbored it and they didn't tell anyone about it.

And eventually, word leaked out.

So through the marriage of royalty, and then it became this upper echelon, very fine kind of food.

But Montezuma's relationship, alleged relationship to chocolate and its sexual powers never really left.

Only now it's the well-to-do, right?

With all of their clothes and perfumes and foul ways when it comes to hygiene, right?

Compared to Montezuma out there just doing his thing.

I mean, no question, he would raid other cultures and he would make them pay a tariff, which was in fact cacao's, right?

Because it didn't grow in Mexico.

I'm on a roll here, but getting back.

So that's how chocolate became the upper echelon, sexy, sexy thing, and why we today

consider it an aphrodisiac.

That's amazing.

But last thing, sex is in the brain, isn't it?

If you get sexy, go eat it and have some sex.

Good sex.

So chocolate, the plant it's derived from literally means food of the gods.

And it does contain the amino acid tryptophan, which is used to make serotonin in our brains.

And it also contains the stimulant phenyl ethylamine, which is a natural euphoria-inducing cannabinoid, and it boosts our dopamine reward systems.

For more on all these neurochemicals, we have a molecular neurobiology episode for you.

And for more on not chocolate, we have a whole episode on carob.

What it is, why did almond moms of the 1970s eat it?

And why is it falling from the trees in front of your house?

But back to chocolate.

Is it anaphrodisiac?

Is it?

Can someone study this?

Of course they did.

So a 2006 Journal of Sexual Medicine article titled Chocolate and Women's Sexual Health, an intriguing correlation found that yes, women in their study who ate chocolate had higher female sexual function scores, but

But it also found that younger participants ate more chocolate and that in general, general, younger people, they're just hornier.

I mean, it's placebo effect is effective.

Plus the texture.

I just love that they saw that and they were like, it's essentially Viagra.

They're like, it's Viagra is what he's drinking.

He must be.

And that whole idea of like Viagra and of needing to create who we are.

The world of candy came out of a world of herbs and it came out of a world of, you know, medicinal things, but it wasn't quite as imbued with having to reinvent ourselves.

It's more like wanting to have a great time and not die young if we could help it.

Well, that's the goal anyway.

Well, what about the preservation aspects of it?

Because I know that if you candy orange peels, they tend not to spoil it.

So, was candy and sugar, was that a way of preservation in olden times?

Did it grow from that direction?

Yes, it did.

So, I've just been working on on this for one of the museums, in fact, trying to convince them that the French didn't actually create glasse candy.

But in fact, we're going to look at this from the lens of a very narrow perception of history, where everything that's candy in the U.S.

somehow wound up with the ancient Romans or Greeks, right?

And it's not true.

I mean, half of what they were eating came from Asia.

So that isn't true.

So we're going to let go of that.

Let us not credit the Roman and the Greeks with everything.

But one of the things that you're absolutely right about is that sugar, and in particular, in many places, honey, was a preservative.

And it was used that way, just as salt may have been.

And honey was useful because, as everybody knows, it didn't spoil, although it could have crystallized.

So sugar was used as a preservative.

And one of the vestiges of that is, in fact, the much maligned glasse candy, which would be the orange peels.

And it's much maligned because it's a core part of the very much maligned Christmas cake, right?

The fruit cake.

But really, it has a venerable history and is based on the preservative aspect of sugar.

So if you're wondering why a jar of honey can outlive you, some pots of it have apparently been found in ancient Egyptian tombs.

So according to one Smithsonian article, food scientists have cited a a one-two-three punch of one, the very low moisture content of honey being inhospitable to bacteria and viruses.

Plus, it's got low pH and high acidity, and a bit of hydrogen peroxide resulting from some chemical reactions from the honey bee tummies since they eat the nectar and then they kind of barf it out into honey.

Don't worry about it.

We don't worry about that.

Are there any candies that are based on the fermentation of that sugar or no?

Once you've fermented, then you're just talking booze.

That's just booze.

Yeah, other way around.

So the candy, oh man.

All right, now let's talk about prohibition

because candy, particularly rock candy, was used as the eight-core fermenting agent in the alcohol and the drink.

Rock and rye.

Rock is the rock candy, and rye is the whiskey.

So you put

rock candy in the rye, and it would create this really very seraphic kind of drink.

I don't know if if you've had it.

No, I don't recommend it.

It's up to you.

So Prohibition in the U.S.

lasted from 1920 to 1933.

And rock and rye was kind of like a rye old fashioned with rye whiskey, rock candy, bitters, and a little orange rind or a cherry.

And there are faygo drinkers out there.

And yes, there is a soda flavor called rock and rye, which is said to taste like vanilla Dr.

Pepper.

And somehow, in a Dayquil haze, I found myself on the subreddit Juggalos.

And one enthusiastic, insane clown posse and Faygo fan proclaimed, quote, my dad found me some rock and rye.

Finally, what do you guys think of it?

Whoop, whoop.

And many chimed in that this flavor of faygo was the best flavor of faygo.

All right.

However, what was interesting was that during prohibition, the prohibitionists were closing everything down that was remotely connected to alcohol, including the rock candy factories.

Even though they were genuinely making rock candy and rock candy was genuinely important from many things.

It was used as medicine for the throat, but it was also a favorite of kids.

They loved rock candy, right?

Closed down and they shut down all but one, I think, because it was so used

as for alcohol.

Can I tell you the flip side of that though?

Yes.

All right.

So if you like candy, you got to be somebody who likes to have fun, right?

Yeah.

I mean, it's all about about fun.

So you have these candy makers during prohibition, and they want to be able to sell their candy.

All right, so how do you sell it?

Everybody's making candy.

There are a million kind of candies out there.

You're selling it, kids, but you want others to buy it, right?

So what did they do?

They named the candy for popular illegal prohibition era cocktails.

Oh my God.

And so you have the cherry mash, which was a very, really popular cocktail because you just took,

I mean, prisoners were doing this in their bathrooms.

I mean, literally, people at home, you take cherry or other fruits too, but cherry was real popular.

You let it ferment, it's the sugar and the cherry, right, that makes it ferment in some of the acids.

You make it into a drink.

You have, do you remember the little wax bottles?

They were called nickel dips.

Yes.

Right?

The nick for a nickel.

for a bag and the nip because they made them look like a nip of whiskey during prohibition or the lead-in to prohibition.

So you can go through one candy after the other.

It's almost like a shadow rebellion against a prohibition that with the candies.

It was great.

I mean, I remember as a kid, we would walk down to the corner store like a block or so.

Yeah.

My, like my parents were like, whatever, just don't die.

We'd walk down to Circle K and get a slushy.

And absolute.

treasure was buying a pack of candy cigarettes as a child.

Yes.

I know they still sell them, but as a child, there's, for some reason, you're like, look, I'm smoking, which is so hilarious that we do use it as a proxy for like other forbidden things.

Well,

it's funny because we sell in my store.

So I have a store called True Treats, right?

And so it's in Harper's Ferry.

And so we get to observe how people use candy.

And of course, our best seller, I mean, we want them to be the big things, but it's candy cigarettes is the best seller.

So they actually go back to the late 1800s when they're selling working class kids and the working class kids want to be like grown-ups, like Hershey even.

You know, they made chocolate cigarettes.

So the kids would buy these chocolate cigarettes.

I do want to tell you also, you have to remember, stay in the context of time, which for me for a minute, right?

They also sell guns, but the guns were made out of glass.

And then inside the barrel of the guns, they had these little candy balls.

