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Is Candy Evil or Just Misunderstood?

FOR Samira Kawash, a writer who lives in Brooklyn, the Jelly Bean Incident provided the spark.

Five years ago, her daughter, then 3, was invited to play at the home of a new friend. At snack time, having noted the presence of sugar (in the form of juice boxes and cookies) in the kitchen, Dr. Kawash, then a Rutgers professor, brought out a few jelly beans....

Dr. Kawash, who studied architectural theory, narratives of women and medicine, and the imagery of terrorism before she began to write Candy Professor, has complicated feelings about her current specialty. She describes her childhood in Sunnyvale, Calif., in the 1970s as an “endless, and mostly frustrating quest for candy,” restricted to a small weekly indulgence after church on Sundays. Later, she said, binges on gummy bears and spice drops fueled her undergraduate research at Stanford; more recently, she found herself flushing handfuls of candy corn down the toilet to prevent herself from eating “just a few more.”...
Read entire article at NYT