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Oh hey, it's that guy that you work with who somehow has like eight pairs of cool glasses.
How did you do that? Ali Ward? Here we are Spootober.
Spooketober is always full of like scary creepy things, and now this one is terrifying for your teeth and your pancreas, but not your tongues are 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's a huge world. So we're going to get into it in a sect. But first, thank you to all the patrons at patreon dot com for supporting the show for as little as a dollar a month and you get to submit your questions if you're a patron. Thank you to everyone skulking around in ologies merch from ologiesmerch
dot com. Thank you as always to people who leave reviews for us, which help the show so much, and since I read each one, thank you this week too. Melon Farmer and Jim who wrote keep up the great work. Don't change a thing. Don't let the pew dwellers tell you not to swear. Potty language is a spice of life as long as you wash your hands before afternoon tea. Thank you, Jim the melon Farmer and everyone who.
Is looking for kids. Save episodes.
Just in general, I swear here and there in this show, but we do have classrooms save episodes specifically for you if you need that. It's a show called Smologies, and you can find it wherever you get podcasts. It's linked in the show notes. Those episodes, again are classroom safe. All age is safe in case you do not like the occasional adult word anyway, if you've ever left a review, I've read it and thank you.
Okay.
Confecteology 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 ten books, including twenty sixteen's Sweet Is 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 fifteen 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 Harper's 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
the special Spooptober 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 to the very end because it's the best okay onto Everything from divisive candies, apothecary origin stories, military grade chocolate, the warheads that could save you, the polarization of liquorice root, having whorehound on hand, Sugar sources from beat to corn, Turkish temptations, Roman flimflam, marzipan, mini sculptures, the sourrest of the sour balls, sugar plum ballets, your grand ant'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. 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 in our relationship to food, sex, fund, the environment, and 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 stories, it has a bunch of barrels full of taffy and swirls, and you know, you walk in there and it smells like sasparilla. 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, you 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 taffys 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 the things in the fourteen hundreds, and then it made the way to the fifteen hundreds 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 you sawed them, and that was the origin of what then became the taffy. And that has its own story.
More on taffy later because it's bunkers. But back to prehistory.
They're 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 for from teenagers. From teenagers, 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 that those 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 Two, people with chewing resins just as resins are as softer gums. So for the same reason people thought it was good for the teeth. Freshen your breath gave you something to do.
So yes, ancient teens smack and shaw. According to a twenty nineteen paper titled Ancient DNA for mastics solidifies connection between material culture and genetics of Mesolithic hunter gatherers in Scandinavia and they were of the Late Mesolithic period about ten thousand years ago and wads of chewed birch bark pitch found at an archaeological site based on the toothwaar and the molar placement suggest that the chewers were both male and female and around twelve to fourteen years old.
But there was this twenty twenty four 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 gonna get back to candy.
You mentioned a little bit about using the dregs, using molasses and sorgum. 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 and 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 honeybee didn't get into the fifteen sixteen hundred, so it's brand new. But people use sugars from maple. That would be the Native Americans, and they would use it from foods.
And as we discussed in the Melatology and Indigenous Melotology 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 three thousand years, indigenous populations in the Yucatan Peninsula hunted and collected wild honey, and they kept populations of this stingless honey producing bee called Melipona beachii, which is now nearly extinct in the region.
And there was this.
Twenty ten 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 malifera, you are looking at essentially a feral cat or a pigeon. And for more on those you can see the Columbitology pigeon episodes and the philonology 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 sugar is what was their idea of celebration in front? 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 enslave
people while they were enslaved. So if you want to say, what is the difference between candy and say, bake goods or other foods, it is that it's based in sugar of some sort, right, And that's what I see is 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 seventeen hundreds and it spanned until the mid eighteen hundreds, thanks in part to the development and the refinement of the steam engine, and people were like, you, guys, let's make more shift for people to buy.
So by the time we got to the industrial age to the let's say mid eighteen hundreds, 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 half penny, 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 their 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 death's fires, robberies.
So yeah.
In eighteen fifty two, a doctor with 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, cowardice, cruelty, and degradation. In a century later, in nineteen fifty five, Edward Podolski, 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 all 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 post prandial hyperinsulinemia. And I know that because apparently I have it, and I had to take like a five hour blood test to the doctors.
I'm one of those people.
In my case, when I eat 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 two thousand and nine British Journal of Psychiatry paper titled Confectionery Consumption in Childhood and Adult Violence, citing correlations between canny 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 fifteen years later researchers would also now look at neurodivergence dopamine seeking as well as chronic PTSD from poor accommodations. But what hell do I know less than an ADHD expert and doctor 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 epe bodies and our lizard brains even handle? Either way, When poor kids had penny candy, people were like, lock your doors, hell's got to break loose.