And kids would want, they'd buy them because they want the, probably they want the little glass guns but they also get the candy or vice versa who knows which by the 1940s it became the bubblegum cigarette and that was when you could blow the sugar out and it would look like smoke and then

people got suspicious that their kids would start smoking because they had these candy cigarettes.

May I tell you my personal experience?

Yes, you may.

I did enjoy candy cigarettes and I did smoke cigarettes for years.

But I, it had nothing to do with the candy cigarettes.

It had to do with Janice Joplin because you cannot wear a lot of jewelry and drink southern comfort and hitchhike without a cigarette in your hand.

So that 15 years of smoking cigarettes, but it had nothing to do with the candy.

Oh, I love her.

You know, those days is just what you do.

It was just a different, it was a slightly different era.

I mean, luckily, I never smoked, but

I remember as a kid being like the bubblegum ones where you could blow it out because my parents smoked.

So I was like, oh, I'm almost like them.

But I began to associate cigarettes with like my mom being stressed out at tax time.

So luckily, my parents' stress smoking was not the same as like Janice Joplin.

I'm sorry, mom.

So it taught you.

Yeah.

What about when candy bars came on the scene?

When did we go from a box of four bonbons to smooshing the bonbons together into one block?

That happened.

You see, another really fascinating thing.

So, that started with the Fry family of England in the 1800s.

The stuffed thing, which they called combination candy bars, like the peanut chew and so on, those came around the 1920s.

Actually, they became popular then.

They were used during wartime.

So, in World War I, in the first rations ever, the government gave them candy bars because it had sugar, which they really needed.

It had nuts.

It had other fruits in it, and they gave them candy bars and they loved it.

They came back and proclaimed the glory of candy bars, and candy bars took off.

But what's really important here, right?

And this is the versatility of candy.

You better have me back on your show because I'm just getting going.

The versatility of chocolate bars is amazing because

they

now think about this chocolate bars were sold as a meal in a bar during the depression and they were also sold as energy bars fast energy bars and people bought them for that they didn't have money they went out and they got a candy bar and they felt that they were okay right

so now

And this is the bizarre thing about candy.

We eat it and we don't know we're eating it.

You take your average energy energy bar that has a brown label.

It is very serious and it has a sports thing on it, like somebody running like a cartoon thing, right?

You're eating a candy bar.

It's the same, you know, don't give me that.

You can put all the vitamins you want on the wrapper.

It is a candy bar.

And the way it's marketed is no different from the way it was marketed when the National Confectioners Association was marketing it in the 1920s and 30s.

So while the first chocolate bars were made in the mid-1800s, they did in fact take off in demand after the world went to war.

And chocolate bars were food for the troops.

They were called D-rations.

They were made by Hershey in 1937 at the behest of one Captain Paul Logan, who needed some chow for the troops that could handle high temperatures, was highly caloric, and to prevent soldiers from eating them too fast, had to taste, quote, just a little better than a boiled potato.

So the D rations went off to war.

Soldiers were like, it doesn't taste great and it hurts my teeth to bite it, but it gets the job done.

Now, the first candy bars, though, those came about in the early 1900s.

In 1912, there was a marshmallow nougat peanut confection called the Gugu Cluster.

And shortly after came peanut chews, which were invented by an immigrant from Romania as a ration for World War I soldiers who loved it.

Now, who else loves the chocolate and molasses peanut chews?

Me.

Also, vegans.

My vegan friends always go for the peanut juice, but not so fast.

I have a little bit of bad news because some sugar is refined using bone char, and some glycerin in the ingredient lists can come from animal sources.

And peanut juice and many other candies contain hydrogenated palm kernel oil, which I'm so sorry, Big Downer can lead to deforestation and peril for many species, including orangutans.

So other folks have said peanut juice are not cruelty-free or kind.

What about kind bars?

Well, when Susan says we eat it and we don't know we're eating it, she's talking about how many candy bars started out as energy bars and how many present-day energy bars are pretty much candy bars.

And about a decade ago, the FDA did a smackdown to four flavors of Kind Bar and made them stop touting themselves as healthy as the content of saturated fat was too high.

And about a year later, Kind published a release saying that Kind sought to better educate itself on the regulation in question.

And because the fats came from nuts, the FDA forgave them.

They buried that hatchet.

But yes, myself, as a college student who sometimes made negative dollars on commission working for Circuit City, selling electronics, and I would look for change under my floor mats to eat a Snickers for lunch.

I get it.

Today's energy bars sometimes are just yesterday's candy bars, but more expensive.

Very important, right?

I mean, yeah, we've got one in the bottom of the bag in case we get hungry.

And, you know, it's a lifesaver when you get stuck in traffic, right?

Of course.

Right?

Okay, it's food.

And they used to say even candy is good food.

Eats him every day.

That was what they would say.

But before they morphed into energy bars, of course, during the World Wars, a lot of resources were headed overseas.

So things at home were limited.

And Americans were issued these ration books with stamps that they could turn in to limit their purchases of things like meat and cooking oil and canned foods, and of course, sugar.

So, people here didn't have at home had sugar rations.

We all know that.

They didn't have much sugar.

After these events, particularly the wars, and particularly World War II, well, no, World War I and II, sugar was back and it came back in the form of candy, which people still considered medicinal.

So, grandmothers and our grandmothers, and their grandmothers would go and buy tons of candy and they would have candy bowls and they would put the candy in it.

And why?

Because now sugar was back.

And you know what that meant?

That meant things were good again.

Peace was here.

We are affluent.

It was a sign of affluence, meaning we had jobs again, meaning we could buy things.

So candy was a symbol.

of all of that so important that these grandmothers carried it in their purses and these grandfathers kept it in their workshops and when these kids like me when my great aunts and my grandmother gave me the candy was a sign of love and it was the sign that everything's all right we're gonna be okay and things are good and it stayed that way up until we got really uptight in the 60s and 70s and still ate the candy but pretended that we didn't so candy morphed into stuff like energy bars and we still eat it and gummy and gummy vitamins vitamins and gummy vitamins which i ate some this morning so hooped you know a turkish delight with magnesium in it essentially more on corn syrup in a bit but there are many types of sugars and they all fall under monosaccharides or disaccharides but your body digests them into glucose and for more on what a carb actually is we have a glycology episode as well as a diapetology episode So the reality is that we've always had sugar.

We've always had a lot of sugar.

It comes from lots of different places.

It comes from sorghum which is a grain carbohydrate that becomes a sugar when it's processed it comes from raspberry leaves and you know all different

things yeah we've always had it we being most americans say in the 1700s if you were enslaved you were forced to make it under dire conditions you did have the

molasses, which is the dregs of the cane sugar production.

So a lot of people didn't have cane sugar, but they had a lot of sugar.

They had plenty of sugar.

What happened is corn syrup is very versatile.

And so they started making high fructose corn syrup, which had two purposes.

It got the candy through the machinery and it made it sweeter.

And now all of a sudden, everybody thinks corn syrup is really, really bad for you.

And corn syrup probably is really, really bad for you, depending on the corn syrup you get and how processed it is.

Hang on a sec for that.

But when it comes to sugar being harmful, what about less on a biological or molecular scale and more from a social and humanitarian standpoint?

The abolitionists had a movement which was the free products movement.

And what they would do,

I've heard also it's free produce movement, but what they would do is boycott anything that was made with, quote, the blood and sweat of slaves.

If we boycott cane sugar, then we'll make it unnecessary for them to hold people in enslavement because they're not going to be making money from it because nobody's getting the goods that these enslaved people are making.

But they still needed sugar.

