Faber & Faber
October 2013
On Sale: October 15, 2013
416 pages ISBN: 0865477566 EAN: 9780865477568 Kindle: B00C74OXV4 Hardcover / e-Book Add to Wish List
For most Americans, candy is an uneasy pleasure, eaten with
side helpings of guilt and worry. Yet candy accounts for
only 6 percent of the added sugar in the American diet. And
at least it’s honest about what it is—a processed food,
eaten for pleasure, with no particular nutritional benefit.
So why is candy considered especially harmful, when it’s not
so different from the other processed foods, from sports
bars to fruit snacks, that line supermarket shelves? How did
our definitions of food and candy come to be so muddled? And
how did candy come to be the scapegoat for our fears about
the dangers of food?
In Candy: A Century of Panic
and Pleasure, Samira Kawash tells the fascinating story
of how candy evolved from a luxury good to a cheap, everyday
snack. After candy making was revolutionized in the early
decades of mass production, it was celebrated as a new kind
of food for energy and enjoyment. Riding the rise in
snacking and exploiting early nutritional science, candy was
the first of the panoply of "junk foods" that would take
over the American diet in the decades after the Second World
War—convenient and pleasurable, for eating anytime or all
the time.And yet, food reformers and moral crusaders
have always attacked candy, blaming it for poisoning,
alcoholism, sexual depravity and fatal disease. These
charges have been disproven and forgotten, but the mistrust
of candy they produced has never diminished. The anxiety and
confusion that most Americans have about their diets today
is a legacy of the tumultuous story of candy, the most loved
and loathed of processed foods.Candy is an
essential, addictive read for anyone who loves lively
cultural history, who cares about food, and who wouldn’t
mind feeling a bit better about eating a few jelly beans.
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