Sweet Tooth: The Bittersweet History of Candy Hardcover – Bargain Price, May 22, 2012

Charming narrative of a personal quest into why we love the sweetest substance of all. From childhood delight to the polictical heritages of slavery and exploration, this book doesn't sugar coat its subject, it infuses it with rememberance, lost childhood, and adult temptations.

Boring-I was hoping that tis work would include much more information on the history and innovations of large candy concerns-Nestle, Hershey, Mars, et al. Instead I found little to no new knowledge here. Not recommended.

Great!

"Sweet Tooth," much like candy, was a good, but it ultimately did not satisfy.Hopkins tells a compelling tale. Her take on the history of candy is the history of sugar and chocolate, with the final products of each having their own tales throughout time. It is a history of slavery, mistakes, capitalism, and the destruction of towns. It is a history of a product that went from being medicine, to being something only the wealthy consumed, to being something thought of only being for children. In that lies the power behind the book, but it is also what drove me a little nuts.Each chapter could have been its own book, and since the book was short and covering the history of candy (a broad subject), I knew nothing could be delved into all that deeply. Still, as a primer, it works. I just wanted more ... which says much about Hopkins and her subject ... and me, I guess.

This book is as much a memoir and a travelogue as it is a history of candy, and isn't quite satisfying as any of the three. The book frequently feels like it is somehow digressing from itself, as the author goes from style to style. The tone veers from scholarly to conversational, from fact to opinion (and occasionally to wild conjecture almost presented as fact, as when Hopkins speculates about why something was done in 1830, and then refers to her conjecture as "evidence"). She could also be quite repetitive, pressing a joke about Palermo's traffic laws being more like guidelines into service repeatedly, repeating sentences verbatim from her main text to her "Candy Bag" side bars, sometimes on the facing page. It would be more accurate to say that this is the author's bittersweet history of her relationship with candy, perhaps, than to describe this as a history of candy in general. She frequently discusses her exploration of candy as a quest for a lost innocence or bliss from childhood, sometimes in terms that were bordering on the self-indulgent. (And the last chapter feels oddly like a commercial for her local chocolate manufacturer.) The book is not without its charms, but a bit like black licorice, I suspect this book is not to everyone's taste.

The old advice is that you grow up and you are to put away childish things. Journalist and food blogger Kate Hopkins bought into this. She was a fiend for candy when she was a kid, but as you age your view of candy is supposed to change. "No longer is it representative of the happiness that life can bring you," she writes in _Sweet Tooth: The Bittersweet History of Candy_ (St. Martin's Press). "Now it represents the unhealthy, the immature, and the gluttonous." She found that her definition was coming correct: "Adulthood is when one has the means to buy every candy in the shop but no longer has the desire to do so." Fortunately for her, and for her readers, her means of getting her midlife crisis behind her was to travel and research the history of candy. A friend is incredulous, saying, "So you're going to travel the world, claiming you're studying the history of candy, but instead you're using it as an excuse to do a yearlong Halloween?" She does get to binge on some fancy candies, and some Halloween-bag standards, and some historic sweets, and even readers who don't want to admit how much they themselves would enjoy such indulgence will enjoy the witty, wide-eyed report of this binge and the travelogue with its historic views of the sometimes unsavory candy story.The ancient Egyptians may have combined nuts or seeds with honey, but there is no evidence of sugar making until around 500 AD. Naturally, the history of candy is closely linked to the history of sugar, and Hopkins does not skip reflections on the darkest part of this history, slavery. Not only was there a slave problem centuries ago, but we continue the problem today with that other irresistible treat, chocolate. There are horrors of child slavery especially in Ivory Coast which supplies about 40% of the world's cocoa beans. That such things might still be, just to get us our chocolate treats, is a dismal reflection on humanity. Throughout the book, Hopkins includes sidebars labeled "Kate's Candy Bag," a nod to her beloved Halloweens of childhood. Halloween plays a huge role in candy sales, and the candy makers know it, but it is a relatively modern holiday. The National Confectioners Association was formed in 1884, partly to improve candy's image; as an example of how easily some people will disapprove of what they see others enjoying, Hopkins quotes one moralist as advising how candy shops were "hot beds of disease," and candy consumption would lead to "intemperance, gluttony, and debauchery." The NCA wanted to clear candy of such charges, and incidentally, to make more money. They proposed a Candy Day, the second Saturday of October starting in 1916, for exhibiting and promoting their candy wares, but in the 1920s trick or treating with candy handouts seems to have started in the west, and moved eastwards. We have our candy day, but it is not Candy Day.Hopkins goes first to Palermo, where there are ancient confections based on Roman and Arabian cuisines, but in which also she mistakenly enters a shop thinking it sells candy, while it turns out to be the storefront of a wedding consultant. "My first attempt at acquiring candy in a foreign land, and here I was, inadvertently attempting to plan my own nuptials." She goes to Genoa, because of the connection to Christopher Columbus, who influenced candy strongly because he helped in the propagation of sugarcane, but he also failed to influence it even more because it's likely he was the first European to come across chocolate, and he didn't do a thing about it. In Venice, she visits the city most associated with the spice trade of its time; sugar was treated like a spice, and also combined with spices to make flavored candies. In England, a land that loves its toffees and chocolates, she has Edinburgh Rock and Soor Plooms and rhubarb custards. Finally back in the USA, she makes her pilgrimage to Hershey, Pennsylvania, joyously visiting a city founded on chocolate, a visit that somehow her parents had denied her when she was little. The worldwide tour is great fun, and it is a delight to read her funny, self-deprecating reports. You can read her book, learn some important world history, and wonder at some very fancy or very plain candies. You won't risk a single cavity or gain a pound, unless (and this is a true risk) you find Hopkins's enthusiasm contagious.

I was really excited to read this book. After having read Steve Almonds Candy Freak I had hoped this would be in a similair vein. As someone who has read other books about candy and has a general knowledge of the sugar/slave trade and chocolate production there really was very little new information here. I was also very dissapointed in the brief descriptions and in some cases mere mentions of different candy shops visited. As someone who loves candy I was hoping for detailed description of these unique stores. The same was true for the candy the author sampled, there was almost no description of what the candies tasted, smelled or looked like except for a few exceptions.All in all unless you know almost nothing about the way candy ( mostly chocolate and old fashioned candy, little mention was made of modern sugar candies like sours, Skittles, Nerds, Etc other than gummi bears) was made and is made today i dont think this book will prove overly enlightning.