Is Candy Evil or Just Misunderstood?

Five years ago, her daughter, then 3, was invited to play at the home of a new friend. At snack time, having noted the presence of sugar (in the form of juice boxes and cookies) in the kitchen, Dr. Kawash, then a Rutgers professor, brought out a few jelly beans.
The mother froze. Her child had never tasted candy, she explained, but perhaps it would be all right just this once. Then the father weighed in from the other room, shouting that that they might as well give the child crack cocaine.
“It was clear to me that there was an irrational equation of candy and danger in that house,” Dr. Kawash said in a recent interview. “And that was irresistible to me.”
From that train of thought, the Candy Professor blog was born. In her writing there, Dr. Kawash dives deep into the American relationship with candy, finding irrational and interesting ideas everywhere. The big idea behind Candy Professor is that candy carries so much moral and ethical baggage that people view it as fundamentally different — in a bad way — from other kinds of food.
“At least candy is honest about what it is,” she said. “It has always been a processed food, eaten for pleasure, with no particular nutritional benefit.” Today, she said, every aisle in the supermarket contains highly manipulated products that have those qualities.
And, she points out, many people who avoid candy will cheerfully eat sugar-packed chocolate-chip energy bars and drink Gatorade for health reasons, although a serving of Gatorade contains about the same amount of sugar as a dozen pieces of candy corn. Dr. Kawash’s expertise is in American culture and gender studies, but some nutritionists share her views on the pariah status of candy.
“I don’t think candy is bad for you,” said Rachel Johnson, a nutrition professor at the University of Vermont who was the lead author of the American Heart Association’s comprehensive 2009 review of the scientific literature on sugar and cardiovascular health.
Dr. Johnson said that candy is considered bad because it lacks the “health halo” that hovers over sweet food like granola bars and fruit juice. “Nutritionally there is little difference between a gummy bear and a bite of fruit leather,” she said.
Dr. Johnson also noted that candy provides only 6 percent of the added sugar in the American diet, while sweet drinks and juice supply 46 percent. “There’s reason to believe that sugar in liquid form is actually worse than candy, because it fills you up and displaces healthier food choices,” she said.
Dr. Kawash, who studied architectural theory, narratives of women and medicine, and the imagery of terrorism before she began to write Candy Professor, has complicated feelings about her current specialty. She describes her childhood in Sunnyvale, Calif., in the 1970s as an “endless, and mostly frustrating quest for candy,” restricted to a small weekly indulgence after church on Sundays. Later, she said, binges on gummy bears and spice drops fueled her undergraduate research at Stanford; more recently, she found herself flushing handfuls of candy corn down the toilet to prevent herself from eating “just a few more.”
“Obviously, my own relationship with candy is not totally healthy,” she admits.
Fortunately, some of that passion has now been channeled into research. There are many blogs devoted to tasting, photographing and tracking down obscure types of candy, such as Candy Addict and Candy Blog, but Dr. Kawash’s work is rarely about taste or nostalgia. She is much more interested in untangling the threads of control, danger and temptation that candy has carried since it became widely available in the 1880s.
Until then, most candies — like fudge, brittle and taffy — were homemade, and store-bought hard candies like horehound sticks and peppermints were relatively expensive. But advances in technology enabled sugar to be spun, aerated, softened and flavored in new ways, and sold cheaply. Just like that, candy entered popular culture.
Dr. Kawash notes that candy, like cigarettes, was long advertised as having health benefits. “Eat Tootsie Rolls — The Luscious Candy That Helps Beat Fatigue,” reads one of the many ads she has exhaustively analyzed on her blog. One post is dedicated to the “slippage” between candy and medicine that she has found in a close reading of the history of cough drops — hard candy in a socially acceptable form.
But there have always been what she calls “candy alarmists,” who warned that candy was too stimulating, too soporific, poisoned, or otherwise hazardous. Dangerous candy appears in many fairy tales, a theme continued with the modern public-safety message, “Don’t take candy from strangers,” and in public scares over tampering and contamination. (Dr. Kawash recently detailed how all of this led to the candy wrappers we know today in The Journal of American Culture.)
In the early 20th century, she said — in the absence of any medical evidence — doctors blamed candy for the spread of polio. In the 1970s, refined sugar approached the top of the food counterculture’s list of enemies, spurred by international best sellers like “Sugar Blues” and “Sweet and Dangerous.” Tooth decay was the longtime threat; more recently, the global spread of obesity has prompted fears of the “empty calories” in candy.