My favourite store bought cookie is called The Decadent Chocolate Chip. Let's not be shy about enjoying our favourite candy and treats. However, candy now faces a serious threat from the nutritious, healthy snacks that are the rage.
Samira Kawash researches and writes on the cultural and social history of candy in 20th-century America. She is a professor at Rutgers University (New Brunswick, NJ). She blogs on candy history and opinion at Candy Professor.com.
Her essay in the Atlantic laments 'The End of Candy: How Health Food Threatens our Sweets.' She attended The Sweets and Snacks Expo recently in Chicago where 550 exhibitors displayed their products including 2,000 new offerings.
For example,'"the Focus Food Protein EnerGI Bar in "Chocolate Fudge Brownie" flavor is no match for, well, a chocolate fudge brownie. At the end of the day, these so-called healthy snacks are actually arguments against eating any candy at all.'
Kawash concludes, "Defenders of candy, unite! Let us disavow the slippery logic of "nutritional snacking," which justifies the expansion of the processed food market with the tools and rhetoric of nutrition (or the faux-nutrition known as "nutritionism"). Let us insist that the non-nutritive pleasures of candy be preserved as such: non-nutritive, and pleasure. That is what is special, and fun, and unique about candy."