They still had to have sugar.

What did they use?

They used maple, which is hard to get, but they used that.

They used sorghum, which they boiled.

And the ones in the north discovered in the 1800s, not knowing the enslaved people were using it since they first came over in the 1600s.

And they used beet sugar which grows in cold weather and so it's a big sugar beet it's not the beet they eat for dinner and it grows in cold weather so unlike cane sugar which is dependent on a hot climate that's unnatural here they could have the beet sugar and those were the sugars that became most of the sugars Americans used for decades after the Civil War and still today.

Do we want to get into corn syrup?

Do we go there?

Okay, so this is an aside.

This is not an entire episode, so I'm going to bottle up a lot of feelings about sodas and we're just going to give you a little sip of history.

So table sugar is sucrose and fructose is a different type of sugar.

It's sweeter than sucrose.

Fructose occurs obviously in nature all over the place.

Now, eventually your body breaks it all down into glucose, but in the 1960s, manufacturers figured out how to chemically convert some of the existing glucose in corn syrup into fructose, making the little gremlin that we see on so many ingredient lists high fructose corn syrup.

Now, nutritionally, there shouldn't be a difference, but researchers are still figuring that out.

But the Wikipedia for high fructose corn syrup is very much like, all good, nothing to see here.

I'm going to guess there are some high fructose executives that are hopping on there editing it because a bop through medical journals is like, girl, don't do it.

High fructose, don't go there.

Again, research is still out, but a 2021 article by the National Cancer Institute titled, Inquisitively, Does Too Much Fructose Help Colorectal Cancers Grow?, details how one 2019 study showed that feeding high fructose corn syrup to mice prone to developing intestinal tumors could increase the size and the aggressiveness of colorectal tumors.

And many, many other papers link overconsumption of all sugars, including fructose, to everything from metabolic syndromes to asthma.

Now, in 2018, the average American consumed 62 pounds of refined sugars.

In some countries, sodas are made with cane sugar, but the U.S.

government is very pro-corn.

So, high fructose corn syrup is more readily available in everything.

Now, remember, entirely eliminating high fructose corn syrup will not save your life if you're going wild with a ton of other sugars.

It may affect your body differently, but the main problem is it's just in a lot of things.

High fructose corn syrup is like if your friend's magician friend showed up at every party and you're like, who invited him?

I kind of can't deal right right now.

Small doses, people, but we'll talk about that, how to eat candy in a healthier way later in the episode.

Now, on the topic of reviled corn products, let's talk about one candy that's really stuck in your craw, and that is candy corn.

What even is it?

Okay, it's made with sugar, but of course, corn syrup, of course, sesame oil, artificial, probably vanilla flavor, gelatin, and a glaze that contains a secretion from bugs.

Vegans, you're off the hook on candy corn.

You can turn this down for ethical reasons.

But candy corn, it was born in the late 1800s and it was marketed toward rural populations, of course, and it once bore the name chicken feed.

This was a candy called chicken feed.

And according to Susan's research, workers were often burned trying to successfully pour the hot colored sugar into the molds.

People suffered to make candy corn.

If you still enjoy candy corn, I'm going to saddle you with an unsettling fact.

Brocks is one of the biggest producers of candy corn, and they rolled out a turkey dinner-flavored variation with notes of onion-y stuffing, roasted bird meat, green beans, cranberry sauce, carrots, and sweet potatoes.

Although later iterations swapped out those root vegetables with apple pie and coffee, I think they kept the turkey and oniony flavors.

This was a few years ago.

I couldn't find it anywhere on the market.

Maybe the world is just too tough right now.

And Brocks is like, we'll we'll bring it back when things calm down.

Can I ask you some questions from listeners?

From what?

From listeners who wrote in already.

They know you're coming.

Oh, a listener's listening now?

No, they're not listening now, but they sent in.

No, no, no.

They sent in 36 pages of questions for you.

We won't ask all of them.

I'm happy.

Yay!

This is great.

Can I just tell you, Allie, really fast?

I get into so much and they are always boring.

And after a while, I tell my assistant to to call through them because I can't do like between you meet boring.

And you were like, man, I would be interviewed by you any day or night.

I'm telling you.

Yay.

This is like, this is great.

I'm really happy.

And we are so happy too.

We're also happy to support a cause of Susan's choosing.

And this week, she chose her local Animal Welfare Society of Jefferson County, which provides housing and adoption services for abandoned, surrendered, neglected, abused, and unwanted dogs, puppies, cats, and kittens until they're adopted.

And I looked at their website for the Animal Welfare Society of Jefferson County, and they have several very sweet kitties and a few dogs, one of whom is named Gravy Train.

So a donation will go to them in Susan's honor, and that was made possible by sponsors of the show.

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Moving on.

This question was asked by Ghoul Next Door, who said, My grandmother loves circus peanuts, but I find even the thought of them somewhat nauseating.

Does nostalgia play a part in those preferences?

Ghoul, you're not alone.

Some people asked, Andy Pepper and Daniel Schmaniel wanted to know what your thoughts are, yay or nay, on the ever-polarizing orange circus peanuts.

Have you had those?

They're those like marshmallowy.

What are those?

How do you feel about them?

All right.

I would say we did a poll once to try to figure out when people are coming in our store, what do people think?

It's absolutely polarizing.

So this is what I want to tell them.

You ready?

Knock it off.

Cut it out.

I'm going to tell you the story of circus peanuts in, as they would say, no pun intended, a nut to be fair.

Circus peanuts were really made in the late 1800s for circuses because the circuses had these really, it's very unfortunate, but they had these elephants that they would come, the poor things.

And so we would all get circus peanuts.

They have big newspaper ads.

The circus is coming.

Buy your circus peanuts now.

Full page in the newspapers.

These candies were so popular that they were all around the country.

They were different colors.

They were beloved by one and all.

And so much so, they became the prototype for drum roll, if you please,

the Lucky Charm cereal.

No,

yes.

Really?

Really?

Because those are so crunchy.

Yeah, so knock it off, guys.

It's a great candy and it has a fascinating history and is built into the fabric of who we are.

When you were a little kid, you're picking out the Lucky Charms charms out of the cereal, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, you're picking out circus peanuts in a grown-up form.

So yes, we know that these weird orange-colored banana-flavored marshmallow tragedies were an ingredient in the Lucky Charms prototype.

And history, though, gets muddy about their circus origins.

But as one book called Food Bites, The Science of the Foods We Eat notes, the history of circus peanuts is clouded, as with most foods but perhaps for circus peanuts it's because nobody wants to admit that they were responsible for developing this much maligned product but yeah also on the topic of books you can find out more about lucky charms and other cereals in Susan's book fun foods of America outrageous delights celebrated brands and iconic recipes and I never would have suspected that circus peanuts which have the texture of an old eraser would have led to one of my favorite well-rounded breakfasts containing the food group of marshmallows.

Do they need to get more stale?

I feel like if you have a soft marshmallow, it's one thing.

And then if you have a crunchy, like you charm, but there's like some in between where your body doesn't trust it.

Well, you know, that's an excellent question.

And it's a whole nother subject.

So only let me tell you that.

Our bodies like things that are crunchy.

And this is from my new book.

Our bodies like things that are crunchy, which is why you find advertisements for crunchy things, right?

And our bodies don't trust things that are bitter.

And our bodies tell us if it's bitter, it's poisonous.

You can see our gustatology episode, which is all about taste buds and why we love some things and gag out others as if they were haunted.

Okay, Han the Bee wants to know more about Marzipan.

