Sugar monstrosities

No Halloween costume for me this year. I have no desire to show up on Twitter as an Ebola patient, or an ISIS terrorist, or in any other garb that I will instantly regret. And I’m not going to repeat my attempt to go out as Unnecessary Apostrophe Man. (It involved a paisley shirt, a name tag reading “Happy ‘All ‘Saint’s’ Day,’” and construction-paper punctuation marks that weren’t worth the trouble to make.)

I will be eating sweets, which is both cause and compensation of sleeping alone, but I won’t be going locovore. BDCwire’s Kevin Slane explains why in a story called “Dear America, We Invented All the Worst Candy. Sorry. Love, Boston.” Maybe because of its Puritan roots, Boston has come up with some of the hateful things to throw in someone’s Halloween bag: Charleston Chews, Mary Janes, Sugar Daddies, Sweethearts, and Necco Wafers. Most of these leave a quick-hardening residue of regret on your back teeth. None of them are preferable to the rocks given to poor Charlie Brown.

The only decent vending-machine treats to come out of Boston are Junior Mints and the elusive, always musty Sky Bar.

There are three acceptable sugar-delivery systems: real fruit, chocolate, and alcohol. No cheesecake. No carrot cake. And no sticky or chalky crap that punishes your teeth. (A Facebook friend protested, “Wait, what? You have to be 115 years old to like the taste of molasses?” OK, I’ll grant a narrow exemption for Panda licorice.)

Americans eat far too much sugar, as John Oliver reported last Sunday—an average of 75 pounds a year. Much of that is in the form of added sugar and corn syrup that makes food taste worse. Most ketchup is too sweet. It’s tough to find bread that couldn’t just as easily be cake. (Nutella on toast is chocolate cake.) Fruit juices are so over-sweetened that they all taste the same. Sweet tea is an abomination to God.

Avoid all these things so that you won’t feel guilty when you have sugar in its proper forms: warm cherry cobbler, a dark chocolate Mounds bar, and a whisky sour.

Comments

[Rolando Teco]

Why no carrot cake? I LOVE carrot cake!

[Robert David Sullivan]

Maybe rum carrot cake would be OK.