1979: James Mack, a candy manufacturer representative, told government officials that banning candy sales from schools could lead to "injury, drug abuse and drinking." His reasoning was that candy provided children with an "island of pleasure," and if denied this they might seek out worse things such as drugs. They might even "leave the school premises [to seek out candy] and encounter traffic hazards".
Wisconsin State Journal - Jan 31, 1979
Posted By: Alex - Sat May 22, 2021 -
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Category: Candy, 1970s
Candy is a food! That's the first thing to know about it. Candy supplies definite needs of the body, just like milk, fruit, vegetables, cereals. Candy, in fact, furnishes several vital elements of the diet, without which you couldn't keep well!
... Caroline Hunt, noted specialist in Home Economics, has therefore recommended that candy be made a part of the "sweets" ration, which consists of about five pounds a week for the family of five. Candy may constitute whatever part of this is desired.
So they were recommending that everyone eat a pound of candy a week!
Saturday Evening Post - Oct 27, 1928. Source: atticpaper.com
On the basis of additional history obtained from his family, the patient was eating one or two large packages of soft candy daily. Three weeks before presentation, he had switched from eating fruit-flavored soft candy to eating licorice-flavored soft candy that contained glycyrrhizic acid, which is converted to glycyrrhetinic acid after it is consumed.
The glycyrrhetinic acid caused his potassium levels to drop, which then caused his heart to stop.
It would have been weirder if he had been crushed by 16 tons of licorice. But licorice overdose is a weird way to die nevertheless.
Created in 1991 by Australian philosophy student Richard Manderson. They were Jesus-shaped chocolates filled with raspberry jam so they would "bleed" when bitten.
Richard Manderson first created a series of small raspberry fondant filled chocolate Jesuses that were sold for consumption to visitors of Gorman House Arts Centre in Canberra, an Australian cultural centre and heritage site that runs theatres, workshops, exhibition space, artists' studios, offices and a café.
When a US newspaper condemned his act of depicting Jesus on a chocolate, Manderson decided in answer to create an actual life-size chocolate Jesus he called Trans-substantiation 2. He did so by filling a plaster mold with fifty-five pounds of melted chocolate. He used chocolate-dipped strings for hair and plastic Easter wrap for a loincloth. Manderson's work was exhibited in public around Easter in 1994, with Manderson inviting the public to come and eat his chocolate Jesus work after the exhibition.
Wisconsin lumberman Stuart Stebbings wanted to be able to eat candy. But being diabetic, he couldn’t. So, in the mid-1950s he invented “cheese candy,” in which much of the sugar was replaced by cheese. Specifically, Swiss Cheese. He marketed it as CheeSweet. His advertising described the flavor as “delightfully different.”
Apparently the American public didn’t take to it, because by 1960 Stebbing’s CheeSweet Company had declared bankruptcy.
The In Too Deep blog notes that CheeSweet did, however, achieve a minor form of literary fame, in that it was mentioned by John Steinbeck in his 1962 book “Travels with Charley: In Search of America.” Steinbeck wrote:
I don’t know whether or not Wisconsin has a cheese-tasting festival, but I who am a lover of cheese believe it should. Cheese was everywhere, cheese centers, cheese cooperatives, cheese stores and stands, perhaps even cheese ice cream. I can believe anything, since I saw a score of signs advertising Swiss Cheese Candy. It is sad that I didn’t stop to sample Swiss Cheese Candy. Now I can’t persuade anyone that it exists, that I did not make it up.
Twin Falls Times-News - Aug 31, 1958
Posted By: Alex - Tue Feb 25, 2020 -
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Category: Candy, 1950s
Just a few days ago, on Dec 24, 2019, Maryellis Bunn of New York, NY received patent no. 10,513,862 B2 for a “system, method, and apparatus for simulating immersion in a confection.” The specific confection she had in mind was candy sprinkles. Although the patent extends to include Hershey’s kisses and popcorn.
In other words, what she’s patented is the idea of a pool full of fake sprinkles, which people can immerse themselves in.
This makes more sense once you find out that Bunn is the founder of the Museum of Ice Cream, and apparently one of the activities you can do, if you visit her museum (in either New York or San Francisco), is swim in a pool of fake sprinkles. See the video below.
Bunn's Museum of Ice Cream business is reportedly worth around $200 million, and she only started it in 2016. So, while some are mocking her sprinkle-immersion patent as frivolous, she's laughing all the way to the bank.
In Oct 2013, the chewing gum company Beldent gathered five sets of identical twins. In each set, one twin was instructed to chew gum while the other sat motionless. Visitors to the Buenos Aires Museum of Contemporary Art were then asked questions about the twins.
Their answers indicated that 73 percent of people had a more favorable impression of the gum chewing twins. Beldent claimed that this disproved the "chewing gum stigma."
Though I disagree. I think gum chewing does turn off some people. What the experiment showed was that there's an even greater stigma attached to being expressionless, showing no emotion at all
Paul Di Filippo
Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1.