They love it, but they know it's a very polarizing type of sweetness.

And part of the fun is that it comes in such cute little shapes and designs.

So

sculpting marzipan, was that considered a very fancy treat?

They want to know?

Okay, so it's polarizing.

So now we've had two questions, and both of them were polarizing candy.

So we're patting a thousand here, and fine with me.

So they actually go all the way back to the ancient Romans.

It had to be in a place where the almonds grew because almonds were really significant for many reasons.

And one of them was a sign of the changing of the seasons, the beginning of life, birth, renewal, as well as new beginnings.

So it had all of these values to it.

It was the first tree in the Middle East to flower.

And so it became really important.

Biblical, you know, the rod of,

oh my gosh,

of Aaron, was it?

So yeah, Aaron was the brother of Moses and probably annoyed that everyone was like, yo, how is Moses, man?

Tell Moses to hit me up.

But Aaron had a rod too.

And it was said to have been endowed with magical powers and it miraculously sprouted blossoms and almonds to show that God thought Aaron was cool.

So he's like, oh, okay, you parted some seeds while I have an almond wand.

In the Bible, you see a lot of the use of almonds, for example.

So the marzipan

was made

to be an almond paste, an almond confection, and it was the almond that gave marzipan its clout and importance.

The marzipan was so significant that they would have entire tables with a pig with an apple in its mouth.

They would have voluptuous fruits, all of it made by Marzipan.

Marzipan was really important.

And the reason why today we have Marzipan at Easter, that kind of thing, is because of that ancient use of it.

So the Marzipan and the shapes is today, it ain't nothing like it used to be.

I do love the little sculptures, though.

It does make me want to sit down and have craft night and sculpt little fruits and piggies and stuff.

They were always sculpted.

Yeah, the wood, but like really like towers, like towers on a table made out of marzipan.

It took me a while to like marzipan, and I was like, what's happening?

But I love it.

Another polarizing flavor, because people have their favorites.

Rowan Tree, Rachel Pristaco, Miss Carter of Mars, Sugar Puff Jadikins, Bernard Robin, Evan Davis, Crystal Wilson, Christine Valdez, and Brian Shenanigans.

They all want to know, in Rachel's words, how do they make sour candy sour?

What are they coated with?

Rowan Tree is obsessed with it, but wants to know why sour candies were developed.

And Brian also mentioned that they can help with nausea while pregnant.

But yeah, sour candy, I'm drooling thinking about it.

What's the deal?

Okay, sour candies, say the lemon sours, right?

They're really important because, say, in the war or if you're traveling somewhere, or even if you're nauseous, the sour candies were there to make you salivate so that if you're in war, you don't feel as thirsty.

Or they make you salivate and that soothes your throat because now all the glycerin is getting down there.

So they had a really important use,

but

they were not as sour as they are now.

That isn't really how it works.

If you have a lemon and you leave it out for a couple of days, it's not going to be sour.

And in this case, what makes a lot of sour candies make your mouth kind of pucker in and implode is what's called sour sanding with additional acid like citric or tartaric acid.

How do you quantify what is the most sourst?

The pH scale.

So scientists, they use the pH scale to measure a substance acidity or the strength of the acid that it contains.

More acidic a substance, the lower it scores on the pH scale.

So in a pamphlet titled The Power of Sour in Your Mouth, which was distributed by the Minnesota Dental Association, water has a pH of seven, okay?

Neutral.

Now, the lower you go, again, the more acidic something is.

Vinegar is about a 2.2.

And stomach acid and lemon juice, those hit about a 2.

So I scooted my eyes right down that candy list to see what was the lowest pH.

And the top three sour treats are Altoid Mango Sours with a pH of 1.9.

That's more acidic than stomach acid.

Wonka Fun Dip Powder is more acidic at 1.8.

And the top measured sour candy was warheads sour spray 1.6.

There was one more thing on the list below that and I was like, what's that?

And it was something at 1.0 and that was battery acid.

Warhead sour spray comes in at just over a half a point on the pH scale over battery acid.

So if you've ever wondered why hot sauce can clean your pennies, it's the vinegar, it's the acid, which again is less acidic than a warhead sour spray.

So let's do a wellness check on your teeth, shall we?

The journal of the American Dental Association found in a paper titled, In vitro enamel erosion associated with commercially available original and sour candies, that the potential for erosion associated with sour candies has been identified as a new and emerging concern.

So rinse your mouth after eating.

Or maybe your biggest takeaway from this is to just obtain some warhead sour spray.

From the reviews, the watermelon is the most sour.

Maybe you just want to have this in your purse when walking alone at night as a weapon.

And so sour is the new flavor of du jour.

And so now they're like, we're really so sour.

We have pucker up candy and you can't stand it.

This is all about manufacturing, kids.

And better get used to it because it's everything seems to be commercialized and candy's no exception.

Originally, though, those sour candies were really beneficial and really purposeful and really symbolic because, as I mentioned, these candies were available for everybody.

And if you have a sore throat and you have a sour ball, you just feel better.

If you're nauseous, the sucking on it clears up your ears.

Same thing.

I've heard that it can help with a panic attack because it jolts your brain into your physicality instead of your head.

Yeah, it distracts you.

Yeah.

Yeah, it distracts you.

And according to a 2016 study in the Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment, is distraction an adaptive or maladaptive strategy for emotion regulation?

A person-oriented approach.

Distracting yourself with physical sensations may be either adaptive or maladaptive, depending on whether it's combined with an attitude of acceptance, which is helpful, or just avoidance, which is not so much helpful.

Now, if you don't have something sour on hand, if you're having anxiety or a panic attack, you can always do some other mindfulness, like feeling your inhalations as you take deep breaths or trying to identify the sounds you can hear or the smells you may be experiencing or doing a body scan meditation, feeling all the parts of your body in succession going up from your toes and saying, this is a feeling I'm having, but it's going to pass like clouds.

And if that sounds too hard and you're like, give me the sour stuff, bitch, then I can direct you toward those warhead sour sprays, which according to an Amazon review from a user named Tiffany, I love watermelon especially when my brain decides to be mean to me.

Another Amazon reviewer named Jane wrote that when a panic attack strikes, quote, I use the sour taste to redirect my brain to worry about the sour and not what's making me anxious.

The only thing I would ask is to make them more sour.

Jay, that would be battery acid.

So let's stick to those warheads for now.

But as long as we are staying away from toxic substances, another user said that sour warhead spray, quote, genuinely helped me quit vaping after eight years of trying and failing.

So who knew?

Warheads that are actually saving lives.

Now, if you're thinking that these are niche interests, let's talk about what's popular.

A few patrons asked, including Kaylin Joviak, Chris Curious, Marico, and...

Colorado Keith, first-time question asker, wants to know if there's a candy by weight that's the most consumed every year or if it changes much over time.

Like, is is there one candy that is hands-down more popular,

you know, with consumers across the world?

Well, the most popular candy around the world is chocolate.

So, my area of expertise is North America.

But I know that around the world, you have many iterations of chocolate.

And depending where you are, dark chocolate takes precedence, or milk chocolate does.

So, it's really hard to narrow down and say which one by the pound is going to win out.

but i would put my bet on chocolates made by hershey okay and the reason is that hershey has mastered the art of cheap chocolate that's affordable and abundant and it has a really good albeit false story behind it and what's the flim flam with the hershey story The flim flam is that Milton Hershey never invented anything except marketing prowess.

He was great at inventing marketing schemes, and he put the almond in the chocolate bar.

He dropped out of grammar school.

