Your Favorite Candies Are Byproducts Of Prohibition

In early-19th-century America, candy was expensive. I'm talking gold-plated carriage, own-your-own-house, all-your-original-teeth expensive. The closest thing kids had to candy was molasses-sweetened pudding, which sounds like something Santa Claus would leave in the stocking of a serial killer. But in 1847, a pharmacist named Oliver Chase invented a small hand-operated machine that pressed out sugar-lozenges. He had a bunch of sugar lying around because he'd been using it to hide the taste of the grosser medicines, and then he decided to sell his lozenges to sooth the throat or settle the stomach. He sold the machines, and candy became pretty popular: By the time the Civil War hit, soldiers were carrying candy in their pockets along with bullets and food, and we soon replaced the hand-operated candy machines with steam-powered ones to pump out those sugar wads faster.

Then, candy got its big break: Prohibition. After Americans' right to booze was taken away, we needed to find something else to shove down our throats, and we entered The Golden Age of Candy. Between 1920 and 1933, we saw the invention of Oh Henry, Charleston Chew, Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, Butterfinger, Milky Way, Mr. Goodbar, Milk Duds, Mike and Ike, Heath Bar, Kit Kat (then called "Kit Cats"), and Snickers. Hershey's Kisses were invented in 1907 but exploded in 1921 because they finally figured out how to automate their creation. Basically, four out of five of America's favorite candies were invented as an alternative to getting drunk (M&Ms were invented in 1941).

Pop Culture Has Taught Us To Fear New Candy

A lot of science fiction and fantasy films operate on the idea of wish fulfillment. Harry Potter is fun because deep inside most of us are still holding out hope that our owl just got lost and that he's going to show up any day now with a letter tucked in his beak. Charlie And The Chocolate Factory is a fun story for a similar reason -- lucking out and finding a life-changing golden ticket in a candy bar would be amazing: I could finally quit my job and spend all day pursuing my passion of standing naked on a roof and screaming racial slurs at babies through a megaphone.

So why is it that in these fantastical universes the candy always sucks? In Harry Potter, we see some minor novelties, but for the most part we get stuff like Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans, which are jellybeans that contain flavors like "vomit" and presumably "dry dog shit." There are also enchanted chocolate frogs, the marketing pitch for which is that they will try to escape.

"Finally: The deliciousness of chocolate meets the raw guilt of murdering a cute animal!"

We Simply Can't Handle The Candy

We think of candy as a novelty -- something special and exciting, because that's how it feels on our tongues and in our brains. After all, candy is a reward, right? We eat it most during Halloween and Christmas because it's a thing of celebration and excitement.

But think about how we eat, say, Skittles: Do we enjoy each one individually, savoring the unique grapishness of the purple ones, or the limey-deliciousness of the green ones? No, of course not -- we cram them into our mouths like we're starving mountain men who just stumbled across a pile of delicious baby birds. Then we shove another fistful down our talk-hole without even pausing to wipe the drool from our chin. Our candy habit isn't about flavor; it's about scratching our sugar itch. And boy oh boy, do we have an itch.

In 1822, back when candy was still a weird-looking contraption in Oliver Chase's pharmacy, an American would eat the amount of sugar in a 12-ounce soda every five days. In 2012, we were eating that much in seven hours. Our biology hasn't changed that much in just a couple hundred years, so we're all addicted to sugar. Meta-studies have found that sugar withdrawal in humans is "comparable in magnitude to those induced by addictive drugs," and studies have found that when you try to take sugar away from rats that have binged on it, they show withdrawal symptoms similar to what you'd see in someone kicking a serious drug problem: teeth chattering, tremors, and shaking.

We Deserve Better Than This

I want you to take a moment to look at yourself in the mirror. Just look -- don't judge yourself, don't hold yourself to any standards, just take in what you look like. Let your eyes linger on your features. Absorb yourself. Love yourself as only you can.

Focus on the fact that there's never been anything like you, and there never will be again. And due to humanity's triumphs and hard-learned lessons, you have more opportunity and capability than 99.9 percent of the human beings that have ever lived on this planet. If you dedicate yourself, there's damn near nothing you can't accomplish. I believe that, I truly do. And that's why you deserve better candy. And that's why we need to burn everything.

Yeah. You thought you were going to get off easy, didn't you, candy people? That's right, I'm talking to you now. You thought I was going to tell my readers to write their congressperson, or protest in the streets, or start some kind of pansy-ass boycott. But we're way past that. You led us astray, somewhere, fed us a terrible injustice, and you gave us nothing in return.

That's not how this works. The deal is, and has always been, that for every great injustice, we get a luxury. You can ruin the environment, but it's fine because I drive a car with a turbo-charged V6. I don't notice child labor in China because I'm too busy playing games on the iPhone they made me. This is a simple system, but here, you fucked it up. You switched all your candy over to corn syrup instead of sugar, and in exchange you gave me lower prices -- but no innovation. And that is bullshit. That is street-corner drug dealer behavior. That is unacceptable. And now you must pay.

To my readers, I say this: Join me. Join me in the streets, that we might baptize the world in flame.

JF Sargent is running outside to set something on fire, naked. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.

For more reasons why candy lacks the innovation our country is known for, see the candy wax lips that not even a Batman villain would love in 5 Candies You Hated Getting Every Halloween. Candy has gotten so bad that Soren has taken to eating live animals to satiate his drunken sweet tooth. Try not to gag when you read 6 Animals Clearly Disguised as Candy (A Drunk Column).

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