My father wrote Slouching Towards Gomorrah in 1996, his catalogue of what he thought had gone wrong with American culture: radical individualism, pornography, popular culture, the collapse of standards, and a good deal else. He did not include candy corn.
Maybe that was an oversight. But if he had come out against it, there would have been a battle royale in our house, because I like candy corn and always have.
That puts me on the wrong side of one of the stranger disputes of the season. Every October, otherwise reasonable people start announcing that they hate candy corn. They don’t merely dislike it. They call it waxy, cloying, artificial and inedible. It finishes at or near the bottom of the annual “worst Halloween candy” surveys almost every year, usually alongside circus peanuts and those peanut butter taffies in orange and black wrappers that nobody admits to buying. These are the same people who eat gummy worms, Sour Patch Kids and Skittles without complaint, none of which come in colors found in nature.
The most common complaint is that candy corn is too sweet. Well, yes. It is candy. It makes no claims about cacao percentages, sea salt or responsibly sourced anything. It is sugar shaped roughly like a kernel of corn, although it doesn’t look much like one and tastes nothing like one. It’s mostly sugar and corn syrup, and the shine comes from confectioner’s glaze, which is made from a resin secreted by the lac bug. So, the critics who call it artificial have it backwards. Few candies are more natural, if you count insects.
Candy corn also belongs to October in a way almost no other candy does. A Hershey bar in July is the same Hershey bar. Reese’s can mold its peanut butter cup into a pumpkin, an Easter egg, or a Christmas tree, but it is still a peanut butter cup in costume. Candy corn means Halloween. Put a bowl of it on the table and you have the whole season: the leaves, the early dark, children at the door, and adults insisting the candy in the house is for the children. It has meant that for a long time. George Renninger of the Wunderlee Candy Company in Philadelphia invented it in the 1880s, and the Goelitz company, now Jelly Belly, started making it in 1898 and sold it as “Chicken Feed.” The marketing has improved since then. The candy has not, and I mean that as praise.
There is a correct way to eat it: the white tip first, then the orange middle, then the yellow base. I am aware that all three sections taste exactly the same. That is beside the point. My father believed civilization depended on rules. I am simply applying the principle. The original workers poured each color into the molds by hand, one pass at a time, so eating it in three stages is really a matter of respecting the craftsmanship.
Where people go wrong is quantity. Five or six pieces are excellent. Fifteen is pushing it. Somewhere past that, the experience starts to raise larger questions. But that is no indictment of candy corn. Bourbon has the same problem. Moderation was once considered a virtue.
I also admire the fact that nobody has managed to improve it. Nearly everything else in American life is constantly being upgraded, redesigned, or connected to the internet. Refrigerators send messages, cars have opinions, and appliances demand software updates. Candy corn is still the same absurd little piece of candy it has been for generations, with no app, no Bluetooth, and no monthly subscription. Give them time. To be fair, Brach’s has tried. In 2020 it released Turkey Dinner candy corn, with flavors that included green beans and stuffing. The original survived. That’s how you know it’s a tradition.
If anything in October deserves hatred, it is pumpkin spice. Candy corn knows its place. It shows up for Halloween and leaves when the costumes come off. Pumpkin spice now arrives in late August, while people are still at the beach, and stays until somebody stops it, which so far nobody has. It has gotten into Oreos, Pringles, cereal, dog treats and, in 2019, Spam. Candy corn has never tried to get into the Spam.
There is also the matter of honesty. Candy corn has never claimed to contain corn. The Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Latte came out in 2003 and contained no pumpkin at all until 2015. Pumpkin spice is cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger and clove, the same spices that sat in our grandmothers’ cupboards, sold back to us as a lifestyle. Candy corn may be absurd, but it is not running a con. If you are looking for a sign of civilizational decline in the October aisle, I’d start with the scented candles, not the candy bowl.
For a while I thought candy corn might be one of the last things in American life that politics hadn’t reached. I was wrong. Someone recently sent me a picture of a piece of candy corn made up as Donald Trump, with a yellow top, an orange face, and a tiny suit. The caption read, “You’ll never look at candy corn the same way again.” I confess I haven’t. So much for my theory that candy corn sat in a small neutral zone in the culture wars. Perhaps my father really did miss something.
Still, I doubt the hostility is fundamentally political. I think it is mostly fashion. At some point it became amusing to say you hated candy corn, and now people say it because other people say it. Fruitcake suffered the same fate. So did neckties. Possibly civilization itself.
I am prepared to remain in the minority, and there are some respectable people on my side. Google tells me that basketball great Kevin Durant likes candy corn. So does singer Cyndi Lauper. Mistress of the Dark, Elvira is reportedly a fan and, like me, eats it section by section. It isn’t the Federalist Society, but it’s a club that I am willing to join. We are also less outnumbered than the internet suggests. The National Confectioners Association says Americans buy roughly 35 million pounds of it a year, or 257 pieces for every single person in the United States. Somebody is eating it. They just aren’t posting about it.
If Western civilization really is declining, I refuse to blame candy corn. It has sat quietly in a bowl for more than a century, asking almost nothing of us. My father went looking for the causes of cultural decline and never indicted it. I choose to regard that as precedent. National Candy Corn Day is October 30. Govern yourselves accordingly.
Greatest piece on candy corn, ever!