His mother, he was a Mennonite.

His mother and father were divorced.

How's that?

In the late 1800s, they figured they'll teach him to make ice cream and then candy, so at least the poor kid could have a job, right?

And what he wound up doing was learning from other people.

So overwhelmingly, what he created at the beginning were things that he didn't invent.

He didn't invent the caramel.

He got that off of some guy in Denver.

He didn't invent the kiss.

It was an existing candy.

And he would spy.

He would go to Europe and he'd go spy in the candy companies, but they were all spying on each other.

So that wasn't that bad.

But the beauty and the lost opportunity of Milton Hershey is that Milton Hershey, as the company presents it, is a complete myth.

He was not Spider-Man.

He was a guy who was unable to do so many things that many of us take for granted because we come from families that at least were supportive.

His father took off and then wound up bankrupting him every time they met up.

Yeah, there was no love in that.

He didn't come from a wholesome Pennsylvania family by a long shot.

But the good thing about Hershey, if they would just knock it off over at that company, is that most people are not Spider-Man.

And if you look at Hershey Chocolate and somebody knocked it off and said, you know what?

He was a terrible student.

He had a dysfunctional family.

His father was a jerk.

There's probably a lot of hollering in their household and he made it.

And if you are a CED or even if you're flunking up, guess what?

It doesn't matter.

Find who you are and what you're good at and do it.

And you will make it just the way you should.

So when Susan just said like his father was a jerk, it goes a bit deeper.

So Milton Snavely Hershey's dad was Henry.

And Henry, though he was an avid reader, was not an avid moneymaker.

Well, he started a lot of businesses, but none of them succeeded.

And he had a tendency to grab someone else's money, lose interest, fail, and then split town.

And according to the 1977 New York Times archival story, Life with Father, in his pre-chocolate days, dad Henry started a cabinetry company for displaying candy with Milton.

But then Henry got distracted by the silver rush in Colorado and was like, See you, son.

And Milton was like, Dang, dad, now I'm broke.

Henry was like, Dude, I'm sorry.

Come to Colorado.

Let's mine some silver.

So Milton scraped together some money and then found no silver.

So Milton had to get a job with a caramel maker.

Milton's like, okay, I'm in the caramel business.

And it was like, smell you later, dad.

Milton hightailed it to Chicago, leaving his dad in the dust.

But then Henry showed up in Chicago and was like, Milton, my boy, let me help you with the candy.

And then Henry, his dad, gave a bunch of Milton's money away to one of his friends.

Once again, Milton was broke.

He's like, Dad, I love you.

You suck.

Susan said that Henry and Milton's mom, Veronica Fanny Buckwalter, Snavely Hershley, were divorced, but they were more likely separated.

Although I got way too far down the rabbit hole and I started tracking down Henry's census records.

And in 1900, he listed himself as a widow, although his estranged wife outlived him by several decades.

Henry's 1900 census record shows his occupation was quote, invalid, but his obituary four years later stated that for a man of his years, his faculties were remarkably well preserved and that he died suddenly of a heart issue after returning home from a two-mile walk.

It also says that Henry is survived by his wife, who years earlier, he told the government had died, even though she was still alive.

So yes, Henry Hershey, father of Milton Hershey, the chocolatier, we might call him a bit of a scoundrel or a scamp or a reprobate or a rascal.

Either way, Milton was a good son to Henry and Fanny.

And though Milton and his wife, Catherine, could not bear children of their own, they opened an orphanage and a high-quality education boarding school for impoverished kids, to which Milton quietly left his entire fortune after he died.

And yeah, this was 1910, and at the time, they only accepted males who were white.

And yeah, that sucked.

We do not like that.

Milton, if you come back in another multiverse, please change that.

But Milton was otherwise said to adhere to the religion of the golden rule.

But yeah, Milton Hershey seems like a guy who was imperfect, but tried to do some good things.

Why aren't we doing that?

It's incredible.

I feel like you should be Hershey's CMO.

Like you should take over, change a story.

You know what I mean?

Because that is much more interesting.

No, they don't like me.

I went and I interviewed them for my last book and the woman gave me very short hints.

Oh, no.

I I think you tell their story better than they do.

So, yeah, that's great to know.

It endears me to him personally, but it endears me, yeah.

Okay, so Rebecca Fitchett and Mariko.

Mariko wanted to know, they said, I'm Mexican-American, and the nostalgic candies for me are all centered on tamerindo, chili, and various forms of condensed milk, but wanted to know why some other candies are based on like whorehound and cloves.

And Rebecca Fitchett wanted to know, what is whorehound?

Why was it a popular flavor?

Why is it not common now?

Was that a New England thing and

not a more like global southern thing?

Yeah.

So whorehound is, by the way, if any of you live, I live in West Virginia.

I'm from Massachusetts.

Grow your own whorehound.

It's wonderful.

It's of the mint family.

And it has what is called hoary leaves, which means it looks like little hairs are coming out of it.

And it has a stem with little round, almost like rings around it.

It's absolutely gorgeous and flowers from from it.

It came to North America around the 1500s, sometime around then, and it was used for sore throat and used as a remedy for upset stomachs.

And people really loved it because they added some sugar, they made this candy, which they really enjoyed, and it carried over.

It's one of the candies, much like peppermint, but even more so, that has held on to its medicinal value.

Whorehound is an enigma to people for two reasons.

One is whore.

What do you mean by whore?

And you know, believe me, we get our share of jokes about that.

Number one.

But number two is the flavor.

So the flavor of whorehound in its truest form as a candy is really, really bitter.

And our palates aren't geared for that anymore.

Recently, I would say over the last 50, 60 years, we've had less and less of a tolerance for whorehound candy.

What the candy makers are doing now, particularly the old-timey ones, they're adding more sugar, and now you still have the whorehound flavor, but it's not what it really, really should be.

So, great plant really does work, I believe, from what I've heard from people.

I'm not a doctor, but it seems to work for bad stomachs and for sore throats.

And for more on this, you can see the 2017 Journal of Intercultural Ethnopharmacology paper, Merubian Vulgari, a review on phytochemical and pharmacological aspects, which notes that the whorehound plant has reportedly pharmacological activities such as anti-pain, antispasmodic, anti-hypertensive, anti-diabetic, gastroprotective, anti-inflammatory, antimicrobial, anti-cancer, antioxidant, and anti-hepatoxic, like liver toxic activity in traditional ethnobotany uses.

It does concede, though, that while used in traditional and folk medicines, further scientific studies are needed to explore the clinical efficacy and the therapeutic effect of the plant.

Now, I was reading that it's great for respiratory infections, and I was reading that as I was on the couch with a honking cough, and I was like, I want to get my mitts on that, like post-haste, because I feel like I have old-timey consumption.

And from what I've read, Hoarhound has this earthy, bitter, licorice-y, root beer-type flavor.

And I was like, right now, I'd drink your grandpa's bath water if it cured my goose honk of a cough.

And I was eating a Ricola drop.

I looked up the ingredients.

There's a little whorehound in there.

So there you go.

It really is old time, but it's from the old time palette.

And ours, our palettes are so

limited now, and we have such a sparse vocabulary of what takes good within our mouths.

So

yeah.

Well, if you have time for a couple more questions, I would love to get through.

I have all the time you want.

Amazing.

Okay, great.

Kristen Jacobis and Chakobas, Kristen Jacobis, and Nathan Marion and Alice Rubin all wanted to know, in Alice's words, who decided blue color is raspberry flavor how did blue raspberry become a flavor is there such thing as a blue raspberry

there is not such a thing as very much that's blue that I know of in the whole natural world besides blueberries and now some flowers okay again today's colors are geared to to make you want to eat them.

