5 Reasons Modern Candy Is Total Bull$#!t

First, you got your chocolate family, which starts with a chocolate base and mixes and matches nougat, caramel, wafer, and peanuts and includes Snickers, Milky Way, Reese's, and everything Hershey has ever done. Then you got your pure sugar candies, which are just wads of corn-syrup-paste of varying density and elasticity that all promise to be flavored after some kind of fruit or spice but really just include one tiny facet of the flavor they promise to deliver. This includes Skittles, Jolly Ranchers, Starburst, etc. They come in two broad varieties: sour and not sour -- and sour is better.

And then, finally, you have your exotic candies, which might contain fruit or weird nuts you've never heard of and cost three times as much as normal candy so you buy them only when you're trying to fuck someone (Godiva, Toblerone, and so on).

To be frank, I find this lack of variety unacceptable. What if there were only three types of movies, and they were all re-releases of movies that first came out when your grandfather was a kid? You'd be furious. You'd ramp the gates of your movie theater in a motorcycle and rip the projection screen to shreds. You'd string the ushers up by their necks in the town square. You'd burn the Weinstein mansion to the motherfucking ground and burn a pile of Spy Kids DVDs in effigy. And yet, for candy, we endure this injustice.

Need I remind you that we are America? We put a man on the moon. And then we spent the next 50 years comparing that accomplishment to the pettiest bullshit we could think of.

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We are a nation of equal parts innovators and people who will use innovation to shame other innovators for not innovating hard enough. And you're telling me that this is the best candy we have to offer? Really?

I had to know why. I had to know where we went wrong. So I began researching, and I discovered that ...

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).

Since then, our candy innovations have been few and far between. We saw a brief revival in the '70s, with the release of Nerds, Reese's Pieces, Sour Patch Kids, and Skittles (which, let's be honest, are really just bigger, chewier Nerds). But though the '80s and '90s saw the release of new candies, they've all failed to become iconic. Why?

You're not ready to understand yet. There's one more thing to explain.

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!"

Think about that: The candy is imbued with magic, but instead of giving your tongue an orgasm or changing flavors to adapt to your mood or making everything you eat taste like candy for the rest of the day, the chocolate frog just tries to escape. As if the one thing missing from my real-life candy experience is that it isn't a big enough pain in the ass.

You can't arbitrarily make your product a bigger pain in the ass than it needs to be
and expect us to thank you for it; you're not BMW.

But even that's better than the shit we see in Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, a fantastical business enterprise full of lovely sweets that'll fucking kill your ass. Truly the world of fictional sugar-blobs is a world of terror without equal.

Then again, it might be something far simpler than that. Something like ...

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.

This is why our first Golden Age of Candy was during prohibition, and our second was during the "free drugs and sex" craze of the 1970s. This is why when we fantasize about new candies, we make them creepy and bad. And this is why we don't crave new and novel candies. We're not after the candy's flavor; we're after the sugar rush, and we don't want to risk missing out on it by trying something new.

This makes me mad. I don't like thinking that Big Candy has burrowed into my brain and laid eggs that will eventually hatch into questionable decisions. And this is why ...

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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