They treated it almost as we would today as say somebody who's all hopped up on coke? Right, I mean, ironically the coke and opium in those days in the pharmacies, but not in the candy. But yeah, it's really important and it's really good, and it served 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 were used to seeing those start as lozenges? What are some of the types of candy that the industry recognizes, from confections to taffy's to suckers, to bond bonds to hard candies, Like what kind of a ray?
How do you classify them?
That's a good question. I would classify 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 rock 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 fourteen fifteen hundreds, which were a little seed or not 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's sit bla blah blah blah 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 a century with the machinery that that's a panting machine that you know, looked kind of like a cement mixer or is kind of like when you were rolled around, they became the job breaker.
Boy howdy oh.
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 all you know, could go and buy, putting in the 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 dot org, my favorite childhood museum in San Francisco. So you've got the softball stage that starts around two hundred and forty degrees fahrenheit or one fifteen celsius, and this will result in a texture like fudge or prelines. Next up is the firm ball stage,
which you'll get caramel texture. The hard ball stage will get you textures like neuget, 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 and 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 Valley the Nutcracker.
Okay, so she is the ruler.
Of the land of sweets while the prince is a way, I guess she's like a deputy governor but in it too too. Also, it would be so good to see like a Halloween adaptation of the Nutcracker, but instead of the sugar plumb ferry. It's like the jawbreaker goblin. Someone gets 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 plumber one time?
Well, what I'm talking about is this is a teeny little sugar.
Okay, so that wasn't sure.
But they did have, say, sour balls. Right, so you're too young, But my grandmother and all of my great aunts had these persons and then the person they these black persons. Anybody my agent's gun on sixty seven, Well know what I'm talking about. They would have candy bawls. They had a purses and they would sit there talking talk, and in the bottom of the purses were life savers
and sour balls and things of that sort. And you didn't even have to ask, Oh, just go in and you could just rummage in or they would just offer 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 candies with the other. There are mansu bigcorum, no matter
who was eating it. Candy bears 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 Snickers probably.
Let's put it this way, your grandmother would never have a candy bear on the bottom of your purse. She'd have a little lifesaver that you had pulled over the top, but she would not have a Snickers war.
So there are those hard candies. There are sours. Yeah, what are some other types of candies?
There are hard candies, There are taffy's, There are fizzes, There are chocolates, There are filled chocolates. There are soft paste candies like the Wave for which was made by the Way in eighteen forty seven, one of the first candies to be made out in a popcarrier.
And just a side note, so the Neco 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 seventeen hundreds and eventually, like a smaller candy coated version, became our modern day jelly pen. 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 Stricklin 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 Two, 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 gummy or matters. Something that just walloped me was learning that Harry Bo the makers of gummy bears. That's a German company and it comes from the founder's name, Hans Regelbon
Harry Beau. And this entire time I thought Harrybo 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 are the kinds the gummy candies which originated many think I think from the Turkish to light Year nine hundred, 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 butterments, 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 and saloons. So on the topic of less innocent contractions.
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 it with us sex what Yeah, and they still do today. Haven't you ever had a creamy chocolate?
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 that say tulusla trek, which are very sexual, very sensual and amazing. And if he didn't come from such a well to do family, he probably would have been prison for him, but he didn't. They were just gorgeous. They were comfortable, are 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 you know, to Luisa trek 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 there were gifts of sex and come on, let's go and sex.
They were very sensual. The rose the roses and the swirls and so forth. I mean, you know, a guy in the collegist would recognize a lot of their views how they're done. So they're also really sexual. I mean it it's been so multi purpose.
Were there certain ingredients in candy that were considered afrod usiacs 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, there was the little kiss candies, which hers she 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, I don't know how long ago, not like four or five years ago, got to own it, and everybody thinks her she 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 wilber Bud, which was a kiss, or it could have been any number of marshmallows or Toughi's. There were little pieces.
So yes, h O.
Wilbert developed this drop shaped candy from the way that the nozzle kisses sheet underneath it, and then about thirteen years later Milton.
Hershey was like, that's a great idea. I love that.
And it wasn't until the turn of the century two thousand y two k 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 Wilbert Chocolate storefront in Lititz, 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 well to do who would have these sumptuous chocolates that were just made with no ways and skilled hands puts them together, and there was a great art to creating them and they were for sex.
I had no idea that they were so sexer.
