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"Candy Professor" Samira Kawash cannot resist candy corn come Halloween time. Image courtesy of Flickr user Juushika Redgrave

Samira Kawash writes the blog “Candy Professor” and is working on a book about the cultural and social history of candy in twentieth-century America. She spoke to Smithsonian’s Amanda Bensen about Americans’ tricky relationship with treats

Amanda: At this time of year, even people who don’t eat a lot of sweets are stocking up. When did our obsession with Halloween candy start?

Samira: It surprised me to discover that Halloween was not a candy holiday until well into the 1950s. If you go back to the ‘teens and ‘twenties, and look at what the candy companies were making in terms of holidays, Christmas was a big one, Easter was a big one, but Halloween wasn’t even on their radar. There’s no sign of trick-or-treating at all until the 1930s and it really wasn’t until the late 1940s that it became widespread. Even then, kids might have gotten a homemade cookie, a piece of cake, money, or a toy. There really wasn’t a sense that it was all about candy.

So what was Halloween about, if not candy?

Up until before World War II, Americans had Halloween parties that might have involved some of what we do today, like costumes and games, but it was more of a harvest festival than a spooky thing. Candy that was made and sold especially for Halloween appeared in the 1930s, but it was something you’d have in a bowl at your party, not the main focus.

The trick-or-treat giveaway was pretty flexible in the 1950s and 1960s. Candy was becoming more important. At the same time, the door was open to other kinds of treats. No one objected to unwrapped or homemade things like cookies and nuts. Kool Aid’s Halloween ads suggested that kids would come in for a refreshing glass of soft drink. And Kellogg’s advertised cereal Snack-Packs for trick-or-treating.

Cereal, huh? Not sure that would pass muster with trick-or-treaters anymore.

I know—here’s a box of corn flakes, kids, happy Halloween! (Laughs.) But you know, when they did get candy, it was often a full-sized portion, not the mini ones we have today. For example, Brach’s was packaging candy corn for trick or treat in the 1960s, and the 5-cent package was the typical size. This was a pouch with 40 or 50 pieces of candy corn. Today you get just 6 or 8 little pieces in a tiny “treat” size pouch.

Did kids back then get the kinds of massive hauls of candy many now get at Halloween?

It’s hard to say, but my sense is that trick-or-treaters in the 1950s, especially younger kids, were more likely to go into someone’s house and have some punch and visit for a while. The newspaper women’s pages had a lot of ideas for entertaining trick-or-treaters with party refreshments and games, and it is clear that these were frequently strangers’ kids. Some of the social interaction of trick-or-treating has since disappeared; I hear a lot of adults complain that kids now don’t even bother to say thank you. Kids going door-to-door today are just a lot more efficient at covering ground, so it’s easier to fill up the treat bags much faster.

So what happened to make candy so central to the holiday?

Definitely marketing. Starting in the 1950s, big candy manufacturers started putting out a lot more Halloween promotions. But candy also was viewed in the 1950s and 1960s as a more acceptable treat. Kids, of course, really like it. And convenience was probably a big factor for the women who were handing out the treats. Candy was pre-packaged and portioned—if you bake cookies or make popcorn balls you have to wrap them, you know.

Also, in the 1970s, there was the emergence of the myth of the Halloween sadist; the idea that there are people out there who are going to poison the popcorn balls, put razors in the apples, etc. Anything that wasn’t factory-sealed wasn’t considered safe. We didn’t trust the handmade, the unmarked or unbranded. Which is hugely ironic, because in the early 20th century it was the factory-made candy that was viewed as suspicious when it was first introduced!

Even though it’s since been established that the Halloween sadist was an urban legend, there was a sense of loss of small-townness in that era of suburbanization. The neighbors were strangers for the first time. Fear of the neighbors’ candy sort of captured that sense of loss of community.

Tell me about yourself. How did you become the so-called Candy Professor? Is this a lifelong interest?

