Virginia Postrel, Columnist

How Candy Conquered Halloween

Candy is, one might say, both trick and treat.

October 30, 2014 at 6:34 PM UTC

Virginia Postrel is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. She is a visiting fellow at the Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy at Chapman University and author, most recently, of “The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World.”

Provide news feedback or report an error

Site feedback:

Take our Survey

This article is for subscribers only.

In her book "Candy: A Century of Panic and Pleasure," retired Rutgers University literature professor Samira Kawash investigates the surprisingly neglected story of how business and technological innovations turned the U.S. into what a 1907 visitor called "the great candy eating nation." Candy, she argues, is essential to understanding the history of how Americans eat. It was, Kawash writes, the "first ready-to-eat processed food, the original ancestor of all our fast, convenient, fun, imperishable, tasty, highly advertised brand-name snacks and meals." For more than a century, we've simultaneously gorged on the stuff and felt guilty about it. It's an intensified version of our ambivalent and fickle attitudes toward abundant, convenient, mass-produced food in general.

"The 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," she writes. "Candy joins the ideas of pleasure and poison, innocence and vice, in a way that's unique and a bit puzzling." Candy is, one might say, both trick and treat. With Halloween in mind, I interviewed Kawash by e-mail.