So there's a whole process of associating the color with the flavor and then the smell.

And all of that goes together to give you the blue raspberry, which doesn't exist in nature and doesn't, by the way, taste like a raspberry, right?

Yeah.

No, I know.

I eat raspberries.

That doesn't taste like a raspberry.

The snosberries taste like snosberries.

So what you're essentially doing is you're eating laboratory made candy.

If you love it and if you have attachment to it, because you had it when you were a kid, don't worry about it.

It's fine.

But that really is the reason.

And it is about the history of corporate candy making.

I was wondering, I was like, was there an extinct raspberry that was blue and tasted like a slurpee that I'm just unaware of?

I wish.

So according to a Bona Petit article titled, What Even Is Blue Raspberry Anyway?

which has an appropriate level of attitude.

The flavor of blue raspberry is actually this chimera of cherry, banana, and citric acid.

Although, if you ask the 7-Eleven website, it does presently, in the year of our Lord 2024, assert that this flavor is an extraction from the vibrant blue raspberry bushes on the secret island of Rasmus.

And frankly, so many lawyers could make them take that down.

And I'm kind of glad that they haven't.

My point is, blue raspberries are catfishing us so hard and we're so smitten we can't even accept it.

We had some great questions.

Another, people are very polarized about certain candies.

I'm noticing.

And

Rachel M.

says, my husband's is black licorice was invented because they didn't have sugar.

Any truth to that?

Other people, Taya Danalovic and Chicken Chomper, both asked, licorice candy.

Why?

Two people asked that.

And Becky, the Sassy Seagrass scientist, said, salty European licorice.

Is it candy?

Is it savory?

So a lot of people say they love black licorice.

Ryan Ketchum, Dylan V, who asked, can I justify eating a lot of this?

And John, champion of licorice.

Yeah, hi.

My is whether it's time for licorice to make a really big comeback.

Others don't.

What is the origin of this divisive delight?

asked Ryan Ketchum.

Okay, the divisive delight is, and by the way, if you live in West Virginia or Massachusetts or any of these cooler climates, you can grow licorice in your yard.

I do.

It's a wonderful plant.

And so the licorice root itself was, and in some places places still is,

a candy.

You get the licorice root and you chew it and you get the licorice flavor.

And so first came the licorice as something you could chew.

But there's another reason why.

When you chew the licorice root, it splays out into these kind of prawns.

People would chew it.

to clean their teeth and they would always be rolling these licorice roots around in the teeth and they chewed the tree resins for the same reason but licorice root in particular because how it splays out.

So enslaved people would use that and they would use it as a flavoring and people would use it as a digestive and they would use it for all these different reasons.

And when candy started coming around, licorice became really important because it was available and because people liked the flavor.

Our palates have changed a lot.

Charlie Chaplin is one of the best examples of how popularized it became, even though not that many people knew it.

he had a movie called the gold rush and in it he was this hobo and he's kind of out there and he's trying to pan for gold and he didn't have any gold so he had to eat a boot oh and so the famous scene where he ate a boot and he ate the shoelaces like spaghetti this is in the 20s and i know this because i read it and researched it but i also asked the guy who owns the company now he's the grandson of the guy who founded it or the great grandson he confirmed that charlie chaplin called the american licorice company and said can you make me a licorice boot for my movie they said yeah sure so they figured it out they made him two boots because they knew one would probably get kind of rattled up and that's what he's eating in the movie is the american licorice company but licorice was a real favorite for years and years they had all sorts of look Good and Plenty is the first candy brand in the country, Good and Plenty, 1893.

People love licorice.

You know, they were eating good and plenty in 1893.

Today, I believe, again, it's like Horhound, our palates have changed so much.

So, some people with a particular taste profile, as they call them, they like licorice, and other people don't.

Not as many people, I can assure you, like licorice as they used to.

But again, that has a lot to do with our limited palates and not in an insulting way, but just reality.

But yeah, licorice was everywhere.

It was great.

It was important.

It was a medicine.

It was a food.

It was a candy.

It was a tobacco.

It was a sweet treat for kids.

Wow, it was licorice's world.

We were just living in it back then, I guess.

Well, you know what happened?

It didn't very quick.

It didn't grow here.

It grew all over Europe.

And after the Civil War, these people who had, you know, tobacco fields or had had sugar plantations needed an economy and they wanted to create an American licorice economy because they wanted to use it in tobacco.

And they said, we can have grow it here.

We don't have to import it.

We could sell it.

We could export it.

We could use it in the tobacco.

All the money would stay here.

That's the South, right?

That's in the South.

They're saying that.

And who are they trying to get help from?

Well, the North, you know, the victors of the Civil War.

They're not going to give them money to start up their economy again.

So they didn't.

And we never have had a licorice economy.

And all the licorice that we get is from somewhere else.

Side note: the compound in licorice root that makes it sweet is glycorhysin.

And when it comes to salmiake or salty licorice, which is beloved in Scandinavia and Western Europe, the thing that makes it, some would say, nauseatingly salty, is ammonium chloride.

And some people like it so salty, this licorice, that Germany had to start putting warnings that it was for adult consumption only.

Now, can you die from licorice?

Well,

that glycorhysin can alter potassium levels and lead to issues with blood pressure and potentially congestive heart failure if you eat too much.

And some of this salty licorice is shaped like skulls, just in case you weren't afraid enough of it.

But haters, you can stay salty.

Well, you know, speaking of kind of regional stuff, I always wondered why, you know, you go on a beach vacation and there's so many little shacks on piers piers that sell saltwater taffy.

And I'm like, they can't be getting this salt water from below the pier.

So, Liv Tambrini and Kathleen C.

both wanted to know what's in saltwater taffy and why is it called saltwater taffy?

All right, sit down.

Okay, I'm into it.

All right, you're sitting down because I'm going to tell you this, and you may not like it, but there isn't salt in saltwater taffy.

If you go to Denver and you get taffy, and you go to Atlantic City and you get taffy, at least if it's original old style,

no salt in it.

There's no different.

But I'm telling you, marketing, marketing, right?

So marketing is what made the candy of today.

This is what happened.

They were making taffy on the boardwalk in Atlantic City.

And the boardwalk was directly right on the ocean, and the waves were coming up.

And one day there was a storm.

This is the story.

There was a storm,

and the waves from the storm flooded this candy company that was making taffy on the boardwalk.

So it's a mess.

And the guy is in there and the taffy's floating on the water.

And the little girl comes in and says, do you have any taffy?

I want to buy some taffy.

He said, all I have is saltwater taffy.

And one way or another, there are all of these stories like he got the idea a woman walked by and said, you ought to name a bad.

Nobody really knows, but that's why they called it saltwater taffy because it was made by the beach and it kept getting drenched in salt water.

Well, saltwater taffy, this guy wanted to own the name saltwater taffy and he got the rights to be the only one who could use that as his brand.

And more and more people took him on legally.

And then I think this was in the

late 1880s.

And then around the 1920s, saltwater taffy became a use of a word that anybody could have.

He lost the rights.

He was probably dead then anyway, but his descendants lost the rights.

His name was John Ross Edmiston.

And yes, he is dead.

His New York Times obituary from 1939 notes that he lived until the age of 86, although he died suddenly of a heart attack right in his boardwalk store.

But he literally died doing what he loved, selling saltwater taffy, which did not have saltwater in it.