I have a Ph.D. in cultural studies and literary criticism, so I’ve always been interested in interpreting culture and everyday life. I was a professor at Rutgers University for many years, first in the English department, and later in Women’s Studies. After I decided to leave the university, I was looking for a new research project that would connect with my interests and also be fun and engaging for a broader non-academic audience.

At the time, I was a new mother with a little girl. One day she wanted a lollipop. Should I give it to her? That turned out to be a very difficult question. Should a kid have candy? How much? How often? The more I thought about it, the more I realized that candy was pretty complicated. It has such powerful emotional associations, especially with childhood. Even the words we use to talk about eating candy, like “temptation” and “guilty pleasure.” I got interested in trying to understand the meanings of candy and the uses of candy, and what that tells us about ourselves.

I have been researching the history of candy in American culture, and it turns out that ideas we have about candy today are deeply connected to the past.  I’m also discovering that what candy means in different contexts has to do with many different ideas in our culture about food, health and medicine—ideas about what’s good for you, what’s harmful, and what’s pleasurable.

Hmm, I don’t think most of us associate candy with medicine these days.

Right, but the first candies were medicinal! An apothecary in the 18th century would prescribe you sugar candy for things like chest ailments or digestion problems. Back then, the “spoonful of sugar” idea was literal—if you had some sort of unpleasant medicine to take, usually a concoction of herbs that might not taste very good, the apothecary would suspend it in sugar.

It wasn’t until the 19th century that the apothecary and confectionery started becoming separate professions. Candy of the sort that you might recognize today really took off emerged after the Civil War, after the price of sugar has fallen. And then the new industrial machines of the late 19th and early 20th centuries made it possible to produce candy in a whole new way.

Actually, the first candy-making machine was invented by a pharmacist, Oliver Chase, in 1947, to crank out medicated candy lozenges. I think that the idea of candy as medicine still lingers in the way we’re aware of its effect on our bodies. We think it must cause your blood sugar to rise, cause cavities, or make you hyperactive…and it’s true that candy can do all of those things, but so can other things you eat, like a big bowl of noodles!

Medicine and poison are always very close together: The thing that heals you, if you have too much of it, can harm you. So there’s a sort of subconscious anxiety about candy. There’s still this notion that candy somehow soothes, ameliorates pain—you get a lollipop at the doctor’s office, although it’s probably sugar-free these days. And just go to the drugstore and look at the gummy vitamins, sugary cough remedies, chocolate laxatives, etc. Candy looks like the opposite of medicine, but it turns out that a lot of the ways we think about candy’s dangers are closely related to the idea of candy as a kind of drug.

Have the types of candy we like changed over the years?

Chocolate has become more central, and I think that has to do with the idea we have that it is the most luxurious, decadent flavor ever. If you go back to the early 1900s, chocolate was not as ubiquitous, but now there’s a sense that somehow chocolate is better, more adult, than sugar candy. And now the National Confectioners Association survey of kid’s preferences finds the most favored trick-or-treating candy is chocolate.

What strikes you as interesting about our current attitudes toward Halloween candy?

There’s this weird ballet of Halloween now, where families buy a bunch of candy to give away to other kids, but then they take the candy their own kids are given and either throw it away or give it to someone else. So there’s all this candy circulating, but it’s not clear that anyone’s eating it!

From what I’ve seen, trick-or-treating is sort of hyper-controlled by parents. I saw some bit of advice on TV that parents should put candy in their children’s pockets before going out, so they won’t be tempted to eat the candy they get from others—such a strange idea, that you can eat candy, but only the “safe” candy from home.

Do you think we’ve villainized candy too much?

Yes. We treat candy as being so powerful that we try to protect ourselves in it in these almost magical ways. Let’s go back to the lollipop I was debating offering my daughter: it has less sugar in it than a juice box. So it surprised me a little that a lot of moms that I knew seemed happy if their kids drank apple juice, but worried if they wanted candy There was something about not just the sugar, but the form of sugar as candy, that seems to make it especially troubling.

I think that candy becomes a place to put a lot of our anxieties and worries about food, because candy’s at the very edge of food. When you go to the supermarket and you’re surrounded by these things in boxes that have 20 ingredients, it gets confusing. It’s handy to say: That’s NOT food, that’s candy. This breakfast bar, on the other hand, that IS food.