Well, can I tell you?
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 food rays of everybody. So of course a number of explorers, including Hernandez, I think it was.
So.
This is Hernan Cortez, a Spanish conky storer who very famously had major beef with the emperor of the Aztec Empire and the late fourteen hundreds and the early fifteen hundreds that led to the emperor's downfall and Cortes losing most of his looted treasure. But later Cortes had a child with the emperor's daughter who's only seventeen, so I cannot imagine it was a consensual love affair. But anyway, back to this counky storre's arrival in the Aztec Empire. So Hernan Cortez.
Wound up in Mexico and with him was this man who was writing, taking notes on what he saw, and there they Now you know what these people are like from Europe, right, I mean, in one hundred and ten 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 cacaw 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 fifty jalousies of chocolate a day to placate his many wives. So A, I don't think you cared less about placating his wives. And b the jalices of chocolate were available to everybody, and he just really liked them, and they were meant to be healthy and good few and they were for
staminar virility. But it wasn't necessarily sex. But of course you got these guys from Europe. You 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 he his Montazuma. 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 were leaked doubt 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 in 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 they're tiging right, I'm compared to Montezuma out there just doing his thing. I mean, no question, he would raid other cultures and he would made them pay a tariff, which was in fact to cow's right because he didn't grow in Mexico. I'm not
a role here but getting back. So that's how chocolate became the upper echelon sexy sexy thing and why we today consider it in aphrodisiac.
That's amazing.
But last thing, sex is in the brain, isn't it. Do you think of 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 tryptofan, which is used to make serotonin in our brains. And it also contains the stimulant phenyl ethyl amine, 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 carib What it is, why did almond moms of the nineteen seventies eat it? And why is it falling from the trees in front of your house?
But back to chocolate. Is it an aphrodisiac? Is it? Can someone study this? Of course they did so.
A two thousand and six Journal of Sexual Medicine article titled Chocolate and Women's Sexual Health and 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, 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 in 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 young if it could help it.
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 this forum one of the museums, in fact, trying to convince them that the French didn't actually create glass a 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 US somewhat somehow wound up with the ancient Romans or Greeks. That's not true. I mean half of what they were eating came from Asia, what I mean, So that isn't true. So we're gonna let go of that.
Let us not credit the Roman and the Greeks with everything.
But one of the things that you absolutely write 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 crystallize, So sugar was used as a preservative. And one of the vestiges of that is, in fact, the much maligned glass a 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 fruitcake. 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 one two three punch of one the very low moisture content of honey being inhospitable
two bacteria viruses. Plus it's got low pH and high acidity, and a bit of hydrogen peroxide resulting from some chemical reactions from the little honeybee 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 an acre fomenting agent in the alcohol in 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 serpic kind of drink. I don't know if you've had it. No, I don't recommend it. OK up to you.
So prohibition in the US last year from nineteen twenty to nineteen thirty three, 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 fago drinkers out there. And yes, there is a soda flavor called rock and rye which is said to taste like vanilla doctor pepper, And somehow in a Daquel hayze, I found myself on the subredded Juggalos, and one enthusiastic insane clown posse and Fago 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 fago was the best flavor of fag all right.
However, what was interesting was that during prohibition, the prohibitions were close in everything down that was remotely connected to alcohol, including the rock candy factories, even though they were genuinely making rock candy, and rock candy is genuinely important from many things was used as menicuva throat, but it was also favorite of kids. They love rock candy right close 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 gotta be somebodyho likes to have fun, right, yeah, I mean it's all about fun. So you have these candy makers during prohibition, and they want to be able to sell the candy, all right, So how do you sell it? Everybody's making candy. The million kind of candies out there. You're sell any 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 match, which was a very really popular cocktail because you just took shit. I mean prisoners who are 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 is the sugar in the cherry, right, that makes it ferment, And in some of the acids, you make
it into a drink you have. Do you remember the little wax bottles they would call nickel disp yes, right the neck for a nickel for a bag in the nip because they made them look like a nipple. Whiskey during prohibition or the lead into ProBiS. So you can go through one candy f to 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 walked out of like, Okay, I'm kind of 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 Spretty Steers and they're like, look, I'm smoking, which is so hilarious that we do use it as a proxy for like other forbidden things.
