On Candy

While riding in the car with Jane the other night the subject of Candy came up, or it continued after a clerk in Walgreen's Drug Store chatted with us about some of the old time candy. Of course, I bombarded Jane with my reminiscences about the candy of my youth, some of which is no longer available. So you get the lecture today.
It's time for me to write about the changes in one of the world's favorite junk foods- candy. OK, having written that I know candy varies by country, even somewhat by region. You may not know the specific brands of candy I mention but you'll get the general idea of this- that Candy preferences have changed over the years. My theory is that people here in the U.S. and in most other countries have shifted preference sin the last,,,say..50 years from hard and novelty candy to chocolate.
Yes, chocolate rules today and is the number one candy preference among most buyers. The manufacturers seem to introduce new variation of chocolate candies every time a product introduction is to be brought out. Let's dived candy into two arbitrary time phases- the 50's, 60's and 70's would the the first. The 80's, 90's and 2000 plus the second. Candy changed quite a bit from the first to second era.
In the first era both kids and adults who eat candy wanted less chocolate. Favorites included Wax lips (I cringe when I see that written because that wax taste has never left my mouth, even though it has many years since eaten), those wax bottles filled with sweet flavored syrup (most of the kids in my neighborhood drank the syrup and threw away the wax bottles), Candy Cigarettes (politically incorrect today!), Chicklets (That tiny hard coated gum that we all swallowed..maybe the Chicklets are still in my stomach account for my weirdness?) Kits (My favorite, a kind of taffy chunk in 4 flavors. Everyone always ante the strawberry), Sugar Babies (Round globs of sugar that were, yes, sugar coated with a hard glaze), Red Hots ( I couldn't eat those spicy bits of red pepper), Necco Wafers (round sugar wafers in several flavors I still buy those at Valentine's Day because Necco makes their "Sweetheart" candy out of those wafers), Lemon heads (a sour version of lemon hard candy), Gum balls (Every teacher's nightmare), Root Beer Barrels (Tiny root beer flavored hard candy shaped in the form of barrels), Bonomo's Turkish Taffy (Bonomo was an Italian American candy company that made "Turkish Taffy". It does not follow..but it tasted wonderful), Jaw Breakers (These things were usually banned by any right thinking mom, They were round balls that were as hard as concrete. The trick for we kids was to break the breaker without disintegrating the teeth.), Juicy Fruits (A favorite of mine. They were the precursor of gummy bears, but had a much deeper more intense flavor), Smarties (Yes.......I should have eaten this one. It might have helped raise my low IQ), Licorice Sticks (Oh, I hate licorice, but my mother, an infrequent candy eater, loved those things), Life Savers ( The preferred hard candy fro kids of that generation), and Chuckles (Those super sweet and sugar coated globs of flavored "something". It was also favorite of mine).
Ok, you get the idea. The commonality to all those candies is that few still exist today and that they were all non chocolate candy. The candy of the second and current era is mostly milk chocolate based. I won't list them all because there are so many, and you probably already know enough of them or of similar milk chocolate candy sold in your own city. The candy experts now say dark chocolate (I prefer dark to milk chocolate) will be the next rage of the chocolate candy sellers.
It's always been around, and people who like dark chocolate swear by it. But recent medical studies on chocolate say that dark chocolate is "healthy", in that it can lower cholesterol levels. Candy companies are already gearing up for "Healthy Dark Chocolate" offerings . the question is whether enough milk chocolate lovers will abandon their favorite in the name of more "healthy " chocolate. I guess I have written enough about this, enough to make your stomach ache more than all that candy would. You better go have a candy bar and forget this stupidity.
One thing I can't imagine eating is what a German farmer has just confessed to feeding his pigs. No, it wasn't Bonomo Taffy ot Lemon Heads, it was the corpse of an elderly family friend who died suddenly in the farmer's yard last February. Initially, the farmer put the corpse in his freezer and told people in the town (Frizlar-Haddamar) that the dead man was in a nursing home.
Police said the farmer decided to let the corpse thaw, dismembered it and fed it to the pigs. He put the body parts the pigs did not eat into a sack and buried it...all so he could draw money from the dead man's account in order to pay his farm debts. Police ruled out murder charges and have charged the farmer with "improper burial and fraud".