There are so many of these processed, food-like substances, and we want to know where to draw the bright line at what’s wholesome and nutritious, so we use candy that way—even though when you look closely, there is no bright line.

So, back to the lollipop. Do you let your daughter go trick-or-treating, and eat candy?

My daughter is 7 now, and Halloween is her favorite holiday. We live in Brooklyn so it’s a little different, but we go out and take candy, and we give it out. She loves it. One of the things I struggle with as a parent is, how can we have a healthy relationship with candy? I think saying, “it’s a bad thing, you can never have it” is a sure way to create an unhealthy obsession. So I’ve been trying to figure out how to teach that candy is something nice, something I like, but I don’t have to eat it all at once. I think that’s a nice way to experience Halloween.

Do you have a favorite candy yourself?

This time of year, I cannot resist candy corn. I have the biggest candy corn problem. I eat one, pretty soon the bag is gone, and I’m like…what have I done?

It was 91 years ago today that Congress overrode President Woodrow Wilson’s veto of the Volstead Act, which spelled out the enforcement of Prohibition. To commemorate the anniversary of the act’s passage (or the fact that it no longer applies), the Woodrow Wilson House in Washington, D.C. is holding a speakeasy costume ball this evening. It sounds like a fun history lesson:

“Wear your best 1920s attire, knock three times, and join the party at Woodrow Wilson House with bootleggers, flappers, rum-runners, and live ragtime on the piano! Enjoy an after-hours look at the authentically furnished 1920s home and get a special sneak peak at President Wilson’s wine cellar, a rarely seen gem of Prohibition-era history, fully stocked with vintage wines.”

The fact that we can now toast—legally—to the Volstead Act is a testament to how ineffective it actually was at preventing the “manufacture, sale and transportation of alcoholic liquor.” In fact, the 18th Amendment to the Constitution was repealed in 1933, less than 15 years after it was ratified by 46 of 48 states (Alaska and Hawaii hadn’t yet achieved statehood; Connecticut and Rhode Island were the two holdouts). According to an article on the National Archives website:

Enforcing Prohibition proved to be extremely difficult. The illegal production and distribution of liquor, or bootlegging, became rampant, and the national government did not have the means or desire to try to enforce every border, lake, river, and speakeasy in America. In fact, by 1925 in New York City alone there were anywhere from 30,000 to 100,000 speakeasy clubs. The demand for alcohol was outweighing (and out-winning) the demand for sobriety. People found clever ways to evade Prohibition agents. They carried hip flasks, hollowed canes, false books, and the like.

A hundred-thousand speakeasies in New York City alone? The city’s 1925 population was 7.774 million, which would mean there was one speakeasy for every 78 people. I did a search on the New York State Liquor Authority for on-premises liquor licenses in the five boroughs, and there were fewer than 12,000, including restaurants.

There were also other ways to skirt the law, especially when it came to wine, which was allowed in small amounts for sacramental purposes. As an article in The Napa Valley Register explains, Prohibition didn’t exactly shut down the California wine industry. “In fact, between 1920 and 1933, grape production actually increased and the savvy business people who figured out how to work the system became exceedingly wealthy,” writes Kelsey Burnham. “In an era when the economy of the Napa Valley could have been severely crippled, it survived and many thrived.”

Instead of making and selling wine, many grape growers sold juice or bricks of dried grapes with “warnings” about how they would ferment if left in a jug for a specific amount of time, and that “corks were unnecessary with non-alcoholic beverages.” Hint, hint—use a cork.

And what about that Prohibition-era wine cellar in Woodrow Wilson’s house? Well, it wasn’t illegal for a person to keep alcohol that he already owned. However, in an interview with On Tap Magazine, Garrett Peck—author of The Prohibition Hangover and co-organizer of the Speakeasy Ball—noted, “Considering the sale of alcohol was illegal after 1920, it’s a little curious how the 1928 bottle of champagne and the 1922 bottle of Cointreau made their way into the wine cellar. We do know that Mrs. Wilson was a very well connected lady.”