So nope, sorry, kids, no saltwater in your saltwater taffy, unless they're adding it now because they don't want people to get upset.

Right.

Or because they think it'll be cool.

False advertising.

But it isn't.

The real saltwater taffy never had salt.

Does it taste salty to you?

No.

It's not like it's fish flavored or anything.

I think God.

But what they did was they created little boxes with taffy on it.

And so you could go and buy some saltwater taffy from the beach to give us gifts when you go home.

Of course.

So it had its own little marketing ecosystem around it.

Well, in terms of things that have, you can't get anymore greg dobbs asked a great question it sounds informed uh ferreira candy company has recently stopped making uh see i already know have has recently stopped making atomic fireballs jawbusters and lemon heads what drives a company to discontinue products i already miss the fireballs and jawbreakers they say all right so number one don't worry the fireballs are back yay we just started carrying them again we saw somebody else is carrying them we're like we got to get those so they're back and they are.

Originally, they were the sugar plumps of the 1400s and they made their way up to the jarbreakers and then the atomic fireballs after World War II.

That's what they were.

They were very important, but they weren't a money maker.

Susan says that this happens with candy companies a lot.

Things die this much lamented death, but then are resurrected to a lot of fanfare and relief.

The NECA wafer.

The company folded for one horrifying year.

We had no NECA wafers.

Now they're back.

It may have been three years, but it felt like 20 years.

Samsung, that licorice-flavored candy that some older people remember, it was everywhere.

Nope, gone.

Who knows if it'll come back?

So it's just the up and down

of the economic cycle.

of candy and more and more candies are dropping off of the radar.

At this point, yes, you can get atomic fireballs.

Susan has a candy company, of course, and her website, TrueTreats.com, is a feast of info.

Every candy they sell comes with a biography of its origin.

Even if you don't like candy, you can get a load of trivia on every page.

So yes, not only does she write and research, but she is a candy merchant, and so she knows the ins and outs of the biz.

We can get jawbreakers, but only the really, really big one, the mega big ones.

Well, the medium and then the really big ones who do have jawbreakers again.

Lemonheads, I don't know about, but my hunch is they were pushed out by all of their sales, probably limited by all the new, unbelievably sour candies that are out there, is what I bet.

They may come back.

I don't know.

So don't give up.

All you people, when you see your favorite candies leaving, don't worry.

They may come back.

I've witnessed it.

I promise you.

Does it help to tell the company that you're just so pissed not to have fireballs?

Does that help?

Yeah.

Okay.

It does, yeah.

Protest.

All right.

I'm going to tell you a protest that worked.

You ready?

Uh-huh.

Okay.

You know the pixie stick?

Yes, of course.

The little straw, that wonderful little straw, that, by the way, it was gone.

It was gone last year.

No more pixie sticks.

There were some of these like newer versions, right?

Now it's back.

Yeah, the pixie sticks again.

Patron ESO Party confessed that they used to love super sugary candy as a kid, like pixie sticks, but they write, at 26 now, the thought of that candy makes me gag.

And yes, I get it, Iso, my teeth sweat just imagining them.

But the history is fascinating.

Anyway, pixie sticks were made in the earlier part of the 1900s.

Kids were eating them, and they were going to school, and they were eating a pixie stick, and they had their white shirts on because in those days, kids dressed up for school, and they had white shirts.

And they would eat the pixie sticks like you did.

They would go to the pharmacy and they would get them.

And they were covered with colors.

And the mothers were very, very upset.

So they did what you're recommending now, my dear.

What they did is they lobbied the company to make a neater version of the pixie stick.

Our kids love it.

We have to give our kids these candies, but you can't do this.

They're slobs.

We can't have a kid be a slob in school.

So the company obliged.

They listened.

And you know what they made as a neater version of the pixie stick?

You know what they called it?

Tell me, tell me.

Sweet tarts.

There we go.

Those are, yeah, those you can keep in your purse too, and you can just one at a time, you know?

Well, yeah, kids can eat them and not get it all over themselves.

So, people, you can lobby your company.

You can lobby the company, but you got to have a lot of clout.

You got to really get numbers, numbers, and they'll do it.

Well, some people who had best intentions have wondered about sugar substitute candies.

Maybe blood sugar is an issue, maybe

dietary reasons.

And

Turner Pierce wanted to know how is sugar-free candy made and why does it never quite taste right?

And then other people asked about, Brian Shenanigans wants to know, what is it about sugar substitutes and sugar-free candy like sorbitol and melitol that give you the epic poos?

Other people wanted to know.

Did you have the epic what?

The epic poops.

So people asked about real digestive issues with sugar-free candies.

If you have stevia, I mean, you can grow stevia in your garden, rip it up, put it on your fruit salad.

It's delicious and sweet.

The story is that these artificial sugars are so infused with flavor of sweetness that doesn't exist in nature.

As I said, go eat a sugar cube.

It doesn't have that much flavor.

So we go for the artificial sugars, which are really, really sweet.

So now we really, our threshold for sweetness keeps changing from these things.

Okay, so the quick skinny on sweeteners.

There are natural and engineered sweeteners, but what you might be seeing on the nutrition labels of sugar-free or keto-friendly candy are sugar alcohols.

Usually they have talls at the end of their names like xylitol or erythritol or mannitol, sorbitol, and they range from being as sweet as sugar to about half as sweet.

Now these things occur naturally in some fruits, hello prunes, little foreshadowing, but as a processed food ingredient, they are typically manufactured from things like potato starch.

Now, the beauty of them is that they can provide body and sweetness to candy without the calorie content of actual sugars, partly because your body cannot digest them well.

So, they get a fast-track ticket to your intestines, where your gut biome is stoked to have them.

Your gut biome is like, what is all this?

It digests up a storm and it celebrates with plumes of farts.

Sorbitol is sold straight up as a medical laxative.

And P.S.

For more on power washing your intestines, pre-colonoscopy, I have a whole field trip ride-along episode on that, linked in the show notes without shame.

But apart from bubble gut and the cancellation of any plans you had for a few days, sugar alcohols can wreak more bodily havoc.

In a recent Cleveland clinic article ominously titled, What You Should Know About Sugar Alcohols, physicians warn that sugar alcohols like xylitol and erythritol can also cause overactivity of your platelets, resulting in blood clots and other cardiovascular detriments.

So as one Amazon review proclaimed, see you in hell, sugar-free gummy bears.

So you're not reacting well to it because it's not good for you, probably, to whatever extent.

Well, for people who are looking for maybe some moderation or looking for certain candies that might be healthier for them.

A ton of people, Storm, Dylan V, Garrick McLaughlin, Evelyn Sanchez, wanted to know, are there any candies that

still tastes good, but in Andrea's words, is there hope for lower sugar candy that still tastes good for people such as myself who have to watch their sugar intake?

Any advice you have for people who are on health kick?

It's a very hard question to answer because I know that if you have diabetes and you eat raisins, it's sugar and you can't eat that many raisins.

So it's a really hard question.

So I'll take the medical aspect out of it because it isn't kind of

what I would do or I'd get sued if I did because I'm not a doctor.

I can't say that.

Again, please see our two-part episode with a diabetic diapathologist.

Dr.

Mike Natters about diabetes.

Better yet, see your doctor.

But much of what you have has tons of sugar in it that shouldn't.

If you go to a restaurant or even your home and you eat a sauce, you're eating a syrup.

If you go to

have a sandwich, you've got all the sugar in your sandwich, places where it doesn't belong.

When you're eating candy, you know how much you're eating.

Here is her advice, and it's good advice.