Well, truit. 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 wanted to be the big things, but
it's candy cigarettes. It's the best sell. So they actually go back to the late eighteen hundreds when they're selling working class kids, and the working class kids want to be like grown ums like Hershey, and 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 for me for
a minute. Right. They also they also sell guns, but the guns were made out of glass, and then inside the barrel of the guns they have these little candy balls and kids would want they're buying because they want the probably they want the little glass guns, but they also get candy or vice versa. Who knows which. By the nineteen forties 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, of course, but it had nothing to do with the candy cigarettes. It had to do with Jenice Joplin because you cannot wear a lot of jewelry and drink Southern comfort and he had tike without a cigarette in your hand.
So that fifteen years of smoking cigarettes. But it had nothing to do with the kid.
Oh I love her. You know.
In those days, it's just what you did.
It was just a different time. 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 stressed smoking was not the same as like Jenna Stoplet. I'm sorry, mom, but so it taught you. Yeah, what about when candy bars came on
the scene. When did we go from a box of four bond bonds to smushing the bond bonds together into one block.
That happened, you see, another really fascinating thing. So that started with the Fry family of England in the eighteen hundreds. The stuffed thing with called combination candy bars, peanut two and so on. Those came around the nineteen twenties. Actually they became popular then they were used during wartime. So in World War One, in the first rations ever, the government gave them candy bars because it had sugar, which
they really needed. It had not it had other fruits in it, and they gave them candy bars and they loved it. They came back and proclaimed glory of candy bars, and candy bars took off. But what's really important here, right, and this is the versatility of candy. You bet an't be 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 on 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 bar that has a brown label and is very serious and it has a sports thing on it, like somebody rubbing, like cartoon thing. Right, you're eating a candy bar. It's to say, 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 Convections Association was marketing it in the nineteen twenties and thirties.
So while the first chocolate bars were made in the mid eighteen hundreds, 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 nineteen thirty seven 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 again, it's the job done.
Now.
The first candy bars, though those came about in the early nineteen hundreds. In nineteen twelve there was a marshmallow nougat peanut confection called the Googoo Cluster, and shortly after came peanut chees, which were invented by an immigrant from Romania as a ration for World War One soldiers who loved it. Now, who else loves the chocolate and molasses peanut cheese?
Me?
Also vegans. My vegan friends always go for the peanut cheese, but not so fast.
I have a little bit.
Of bad news because some sugar is refined using bone char and some glycerine in the ingredient lists can come from animal sources, and peanut chees 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 jews 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 us snickers for lunch.
I get it today's energy bars sometimes or 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, 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 whale 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 Two, well, the world won into 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
bulls 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 son of affluence, meaning we had jobs again, meaning we could buy things. So candy was the 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, 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 sixties and seventies 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 vitamins.
And gummy vitamins which I ate some this morning. So you know, a Turkish delight with magnesium and it essentially.
More on corn syrup in a bit.
But there are many types of sugars, and they all fall under monosaccharides or die saccharides, 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 corpo hydrate that becomes a sugar when it's processed. It comes from raspberry leaves, and you know, all different things. So yeah, we've always had it. We being most Americans say in the seventeen hundreds, 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 have 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 cuts them 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 coin 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 abolitionist had a movement which was the free Products movement, and what they would do, I've heard also is 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 of slave people are making. But they still
needed sugar. They still had to have sugar. What did they use. They use maple, which is hard to get. They use that. They used sergum, which they boiled, and the ones in the north discovered in the eighteen hundreds, not knowing the enslaved people were using it since they first came over in the sixteen hundreds. And they used beet sugar, which grows in cold weather, and so it's a big sugar beet. It's not the beat they eat for dinner, and it grows in cold weather, so unlike
cane sugar, which is dependent on as hot climates. 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 isn't aside, This is not an entire episode. So I'm gonna bottle up a lot of feelings about SODA's and we're just gonna give you a little sip of history. So, table sugar is sucrose, and fructose is a different type of sugar. It's sweeter than sucrosse. Fructose occurs obviously in nature all over the place. Now, eventually
your body breaks it all down into glucose. But in the nineteen sixties, 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 frucit doose 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 gonna 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 twenty twenty one article by the National Cancer Institute titled inquisitively does
too much fructose help colorectal cancers grow? Details how one twenty nineteen studies show that feeding high frctose 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 over consumption of all sugars, including fruit dose, to everything from metabolic syndromes to asthma. Now, in twenty eighteen, the average American consumed sixty two pounds of refined sugars.
In some countries, sodas are made with cane sugar, but the US 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 now. Small dose is 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 is 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 bucks begans. You're off the hook on candy corn. You can turn this down for ethical reasons. But candy corn. It was born in late eighteen hundreds, 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. Brox is one of the biggest producers of candy corn, and they rolled out a Turkey Dinner flavored variation with notes of oniony 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 Brox is like, 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.
