Reviews

Sweet as Sin: The Unwrapped Story of How Candy Became America's Favorite Pleasure by Susan Benjamin

benlundns's review against another edition

5.0

Man this was an interesting read. So fascinating the transformation that candy has gone through culturally to get where it is today. From berries and nuts and tree sap, to medicine and individually made products to mass produced sugar lining the shelves today. Candy has been repositioned in our diets, changed from company to company, left once continent only to return transformed, years later. Every chapter of this book was full of interesting stories, anecdotes, personal remembrances, and history, that I ate it up. (pun intended). I don't have a particular sweet tooth, but for the candy I do buy on occasion, it was interesting to see how it ended up in the form it inhabits today. And it was interesting to learn more about the people and the accidents that give us the wide selection available in the candy stores today.

If you have even a passing interest in history, and in food production I would recommend this. It's an easy read as it does not dive into hard to follow or scientific jargon at all, but gives an easy to follow description of the path that candy followed from an idea to an actual product you could buy at the store. There are lots of "behind the scenes" information about how some of the long lasting and short lived candies loved by many and loathed by others came to be.