Candy Freak

PETER: This is BackStory. I’m Peter Onuf. John Hancock. It’s a name we tend to associate with the Declaration of Independence, but Hancock first made a name for himself illegally running raw materials for rum, and he wasn’t the only one.

MALE SPEAKER: We’re talking about major American founding families. They were deeply complicit in the molasses smuggling trade.

PETER: After the Revolution, sugar continued to be big business in the Atlantic world, on the scale of oil today. And so when the end of slavery stripped sugar planters of their workforce, American sugar barons turned to Asia.

MALE SPEAKER: In 1869, in their private correspondence, Louisiana planters are very explicit about wanting a new slave labor force essentially.

PETER: Today on BackStory, a history of sugar in America.

Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the University of Virginia, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

BRIAN: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is BackStory with the American Backstory hosts. Peter, Ed, you know Valentine’s Day is coming up.

PETER: Really.

ED: Good, good, good.

BRIAN: I remembered this when I went shopping in the market and those bags of pastel colored hearts they’re appearing. They say “Be Mine” on them. Only now, of course, they say “Text Me.”

That got me thinking about my days back in Cambridge, Massachusetts. One of my favorite memories was walking down the street and smelling the aroma of those little hearts being manufactured at the local candy factory.

PETER: I always wondered where they came from.

BRIAN: No. Exactly. I learned later that that factory had been turning out hearts for a 100 years. So I wanted to find out a little bit more about where all this came from, and I put a call in to this guy.

STEVE ALMOND: I’m Steve Almond, the author of the book Candyfreak and registered candy freak.

BRIAN: This is a guy who is obsessed with candy. He claims that he has eaten a candy bar every day of his life. A little over 10 years ago, Steve managed to get to a tour inside the very factory in Cambridge that I used to walk by, the NECCO factory.

STEVE ALMOND: The thing is once you step inside a candy factory if you are a candy freak like me, somebody who is really deeply, sadly obsessed with candy, it’s like you’ve reached home. You’ve reached your spiritual home. And the only thing I could think was, I need to get back into more of these factories. I need to spend more of my time in these places talking to people whose job it is to make candy.

BRIAN: Steve did get into those factories. He traveled around the country, and he talked to the makers of what you’d call throwback candy bars, Twin Bing, Star Bars, GooGoo Clusters.

ED: Ahh, GooGoo Clusters. Chattanooga, Tennessee. You can still get them today.

BRIAN: Only you would–

ED: They’re great.

BRIAN: Only you would know that, Ed.

ED: They’re good.

BRIAN: All of these, including GooGoo clusters, were holdouts from an era that Steve calls the Golden Age of Candy. Those are the years between the two world wars. There were something like 6,000 candy companies in existence at that time.

This was a time, he says, when what I experienced in Cambridge was really a standard part of life for many Americans.

STEVE ALMOND: In Boston, there were five chocolate factories in the North End. And when the winds were blowing to the north, the entire North Shore, North Boston suburbs would just be awash in this amazing mesmerizing smell of chocolate.

BRIAN: Well, I’m Brian Balogh, and I’m here with Ed Ayers.

ED: Hey, Brian.

BRIAN: And Peter Onuf is with us.

PETER: That’s me. Today on the show where marketing Valentine’s Day with an hour the explorers the history of America’s sweet tooth. We’ve got stories about the dark underbelly of sugar production and how that system of production shaped US immigration policy.

We’ll look at how for many people sugar substitutes became more addictive than the stuff it was replacing. And we’ll consider the profound impacts of sugar in some of its other forms, like molasses and rum.

But first, we’re going to hear a little more from candy freak Steve Almond. Steve says the inter-war period was the sweet spots so to speak of candy history. That’s because companies had the industrial technology to mass produce candy. Yet the mom-and-pop shops had yet been gobbled up by huge conglomerates, like Hershey and Nestle.

But there was also the fact that sugar itself was seen as a sort of health food. It was really a delivery system for quick energy, and that’s why Steve Almond calls candy bars America’s first fast food.

STEVE ALMOND: The reason they came into being in fact was because the soldiers over in World War I, the quartermasters didn’t want to have a giant block of chocolate. They wanted a self-serving portion that the troops could carry with them for quick energy.

So the whole essence of the idea of the candy bar was, hey, it’s quick, and it’s portable. You could take it with. You can eat it while you’re working. And the way they candy bars were advertised was as quick energy and in fact a replacement for lunch. Hey, you’re on the go, you don’t have time to sit down and have a whole meal, have a club sandwich candy bar, have a chicken dinner.

The chicken dinner candy bar actually had a chicken on the label, like a roasting chicken, like yum. It’s not that it had delicious bits of chicken in the bar, but they were trying to sell very overtly the message this is your get-up-and-go energy, and there’s no downside to it.

Now we know, and it’s overt, and we have cholesterol tests, and we know that obesity is rampant and so forth. So you really have to overcome that knowledge. Back in the ’30s and ’40s, it was like, they’re just great.