Out, Oh listen, listening now.
No they're not listening now, but they sent in quite no, no, no, they sent in thirty six pages of questions for you.
We won't ask all of them. I'm happy, yeah, right.
Can I just tell you Alli really fast? I get into you so much, and they are always boring and after a while time I assist, and it's called through them, because I can't do that between you meet Boring and you're like, man, I would be interviewed by you any day or night.
I'm telling you, yes.
It's like, this is great. I'm really happy.
And we are so happy to 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 kiddies 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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Ah?
I'm not great a sore throat.
I think I'm coming down with cold.
Oh no, you should try a Vogel sore throat spray. It's a natural remedy with echination and sage and can treat symptoms of coals and flus, including sore throats.
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So we leave sore throat symptoms with a Vogel Aquina four sore throat spray, made from achinasia and sage herbs and designed to reach irritated parts of the throat. Available from health stores and pharmacies and white always read the leaflet.
Moving on, this question was asked by Cool 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? Cool, You're not alone? Some people asked Andy Pepper and Daniel Smanuel wanted to know what your thoughts are yea or nay on the ever polarizing orange circus peanuts.
Have you had those? 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 coming in a store, what do people think? It's absolutely polarizing. So this is when I want to tell them. You're ready not it off, cut it out. I'm going to tell you the story is circus peanuts. And as they would say, no pun intended.
I'm not to be fast Cirtacus peanuts, who really made in the late eighteen hundreds for circus because the circuses had these real it's very unfortunate, but they had these elephants that they would come to poor things, and so we would all get circus peanuts. They have big newspaper ads the Circus is coming by 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 I so much so they became the prototype for drum roll if you please, the Lucky Charm cereal. No, yeah, I was.
Really really because those are so crunchy.
Yeah, so knock it off, guys. It's a great candy, and it has fascinating history and has built into the fabric of who we are. When you were a little kid, you're picking out the Lucky Charms Charms oh cereal? Right, yeah, yeah, you know 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 marshmallows one thing, and then if you are 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 other 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, Hana Bee wants to know more about Marzapan. 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 Marzapan was that considered a very fancy treat.
They want to know.
Okay, so it's polarizing. So now we've had two questions. Both of them are polarizing candy, So batting 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 almends 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 and 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 pardoned some sees well, I have an almond Wand in.
The Bible you see a lot of the use of omens, for example. So the Marsapian was made to be an almond paste and almond confection, and it was the almond that gave Marcipient its cloud and importance. The Marsipian was so significant that they would have entire tables with a pig with an apple and its mouth, they would have voluptuous fruits, all of it made by Marsapian. Marsapian was really important. And the reason why today we have Marcipient at Easter that kind of thing is because of that
ancient use of it. So the Marscipient and the shapes is today, it ain't nothing like it used to be.
I do love the little sculptures though it is.
It does make me want to sit down and have craft night and sculpt little fruit pipiggies and stuff.
Like that always sculpted, but like really like towers, like towers on a table made out of Marsapian.
It took me a while, like Mars of Panda. I was like, what's happening? But I love it.
Another polarizing flavor because people have their favorites. Row and Tree, Rachel Pristacco, Ms Carter of Mars, Sugarpuff, Datikins, 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?
Roe and 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 all?
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, 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 suites your throat because now you're all the glycoon is getting down. So they had 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 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 sourist 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 two point two, and stomach acid and lemon juice those hit about a two. 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 one point nine. That's more acidic than stomach acid. Wonka fun dip powder is more acidic at one point eight. And the top measured sour candy was Warhead's sour Spray one
point six. There was one more thing on the list below that, and I was like, who, what's that? And it was something at one point zero and that was battery acid. Warhead Sour Spray comes in it just over 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, 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 our 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 jujuur And so now they're like, we're really so soury a pucker up candy and you can't stand it. This is all about manufacturing kids, and bet it get used to it because it's everything seems to be commercialized in candy is 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 soh while, 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, so it distracts you.
Yeah, yeah, it distracts you.
And according to a twenty sixteen 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 maybe saying, 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 this 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 Joviac,
Chris Curious Marico, and Colorado o'keith. First time question asker it 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 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 aravex for tease is North America. But I know that around the world you have many iterations of chocolate in depending where you are doc chocolate takes precedents or male 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 Choclate's made by Hershey, okay. And the reason is that
Hershey has mastered the art of cheap chocolate. It's affordable and abundant, and it has a really good, albeit false story behind it.
And what's the flimflam with the Hershey story.
