Why We Eat Candy at Halloween: Virginia Postrel Investigates

As Veronique de Rugy explained
two days ago, Halloween candy is more expensive than it should be
thanks to really awful, protectionist
sugar policies that gift U.S. companies market share and
profits.

But why do we buy so much candy at Halloween in the first place?
Over at
Bloomberg View, former Reason Editor Virginia Postrel
talks with Samira Kawash, the author of the delectably titled book
Candy: A Century of Panic and Pleasure, to find out.
Kawash is a retired professor of literature at “Dear
Old Rutgers.” Her site, Candy Professor, is worth a
click-thru.

(Side note: This is exactly the sort of fascinating
information that Postrel is brilliant at discovering! She makes
illuminating connections and does the sort of original research all
of us journos aspire to but rarely pull off.)

“For more than a century, we’ve simultaneously gorged on the
stuff and felt guilty about it,” notes Postrel. “It’s an
intensified version of our ambivalent and fickle attitudes toward
abundant, convenient, mass-produced food in general.”

It turns out that the Halloween-candy connection is a post-war
development, likely growing out of the massification of wealth and
industrial production. From the Q&A:

[Postrel]: When and how did candy become
associated with Halloween? Was trick-or-treating just concocted to
sell candy?

[Kawash]: Would you believe the earliest
trick-or-treaters didn’t even expect to get candy? Back in the
1930s, when kids first started chanting “trick or treat” at the
doorbell, the treat could be just about anything: nuts, coins, a
small toy, a cookie or popcorn ball. Sometimes candy too, maybe a
few jelly beans or a licorice stick. But it wasn’t until well into
the 1950s that Americans started buying treats instead of making
them, and the easiest treat to buy was candy. The candy industry
also advertised heavily, and by the 1960s was offering innovative
packaging and sizes like mini-bars to make it even easier to give
out candy at Halloween. But if you look at candy trade discussions
about holiday marketing in the 1920s and 1930s, Halloween doesn’t
even get a mention.

There’s a great discussion of the
tainted-candy scares of the 1970s and much more. I’ll leave you
with this:

[Postrel]: Your book starts with a story
in which another parent compares your child’s jelly beans to crack
cocaine. How does Halloween candy survive in a culture where candy
is seen as dangerous?

[Kawash]: Well, number one is, kids love
it! And I think our society really does have a very ambivalent
relation to candy, which includes both extremely positive and
extremely negative feelings. I do feel like the candy part of
Halloween has gone overboard, though. There are so many fun things
about the holiday, but all too often kids end up obsessed with just
piling up as much candy as they can. When kids are just marching
from house to house and holding out their bag, trick-or-treating
seems kind of joyless, more like work. Hmm, I wonder where they
learned that?