{"id":28457,"date":"2014-10-31T06:56:03","date_gmt":"2014-10-31T10:56:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=28457"},"modified":"2015-10-28T09:18:23","modified_gmt":"2015-10-28T13:18:23","slug":"candy-is-essential-to-understanding-the-history-of-how-americans-eat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/10\/31\/candy-is-essential-to-understanding-the-history-of-how-americans-eat\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;Candy &#8230; is essential to understanding the history of how Americans eat&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.bloombergview.com\/articles\/2014-10-30\/how-candy-conquered-halloween\" target=\"_blank\">Virginia Postrel<\/a> talks to Samira Kawash about her book <em>Candy: A Century of Panic and Pleasure<\/em>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>It was, Kawash writes, the \u201cfirst ready-to-eat processed food, the original ancestor of all our fast, convenient, fun, imperishable, tasty, highly advertised brand-name snacks and meals.\u201d For more than a century, we\u2019ve simultaneously gorged on the stuff and felt guilty about it. It\u2019s an intensified version of our ambivalent and fickle attitudes toward abundant, convenient, mass-produced food in general.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe candy that gives us some of our happiest experiences is the same candy that rots our teeth, ruins our appetite, and sucks tender innocents into a desperate life of sugar addiction,\u201d she writes. \u201cCandy joins the ideas of pleasure and poison, innocence and vice, in a way that\u2019s unique and a bit puzzling.\u201d Candy is, one might say, both trick and treat. With Halloween in mind, I interviewed Kawash by e-mail.<\/p>\n<p><em>Question:<\/em> When and how did candy become associated with Halloween? Was trick-or-treating just concocted to sell candy?<\/p>\n<p><em>Answer:<\/em> Would you believe the earliest trick-or-treaters didn\u2019t even expect to get candy? Back in the 1930s, when kids first started chanting \u201ctrick or treat\u201d at the doorbell, the treat could be just about anything: nuts, coins, a small toy, a cookie or popcorn ball. Sometimes candy too, maybe a few jelly beans or a licorice stick. But it wasn\u2019t until well into the 1950s that Americans started buying treats instead of making them, and the easiest treat to buy was candy. The candy industry also advertised heavily, and by the 1960s was offering innovative packaging and sizes like mini-bars to make it even easier to give out candy at Halloween. But if you look at candy trade discussions about holiday marketing in the 1920s and 1930s, Halloween doesn\u2019t even get a mention. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Virginia Postrel talks to Samira Kawash about her book Candy: A Century of Panic and Pleasure: It was, Kawash writes, the \u201cfirst ready-to-eat processed food, the original ancestor of all our fast, convenient, fun, imperishable, tasty, highly advertised brand-name snacks and meals.\u201d For more than a century, we\u2019ve simultaneously gorged on the stuff and felt [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,74,7,28,13],"tags":[97,374,1043],"class_list":["post-28457","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-food","category-history","category-media","category-usa","tag-advertising","tag-children","tag-halloween"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7oZ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28457","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28457"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28457\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28459,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28457\/revisions\/28459"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}