The flim flemen 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 is a Mennonite. His mother and father were divorced. How's that in the late eighteen hundreds. They figured, they'll teach me to make ice cream in the 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 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. There was no love in that. He didn't give him a wholesome Pennsylvania family by a long shot. But the good thing about Hershey, if they would just knock it off over it 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. It's probably a lot of hollering in their household, and he made it. And if you are a cedar. Even if you're flunking out, 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 says 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 down. And according to the nineteen seventy seven 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 a son, And Milton was like, dang, Dad, now I'm broke. Henny was like, dude, I'm sorry, come to Colorado. Let's
mind 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 smellulator dad. Milton high tailed 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 Hirshley, 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 nineteen hundred he listed himself as a widow, although his
estranged wife outlived him by several decades. Henry's nineteen hundred 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. Two years earlier, he told the government had died even though she was still alive.
So yes, Henry Hershey, father of Milton Hershey, the chocolateer. We might call him a bit of a scoundrel or a scamp, or a reprobate or 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 nineteen ten 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 are we doing that?
I feel like you should be Hershey's CMO, like you should take over change the story, you know what I mean, because that is much more interesting.
No, they don't like me. I went and I interviewed them from my last book, and the woman gave me very shortens.
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 yeah, okay. So Rebecca Fitchett and Marico Rica wanted to know. They said, I'm Mexican American and the nostalgic candies for me are all centered on Pemerindo chili and various forms of condensed milk. But wanted to know why some other candies are based on like whorehound and cloves. And Rebecca 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 not a more like global southern thing.
Yeah, so horehound is. By the way, if any of you live I live in West Virginia, I'm from Massachusetts, grow your own hoarhound. 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 a little round, almost like rings around. It's absolutely gorgeous. And flowers from it.
It came to North America around the fifteen hundred sometime around them, and it was used for sore throat and uses 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. Horehound is an enigma of people for two reasons. One is hoorr. What do you mean by horror? And you know, believe me,
we get our jokes about that number one. But number two is the flavor. So the flavor of hoarhound in its truest form as a candy is really really bitter, and our palettes aren't gared for that anymore. Recently, I would say, over the last fifty sixty years, we've had less and less of a tolerance for hoarhoum candy. What the candy makers are doing now, particularly the old timy ones, they're adding more sugar and now you still have the warhound 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 twenty seventeen Journal of Intercultural Ethnopharmacology paper Murubian Vulgari, a review on phytochemical and pharmacological aspects, which notes that the whorehound plant has reportedly pharmacological activities such as anti pain, anti spasmodic, anti hypertend, anti diabetic, gastro protective, anti inflammatory, anti microbial, anti cancer, antioxidant, and anti hepatoxic like liver toxic activity
in traditional ethnobotany uses. It does concede, though that well 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 mits on that, like post taste, because I feel like I have old timey consumption, and from what I've read, horehound has this earthy bitter licoricy root beer type flavor. And I was like, right now, I 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 horehound in there.
So there you go.
It really is old time, but it's from the old time palette in ours. Our palates 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.
Yeah, all the time you want.
Yeah, amazing, Okay, great.
Christian Jacobus and Chacaba's Christian Jacobus and Nathan mary And and Alice Rubbon 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's 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 O get 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, it tastes like a raspberry, right, Yeah, no,
I know, I eat raspberries. It 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 fun. 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 not unaware of?
I wish?
So according to a Bona Petite 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 seven to eleven website, it does presently In the year of Our Lord twenty twenty four assert that this flavor is an extraction from the vibrant blue raspberry bushes on the secret Island of as miss and frankly, so many lawyers could make them take that down, and I'm kind of glad that they
have it. 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 and other people are very polarized about.
Certain candies I'm noticing.
And Rachel m says my husband's black licorice was invented because they didn't have sugar.
Any truth to that.
Other people Teya Danealovic and Chicken Chumper both asked licorice candy?
Why two people asked that?
And Becky, this secgress scientist said salty European liquorice?
Is it candy? Is it savory? So a lot of people say they love black licorice.
Ryan Ketchum, Dylan Vee, who asks, can I justify eating a lot of this? And John Champion of licorice.
Yeah, Hi.
My question is whether it's time for licorice to make a really big.