There you have it. If a law is so unpopular and ineffective that even a former First Lady won’t abide by it, it probably isn’t long for this world.

Some people prefer red wine. Some swear by white. A few like rosé. Personally, I like ‘em all (or at least some kinds of each color). And I just discovered another color to add to my wine palette: orange.

So-called orange wine is not made from oranges (although, apparently, some people do make such a thing). It is the name frequently used to describe white wines in which the macerated grapes are allowed to have contact with the skins during part of the fermentation process. Although this was once, centuries ago, common practice in Europe, it fell out of favor in the 20th century. But in the past few years some adventurous winemakers—with a concentration in the Friuli region of Italy, near the Slovenian border—have been experimenting with orange wines.

So, how is orange wine different from rosé wine? Standard winemaking practice is that red wines are made from red or purple grapes (e.g. pinot noir, cabernet sauvignon, merlot), with the skins left on during fermentation. White wines are usually made with white grapes (Chardonnay, sauvignon blanc, riesling), although they can also be made with red grapes with the skins removed (one example is Champagne, which often uses a blend of chardonnay, pinot noir and pinot meunier). Rosé is generally made with red grapes with the skins are left on for only part of the time.

Orange wines are made the same way as reds or rosés—allowing some skin contact—but since they use white grapes, the skins only color the wine a little, ranging from a light amber to a deep copper. But they also add tannins, the compounds normally associated with red wines that give it a slight bitterness and structure. The wine editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, Jon Bonné, wrote a good article on orange wines last year, including a history of the “mini-movement.”

I got my first taste of an orange wine last week, when I attended part of the Food & Wine Weekend at Lake Placid Lodge, an upscale Adirondack hotel. One of the sessions was a New York wine tasting with Channing Daughters winery of Long Island and Hermann J. Wiemer, from the Finger Lakes region. Channing Daughters is one of only a handful of wineries in the United States experimenting with orange wines. We tasted Envelope (so named because they are pushing it, explained the winemaker, James Christopher Tracy), a blend of Chardonnay, Gewurtztraminer and Malvasia bianca grapes.

It was nothing like any other wine I’ve tasted—aromatic, almost floral, fairly dry, with none of the acidic zing that many white wines have. I’m not a very practiced taster, but I thought I noticed a little of a citrus-rind flavor. According to the winery’s description, there are notes of “quince paste, apples, brown spice, roses, lychee, guava and dried papaya.” Tracy said the wines pair especially well with earthy fall foods.

Judging by the reaction in the room, orange wines can be polarizing. But I found the one I tasted intriguing—not something I’d want all the time, but every once in a while. I’d be interested in trying others. Since they are still relatively uncommon, though, it may be a while before I cross paths with an orange wine again.

If Lisa’s post about the connection between chocolate and child labor has made you reconsider your Halloween candy-buying habits, here’s an alternative for you to feed the trick-or-treaters: kale!

Yeah, you’re right—that’s probably not a good idea unless you want your house egged. But did you know that kale has a historic Halloween connection?

According to the book Halloween: An American Holiday, An American History, by Lesley Pratt Bannatyne:

Cabbage and kale, unlikely magical tools that they may seem, were assumed by the Irish to possess great fortune-telling power. The foods were plentiful throughout the British Isles, and young people pulled up kale plants to judge the nature of their future spouses from the taste (a bitter stalk meant a bitter mate), the shape (straight or curved, indicating the condition of the spine), and the amount of dirt clinging to the root (degree of wealth). The divination worked best if the kale was stolen; it was most telling if practiced on Halloween.

This ritual of “pulling the kail” (kale) was so popular that it even inspired poetry. In “Halloween,” written in 1785, the great Scottish poet Robert Burns lyrically describes young people running into the fields, blindfolded, to select their plants on “that night, when fairies light”:

Then, first an’ foremost, thro’ the kail,
Their stocks maun a’ be sought ance;
They steek their een, and grape an’ wale
For muckle anes, an’ straught anes.
Poor hav’rel Will fell aff the drift,
An’ wandered thro’ the bow-kail,
An’ pou’t for want o’ better shift
A runt was like a sow-tail
Sae bow’t that night.