What you do is you get enough candy because there's an event, because it's the end of the week, and you get a candy that you really like, and you just eat it, and just know as you're eating it, I'm not going to have it tomorrow.

I like it.

I ate it.

It's good.

And what will happen to you?

Mark my words, because this is what happened to me.

I went into candy as a researcher, not necessarily a candy lover, but it really was for me, feel good.

I know people feel good when they eat candy, and when you share it with somebody, you feel good, and all that.

Now that I don't eat much sugar and many sweet things, because I really don't, my tolerance for sweet things is very low.

I don't like sweet things.

So, breaking news, a candy historian, an expert who has written 10 books and owns a candy shop, does not overdo it on candy.

When I have a circus peanut, I can eat half and I feel it all day.

And I like it.

I just can't.

So, what I'm saying is

use candy the way it should be used, which is ceremonial, get the candy you really love, share it with somebody.

There's nothing wrong with that.

Once you start looking for candy that's healthy for you, you're going to fall in the trap of getting an energy bar and a health food bar and think that you're eating something healthy and you're still eating candy.

I have to say, I used to work for Food Network and for the cooking channel.

I was on a dessert show for seven years and seven seasons and I never ate so healthy because of that show.

I would go and sample six doughnuts in a sitting, 17 pieces of pie over the day, and then the rest of the week I was like, salads and protein, please.

Like,

I could pass by a bakery case and be like, I'm good.

But as soon as you're like, you can't have it, your brain starts saying, no, I have to have it.

I have to have it.

You know what I mean?

So it's okay.

We want sugar, but we should be using it in a way that works for us and not against us.

Very light.

Just a teeny tiny amount, practically none.

And don't believe what marketers are telling you.

They're fall of beans.

Check your energy bars, folks.

Well, you know, before I get to our last two questions that I ask every guest, what do you give out at Halloween?

Halloween's coming up.

Do you get trick-or-treaters in West Virginia and on your block?

People in West Virginia do, yeah.

Yeah.

We're part of the United States.

Well, I mean, I'm just saying some, maybe you live on a rural road.

My poor parents would get a bucket of Halloween candy and they lived in the mountains, never got anyone.

I live on a cul-de-sac.

I have never seen a child

here for candy.

So we'll get candy.

And I'm like, it's crickets.

So I go to my friends' houses to help them hand out candy.

But when you have to pick out what candy you give out,

I imagine these people have no idea that they're talking to one of the world's experts in candy.

I don't do it.

You don't what?

Susan.

I don't.

I can.

I mean, I worry that nobody will show up at my house and all I'll have all this candy.

So what I have done sometimes is there's a very busy street where they have big Halloween parties for kids.

Sometimes I go down

and I join people there to get out of it.

So what I do is I shut off my lights and I go out together.

It's true.

Or I go meet my friends out there, but they have so much damn candy, they don't want more.

I show up with that candy.

They're like, oh, we don't need it.

My husband and I

said, if we're home early, because this is shutdown time for Halloween, if we're home early, we go to the back of the house and shut off all the lights in the front.

We don't answer the door.

I pictured you with just a trough of pink only Starbursts, which is the best flavor.

And like 10 like pumpkin Reese's.

No, if you

no idea.

I could offer him candy corn.

Corn and they all get pissed off if we get that.

Yeah, I know.

Can you imagine?

They're like never going there again.

Well, then I guess don't ask Susan.

Don't trick-or-treat Susan's house.

You take a trick.

Oh, my God.

Well, the worst thing, last two questions, worst thing about what you do, worst thing about candy, worst thing about researching it.

There's got to be something that sucks about your job.

There is nothing that sucks about it in terms of what I do and telling people the stories because they love them because it's about their lives.

It's about their generations.

It's about happiness.

It's like I'm giving them love.

It really matters.

And when I go in my store, which is candies from the very beginning of history all the way through the 1900s with a story on them, on the labels, they're really happy.

And I can go there and people are really happy.

And it's so important to me that we value happiness and we are happy and that we're together.

And then you want to talk about how love starts?

It starts with happiness and it's care.

So I love that.

The only thing I will say, and you don't have to hear this, that really sucks about my job,

is I really love telling these stories.

And I do so much media.

And I often, most of the time, get us really stupid questions.

And it's like you can just go to the Mars website and get the answer there.

I mean, this is serious important dynamic cultural amazing funny things

so um

that and so that is why i will tell you in all honesty i

i do

I do a lot.

I will be on anything you do at any time.

You are great.

I dread interviews sometimes.

But, you know, sometimes there are people now, I just won't.

Now I'm busy.

Sorry.

But

what I love to do is tell these stories and share things that matter to people.

Having you interview me, in all honesty, and me, just me and you, it so matters to me because I can tell them the interesting things.

And you don't know about it, and they don't know about it, and I do know about.

And aren't the stories that are out there?

What better gift is there in your life?

And it makes people happy and it makes sense and it honors the enslaved people and honors the immigrants and it honors everybody.

Oh, getting your honor schedule was a really big deal for us.

Well, it's a big deal for me too.

I would say have a happy Halloween, but have a quiet Halloween.

I'll have a delicious Halloween.

I'm going to a good restaurant.

So ask sweet people serious questions about the things that are right under your nose or in your purse or in your mouth.

Because the candy aisle, it's never been so nuanced and historical the gossip the gossip in it i love it if you have a favorite candy that we didn't cover honestly just start googling it because chances are it's got a a wacky backstory so thank you to susan benjamin for being on and again her historic candy company is true treats it's linked in the show notes or you can stop by the store in harpersferry virginia her latest book is fun foods of america outrageous delights celebrated brands and iconic recipes linked in the show notes all her books are great a donation went to the Animal Welfare Society of Jefferson County, also linked in the show notes.

And hello to all the little babies there.

Let me know if someone gets gravy train or another animal that is waiting for you to love it.

We are at Olagies on Twitter and X, and I'm at Allie Ward on both.

Smaller gies is our spin-off show that is all ages and classroom-friendly.

You can find it with a new green logo wherever you get podcasts.

That was made by Portland artist Bonnie Dunch, who designed that.

And Erin Talbert admins, the Ologies Podcast Facebook group.

Thank you to scheduling producer and Sugar Plum Fairy herself, Noelle Dilworth.

Our managing director, who also helped a ton with research, is the wonderful Susan Hale.

Kelly R.

Dwyer does the website and can do yours.

Aveline Malik makes our professional transcripts.

Jake Chafee is an editor who just sweetens our mix and our everydays.

And lead editor who confects the episodes together is Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio.

Nick Thorburn wrote the music.

And if you stick around to the end, I tell you a secret.

And so I've been sick on the couch for many days, like four or five days working on this.

And in the background, to keep me company, I've had

season 10 of the survivalist show alone on Netflix in the background.

And right as I was researching clips of Charlie Chaplin eating the boot, Cade on Alone, he's a 27-year-old survivalist from Wyoming, is starving as you do in the winter in Saskatchewan with no food.

So Cade decides he's going to boil a chunk of his leather belt to eat.

I feel like at that time, Cade would have killed for an actual licorice boot.

Well, he would have killed any animal just to eat the animal.

But yeah, what Kizmet watching Charlie Chaplin eat a shoe at the exact same moment another guy is trying to chew his belt.

I'm just going to stick to soup and a lot of recolas.

That's my next meal.

Okay, bye-bye.

Pachodermatology homology, cryptozoology, litology, nanotechnology, meteorology, old fabricology, mapology, seriology, philanthology.

We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams.

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