Samira Kawash - Candy: A Century of Panic and Pleasure

Evil or Just Misunderstood?

It all started with the Jelly Bean Incident.

My daughter was three years old, and she loved jelly beans. A baby fistful of the brightly colored morsels was just about the biggest prize she could imagine, and at one tiny gram of sugar per bean, it seemed to meher caring, reasonably attentive motherto be a pretty harmless treat. So it was with the best of intentions that we decided one day to bring some jelly beans to share for her playdate at Noahs house.

Noahs mom, Laura, stocked their pantry with normal kid stuffPopsicles and juice boxes and Teddy Grahamsso I didnt think much about offering the jelly beans. But Laura seemed taken aback: Well, hes never really had that before I suppose it couldnt hurt.

Couldnt hurt? Could she really believe I was harming my child, and threatening to harm hers, by holding out a few tiny pieces of candy? But greater condemnation was to follow. Her husband, Gary, had been listening to the exchange and with a dark glare in my direction he hissed at Laura, Oh, so I guess youll start giving him crack now too?

He might as well have shouted in my face, Bad mother! I was stunnedit was just a few jelly beans, after all.

I had already promised my daughter she could have some candyand to be honest, I like jelly beans tooso we snuck out to the patio to enjoy our illicit treat. As we ate, though, I couldnt help but think, What if Im wrong? Candy is certainly not a healthy snack. But there I was, letting my three-year-old eat the jelly beans, encouraging her, even. My own mother wouldnt have let me have them, thats for suremy childhood home was a no-candy zone. Maybe I was a bad mother.

This moment was when I first started paying attention to candy, and especially to the ways people talk about eating or not eating it. Just about everyone agrees that candy is a junk food devoid of real nutrition, a source of empty calories that ruin your appetite for better things like apples and chicken. But empty calories alone couldnt account for a reaction like Garys, which made it seem like it was just a skip and a hop from the innocence of Pixy Stix to the dangerous and criminal world of street junkies.

And it isnt just Gary who sees candy as some kind of juvenile vice. Once I started paying attention, I noticed that a lot of stories out there suggested disturbing connections between candy and controlled substances. In 2009, The Wall Street Journal broke the news that middle school kids were freaking out their parents by inhaling and snorting the dust from Smarties candies; YouTube how to videos were all the rage for a few months.

Halls creation is just a novelty gag, but there are some people who think that the sugar its made from is as harmful as the meth its imitating. Addiction researchers warn that the tasty pleasures of candy, cakes, potato chips, and the rest of the sweet, fatty indulgences we fondly know as junk food light up the same brain receptors as heroin and cocaine. A team at Yale showed pictures of ice cream to women with symptoms of food addiction and found that their brains resembled the brains of heroin addicts looking at drug paraphernalia.