You Must Respect Candy Corn

I am alive and autumnal. In this state, I read about candy corn, the seasonal candy that looks like corn kernels. And everything I read about candy corn insists that I have a strong opinion on the matter. Love it or hate it! But must I? The truth is simpler: Candy corn is not evil or good, but simply present.

I’m not going to rehearse the whole story. Candy corn is a late-19th-century confection, invented during an agrarian age that found horticultural treats endearing. Its tricolor, three-part composition was laborious to construct and novel to behold. Once perennial, it later became associated with autumn and then Halloween.

Traditions marking the passage of death, All Hallows’ Eve and until after World War II, when suburbanization made it congeal like nougat—perhaps as a perversion of the indulgences begged for on All Souls Day, or as an anxious mirror of a Victorian aristocratic ritual.