Comeback Others, 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 lcorte in your yard. I do. It's a wonderful plant. And so the licorice root itself was, and in some 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
in 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 choose the tree residents for the same reason. But liquorice room in particular because how it splays out so enslave. People would use that, and they would use it as unflavoring, and people would use said 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 like the flavor. Our palettes 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 his 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 same as scene where he ate a boot and he hit the shoelaces like spaghetti. This is in the twenties. And I know this because I read it research. But I also asked the guy who owns the company now his grandson of the guy who founded it, Oh, the great grandson. He confirmed that. Charlie Chaplin called the American Liquorice 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 I would probably get kind of rattled up. And that's what he's eating in the movie is the America Licorice Company. But licorice was a real favorite for years and years. They had all sorts of look good in plenty. It is the first candy brand in the country. Good in Plenty eighteen ninety three, people love, you know, they're eating Good in Plenty in eighteen ninety three today, I believe again
it's like Corehound. Our palettes have changed so much. So some people with a particular taste profile as they call them, they like licorice, and now 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 palettes, and not an insulting way, but just reality. But yeah, licoras was everywhere. It was great,
It was important. It was medicine, it was a food, it was a candy, it was a tobacco so it was a sweet treat for kids.
Wow, it was Licorica'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 were who had you know, tobacco field 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 could 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 off their economy again. So they didn't, and we never have had a licoric economy. And all the licorice that we get is from somewhere else.
Side note pound in licorice. Root that makes it sweet is glycoorizin. And when it comes to salmiaki 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 glycrizin 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 peers that sell salt water taffy, and I'm like, they can be getting this salt water from below the pier so lived Tamburini and Calcy both wanted to know what's in salt water taffy? And why is it called salt water taffy? All right, sit down, okay, I'm in 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. And you if you've got 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 is directly right on the ocean and the waves are coming up, and one day there was a storm. This is the story. There was a storm and the waves and the storm flooded this candy company that was making taffy on the boardwalk. So it's a mess and the guys in there and the taffy's floating on the water, and the little girl comes in and says, do you have any taffy in one of us? Taffy said,
all I have the saltwater taffy. And one way or another that there are all of these stories, like he got the idea of a woman walked by and said, you ought a name of that? Nobody really knows that. That's why they call the 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 eighteen late eighteen eighties, and then around the nineteen twenties, saltwater taboo 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 right.
His name was John ross Edmiston, and yes he is dead. His New York Times obituary from nineteen thirty nine that he lived until the age of eighty six, 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 salt water in it.
So no, sorry, kids, no salt water in your saltwater taffy unless they're adding it now because they don't want people to get him set right well, because they think it'll.
Be cool false advertising, but it isn't.
The real saltwater entirety never had salt. Does it taste salted to you?
No, it's not like it's fish flavored or anything, I thank 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 his 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. Ferrera Candy Company has also started making oh see, I already know have has recently stopped making atomic fireballs, jowbusters, and lemonheads. What drives the company to discontinue products? I already missed 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's carrying and we're like, we got to get those. So they're back and they are. Originally they were the sugar plumps of the fourteen hundreds, and they made their way up to the jawbreakers and then the atomic fireballs after World War Two. That's what they were. They were very important, but they weren't a moneymaker.
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 neck a wafer the company folded for one horrifying year. We had no neck a wafers. Now they're back. It may have been three years, but it felt like twenty years. Sad that liquorice 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, True Treats dot com is a feast of info. Every candy theyll 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 job breakers, 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 hunches they were pushed out by all of their sales, probably limited by all the new unbelievably our 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 your protests at work. You're ready, uh huh okay. You know the pixie stick, yes, of course, a little straw, that wonderful little straw that by the way, it was gone. It was gone last year. No more pixie sticks were there were some of these, like newer versions. Right now it's back. Yeah, Pixi sticks again.
Patron Eso Party confess that they used to love super sugary candy as a kid, like pixie sticks. But they write at twenty six now the thought of that candy makes me gag, And yes, I get it, you so my teeth sweat just imagining them. But the history is fascinating anyway.
Pixiesick were made in the earlier part of the nineteen hundreds. Kids were eating them, and they were gone to school and they were eating a pixie stick, and they had the white shirts on because in those days, kids dressed up for school and they had white shirts and they would eat 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 meaed a version of the pixie stick. Our kids love it. We have to give our kids these candies. But you can't do this. There's slabs and we can't have a kid be a slav in school. So the company obliged. They listened, and you know what they made as a needer version of the pixie stick. You know what they called it, Tommy Tommy sweet tarts.
There we go.
Those are yeah, those who 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 cloud, got to really get numbers. Numbers.
Well, some people who had best intentions have wondered about sugar substitute candies. Maybe blood sugar is an issue, maybe dietary reasons, and Turner Piers 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 melotol, they give you the epic poops.
Other people wanted to know the epic poops. So people asked about real digestive issues with sugar free candies.