In other words: A silly lad named Will, having pulled up a kale plant with a stem as curly as a pig’s tail, is pouting about his future hunchback wife. Poor guy.

Kale may not have supernatural properties, but its natural ones are pretty potent: one cup of boiled kale is packed with vitamins A, C and K, as well as potentially cancer-fighting isothiocyanates and anti-inflammatory flavonoids. And it can taste fantastic, prepared properly. Try these ideas if you’re not a believer yet:

1. Kale chips. They are, indeed, insanely addictive.

2. If kale seems too intimidating on its own, combine it with comfort food like mashed potatoes or bacon.

3. Simply sauteed kale, seasoned with a squirt of lemon juice and crushed red pepper, is one of my all-time favorite foods. It could get even better with toasted cashews.

4. Give it an international twist: Seasonal Chef has seven ideas, ranging from spicy African kale with yams to Portuguese kale-sausage soup.

5. Layer chopped, sauteed kale into a lasagna with squash and walnuts or sausage.

What’s your favorite way to eat kale?

I know a lot of adults—not me, of course—who buy their favorite Halloween chocolates secretly hoping that trick-or-treater turnout will be light and they can polish off the rest themselves. This is especially true of people who don’t have their own children to pilfer from.

If a relatively new practice called reverse trick-or-treating catches on, such scheming could be unnecessary. Imagine—you open the door on Halloween, and some pint-size Dracula (or is it Edward these days?) hands you a piece of chocolate. Amazing, right?

Of course, there’s a catch. Or, not really a catch, but a serious side that will kill that sugar buzz: some of the cocoa used by major American chocolate companies could be a product of forced child labor.

Reverse trick-or-treating was launched four years ago by the organization Global Exchange with the goal of pressuring the major chocolate producers in the United States—such as Hershey and Nestlé—to adhere to fair trade practices. Children who take part in the campaign hand out Fair Trade-certified chocolates, along with an information sheet about the problem.

About a decade ago, a series of media, government and nongovernmental organization reports exposed the horrible conditions of children (and adults) forced to work in the cocoa fields of the Ivory Coast, the world’s largest supplier of cocoa beans. In 2001 U.S. chocolate companies agreed to meet the Harkin Engel Protocol by 2005, but they’ve made little progress.

On September 30, Tulane University’s Payson Center for International Development, which is contracted by the U.S. Department of Labor to monitor compliance with the protocol, released its fourth annual report on West African child labor. It found that “serious labor rights exploitation including the worst forms of child labor, forced labor and trafficking continue in the cocoa industry.”

The governments of Ghana, another big cocoa supplier, and the Ivory Coast have made some efforts to address forced or indentured child labor and trafficking—with more success in Ghana than Cote d’Ivoire, according to the report.

Several of the major world chocolate companies, including Cadbury, Mars and Nestlé, recently announced that some of their products will carry fair-trade certification. But most of these will be sold in the United Kingdom and Ireland, not the United States. Only Kraft announced plans to deliver certified chocolate to the United States by 2012, through its Cote d’Or and Marabou lines. Smaller companies do sell Fair Trade chocolates in this country.

The Hershey Company, as the largest U.S. chocolate company, has been singled out by fair-trade activists, who criticize its lack of transparency about where it sources its cocoa and its failure to shift to independent certification of its cocoa.

Some certification is stronger than others. A chart in the report linked above shows which companies have committed to which certification. While the Fair Trade Certified label, which Cadbury (overseas only), Nestlé (U.K. only) and Ben & Jerry’s are using, requires 100 percent of the primary ingredient to be certified, only 30 percent of the primary ingredient must be certified to receive the Rainforest Alliance label (which Kraft and Mars use).

The deadline to order the reverse trick-or-treating kits has already passed for this year, but interested people can still download flyers, buy Fair Trade chocolates to hand out to trick-or-treaters, or learn more by reading the Payson report.