BRIAN: But wasn’t there something also pretty honest and transparent about what you were getting? Today we consume so much sugar, but I have a feeling we don’t consume most of it through candy bars. My sense is–

STEVE ALMOND: No.

BRIAN: –we consume it through soft drinks. We consume it through the stewed tomatoes we buy.

STEVE ALMOND: Yeah.

BRIAN: The bread we buy.

STEVE ALMOND: Right. Yeah.

BRIAN: I don’t want to wax nostalgic for the value of a good jolt of sugar, but people knew what they were getting, right?

STEVE ALMOND: Oh, yeah. If you compare a candy bar, that’s a deal at least you know you’re making. When you buy a jar of pasta sauce and you think, oh, my–

BRIAN: Pasta sauce, yeah.

STEVE ALMOND: –oh, my kids are getting vegetable.

BRIAN: Exactly.

STEVE ALMOND: The Ronald Reagan thing. Hey, ketchup, it’s a vegetable folks. Actually, this just mostly corn syrup. So it’s really very much a Trojan horse kind of situation as I’m sure you well know, sort of growing mono-crop, producing all this corn, figuring out how to most effectively sell it to people.

The whole culture is tilted towards a glycemic index that’s kind of insane and ridiculous. I think the best thing to do and the lifestyle that I’ve tried to lead as my cholesterol has gone out of control and my teeth are falling out of my head and I’m worried about it because I have little kid, the way I try to do it is eat lots of fruits and vegetables and beans during the day and then party like a rock star with overt candy products at night. But stay away from that.

We don’t have soda. We don’t even have juice in the house. If we’re going to do sweet stuff, it’s either fruit or it is candy. And most of the time, of course, it’s candy.

BRIAN: Where does your obsession for candy come from?

STEVE ALMOND: Well, I can speak– personally, when I looked back and thought about my childhood, almost every powerful memory that I had was associated with chocolate and candy. The reason for this, particular to me, I think it was, as I really thought about it, it was the antidepressants essentially that I was using.

When I really thought about the episodes that came to mind, they were all instances in which I was clinging to candy because of the emptiness in the rest of my life for a sense of loneliness or just feeling isolated, frozen out by my brothers, whatever it was. Candy was my antidepressants.

BRIAN: So you were self-medicating?

STEVE ALMOND: Correct. That’s exactly what it was. When I look back and if I’m honest about it, that’s exactly what I was doing. I think what was going on is I just was trying to find a way, a path away from my despair. And candy is pretty dependable.

It is never disappointing. Your friend will disappoint you. Your family will disappoint you. Your colleagues, your bosses, your peers will disappoint you, your children. But candy, I’ve never had an experience where I bit into candy and said, boy, that just wasn’t– maybe I’ve had a few, but it’s pretty hard for me to be disappointed by that experience.

BRIAN: Steve, I do want to ask you having visited these icons of an American past what can you tell our listeners about what you learned from your tour through candy land?

STEVE ALMOND: Well, the one thing the bums me out the most about America and being in this land of plenty is that people are just insufficiently grateful that the miracle of being alive in this time and this place. If you had given a Snickers bar to somebody in Meso-America or Europe, forget primitive man, just in pre-Columbian culture, if you had shown them that miraculously little package of really high-quality chocolate and caramel and peanuts, nougat flavorings, and all the rest of it, and just allowed them to put that in their mouth, their heads would have exploded with joy. And it would have been miraculous. Snickers would be their god that they would pray to. And that thing we can buy for a small percentage of our discretionary income.

So what I’ve tried to do as I’ve moved forward sort of from being here, you could think, well, what is it? Am I enabling people? Am I sort of promoting candy? What I’m really trying to say is be grateful, get down on your knees, and thank God or whoever you need to thank that you are able to live in a place and a time where there is so much unbelievably dependable pleasure that you can get from these little miracles, these little creative miracles, whatever piece of candy it is. That is something that– in human history, it’s one of few unblemished miracles of human progress.

BRIAN: Steve, it’s been a real pleasure talking to you. Thanks for joining us on BackStory today.

STEVE ALMOND: Absolutely. Great to be with you.

[MUSIC – SAMMY DAVIS JR, “THE CANDY MAN”]

BRIAN: That’s author Steve Almond speaking to us from his home in Boston. We’ll link to an excerpt of his book Candyfreak at backstoryradio.org. We’re also going to post Steve’s description of the most unappetizing candy bars he’s ever come across. It was relegated to the web, frankly, because it’s just too disgusting to broadcast on the public airwaves.

[MUSIC – SAMMY DAVIS JR, “THE CANDY MAN”]

BRIAN: We’re going to take a short break now, but stick around. When we get back, an early American experiment in ethical eating goes unexpectedly awry.

PETER: You’re listening to BackStory story. We’ll be back in a minute.