If you have stivia, I mean you can grow stivvy in your garden, rip it up, put it on your food sale. 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 sugar sweich are really really sweet. So now our thresholds 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 xylotol or erythritol or manitol 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. Sorbatol is sold straight up as a medical laxative and ps for more on powerwashing your intestines precolonoscopy, I have a whole field trip ride along episode on that linked in the show notes without shame, but apart from bubblegut and the cancelation 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 xylotol and uythrotol can also cause over activity of your platelets, resulting in blood cloths and other cardiovascular debt. So, as one Amazon review proclaimed, see you in Hell, sugar free got me 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's storm, Dylan V. Gerrick McLoughlin, Eveilye Sanchez wanted to know, are there any candies that it still tastes good? But, in Andrea's words, is their 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 healthcake.
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 really hard questions. So I'll take the medical aspect out of it because it isn't kind of what I would do where 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 diapetologist, doctor Macnatter 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'd like it.
I ate it. It's good. What happened 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 who 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 ten 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. But 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 can you really love, share it with somebody. There's nothing wrong but that once you start looking for candy that's healthy for you, you're gonna follow the traps of getting an energy bar and a health food bar. Yeah, that you're eating something healthy and you're still in in candy.
I have to say.
I used to work for food networking 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 donuts in a sitting, seventeen pieces of high 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 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 teeny tiny amount practically, no, and don't believe what marketers telling you the full of beans.
Check your energy 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? What do you get trig or treaters in West Virginia and on your block?
People who 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 your fre case.
So we'll get candy, and I'm like crickets. So I go to my friend's houses to help them hand out candy.
But when you have to pick out what candy you give out, Yeah, 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.
I don't?
I can?
I mean, I worried that nobody would show up at my house all this candy. So what I have done sometimes is this very busy street with with a big halloween some kids. Sometimes I go and I join people there to get out of it. So what I do is I shut off my lights and I go off together. What it's true? Or I gonna meet my friends healthier. But they have so much damn candy. Then it want more? Stup? Oh, we don't need it. We're home early because he's shut
down time for Halloween. We're home early. We go to the back of the house and shut off all the lights in the front.
I have pictured you with just a trop of pink, only starbirds, which is the best way for I'm like I'm like Pumpkin reces no. If you no.
Idea I got from Candy, couldn't, They'll get pissed off.
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 in 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 on my store, which is Candy's from the very beginning of history, all the way through the nineteen hundreds of the 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 sucks, 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 at y'all, is I really love telling these stories.
And I do so much media, and I often most of the time get us really stupidal and it's like you could just go to the Mars website and get there. I mean, this is serious, important, dynamic, cultural, amazing, funny things. So that and so that is why I will tell you in all honesty I do. I do a lot of me. Yeah, I will be on anything you do at anytime.
You are great.
I dread interviews sometimes, but you know, sometimes there are people now I just won't. I'm I'm busy, sorry, but but I what I love to do is tell these stories and share things. Mad to people. Having you interview me in all honesty and me just me and you, it's so madters to me because I can tell them the interesting things and you don't know about and they don't know about it, and I do know about and
an't the stories that are out there. What bitter gift is there in your life and it makes people happy and it makes sense and it honors the enslaved people and it honors the immigrants, and it honors everybody.
Oh, getting your honor schedule was a really big deal for us.
Well, it's some big deals 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 isle, 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 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 Harper's Ferry, Virginia. Her latest book is Fun Foods of America, Outrageous to lights, 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 Ologies on Twitter and x and I'm at ali Ward on both Smologies is our spinoff 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 Aaron Talbert admins Theologies podcast Facebook group. Thank you to scheduling producer and sugar Plum Fairy herself, Noel 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 Malick makes our professional transcripts. Jake Chafee is an editor who just sweetens our mix and our every days. 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 ten of The Survivalist Show alone on Netflix in the background, and right as I was researching clips of Charlie Chaplin eating the boot cad on a loan. He's a twenty seven year old survivalist from Wyoming, is starving as you do in the winter in Saskatchewan with no food, so Caid decides he's going to boil a chunk of his
leather belt to eat. I feel like at that time Caid would have killed for an actual grish boot. Well, he would have killed any animal just to eat the animal. But yeah, what kismet? Watching Charlie Chaplin eat a shoe at the exact same moment another guy has tried to chew his belt. I'm just gonna stick to soup and a lot of recollas that's my next meal, Okay for by Hacadermatology, Homeology, r doo, zoology, lithology, new zeroonology, meteorology, partology, apology, seiology, selology.
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