Turns Out The Evil Halloween Candy Poisoners Was Just FUD That Got You To Buy Prepackaged Candy
from the check-the-wrappers dept
When I moved into my current home a few years back, I discovered (a few weeks later) on Halloween that one of my neighbors is a professional choclatier, when a pair of insanely delicious home-made caramel candy apples were delivered to my house as a "reverse trick-or-treat." It was definitely a nice "welcome to the neighborhood" moment. However, even though I knew I could trust these apples, it immediately brought me back to when I was a kid, when there were all these big scary news stories about people poisoning candy and putting razors in caramel candy apples for neighborhood trick-or-treaters. I remember my parents followed the evening news' recommendations of immediately taking the bags of candy we came home with and to spread them out on the kitchen table to go through them looking for exposed candy or loose wrappers to dump in the garbage. It was serious business. These days, many places are so worried about the scary poisoning/razor-blading neighbors that they've officially tried to move trick-or-treating to local businesses away from residences.I'd never really thought much about the scare stories and whether or not they true. When I was a kid, I assumed of course they were true. It was being reported on the news, and I think my school sent home paper warnings as well. How could it not be true? However, Samira Kawash, who is apparently an expert in "candy," is writing a series of posts about Halloween, and one of them notes that the whole story of poisoned/razor-bladed Halloween candy from sadistic neighbors is almost entirely a myth. The number of children really harmed by such things? "Approximately zero."
It turns out that the Halloween sadist is about 1 percent fact and 99 percent myth. One California dentist in 1959 did pass out candy-coated laxatives, and some kids got bad stomachaches. But instances over the past 40 years where children were allegedly harmed by tainted candy have invariably fallen apart under scrutiny. In some cases, there was evidence that someone (a family member) was attempting to harm a particular child under cover of Halloween. In other cases, poisoning which had another cause was misattributed to candy. Not surprisingly, the myth created its own reality: As the stories of Halloween tampering spread, some kids got the idea of faking tampering as a sort of prank. Despite all evidence to the contrary, the myth persists.Of course, in retrospect, this makes sense. We see stories all the time these days of the press (and sometimes groups of parents) creating a moral panic around some dubious piece of information about "harm to children" that never seems to stand up to any serious scrutiny. But, as Kawash notes, "the myth persists." And, while they may not be the reason the myth started or persisted, the main beneficiaries of the myth were the big candy companies, who actually have been linked to health problems at industrial food processing plants:
Wrappers are like candy condoms: Safe candy is candy that is covered and sealed. And not just any wrapper will do. Loose, casual, cheap wrappers, the kind of wrappers one might find on locally produced candies or non-brand-name candies, are also liable to send candy to Halloween purgatory. The close, tight factory wrapper says "sealed for your protection." And the recognized brand name on the wrapper also lends a reassuring aura of corporate responsibility and accountability. It's a basic axiom of consumer faith: The bigger the brand, the safer the candy.Kawash notes that all of this has come at the cost of good, home-made treats, which actually may have been safer for kids. So, as we hit Halloween weekend, I'm sure you'll have plenty of opportunities for eating processed candy options, but perhaps it's time to put an end to the old myth.
Ironic, since we know that the most serious food dangers are those that originate from just the kind of large-scale industrial food processing environments that also bring us name-brand, mass-market candies. Salmonella, E. coli, and their bacterial buddies lurking in bagged salads and pre-formed hamburger patties are real food dangers; home-made cookies laced with ground glass are not.
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Filed Under: candy, fud, halloween, moral panics, poison
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I'll do it...
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Bogus PSA
I have always felt this is just another way to keep the populace scared. People will poison your children! Keeps everyone on edge and not trusting each other which is exactly the opposite that the actual reality of Halloween teaches us.
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Re: Bogus PSA
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Re: Bogus PSA
This needs to be sent out LOUD AND CLEAR by the mainstream media, to make people realize that there are VERY FEW people sick & twisted enough to want to poison children on Halloween.... and most of them are the kid's own parents!
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Oh Nuts!
Ironic really when almost every bought cake in the universe will say at the very least "This product was made in a facvtory that uses nuts and may contain trace nuts" because of hte paranioa of being sued. I know nut allergies aren't funny... but the hype is kinda.
My fave found on a packet of peanuts: "WARNING: This product may contain nuts". I'd damn well hope so!
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Re: Oh Nuts!
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There was a time when the "mainstream media" was a true watchdog over government. When the crooks in power in government (mostly republicans) got fed up with all the attention they were getting from said media, they complained of a "left wing bias" in the reporting. They then got with their banker pals and set up their own network to give their own "perspective" on their version of "news". That new network is called fox.
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there was a time when mainstream media actually reported on important stuff and some pop star shaving her head would never have made it into the news.
perhaps we should all back away from the partisan finger pointing and actually start holding people accountable instead?
yeah, i know.... im just a wacko bent on the destruction of everything nice....
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I pride myself on being an extreme moderate. I hate the left and the right so much that I don't even want to be in the center between the two.
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Ok, this blows
This actually is another feather in the cap for TechDirt. It just reinforces all the stories about "real" journalists vs alternative media. If only those "real" journallists had access to Snopes.com back then, we could have enjoyed a better class of treats on All Hallows Eve.
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Adult candy procurement
Fear = Candy
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Re: Adult candy procurement
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I knew I'd use this some day.
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The best part, though, it usually happened with brand name candy, not local brands. Have you ever tried to open one end of a candy wrapper and put it back together? Yeah. It's easy with a little bit of patience, and you can't tell the difference usually.
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That's just brilliant.
"People on the internet are unreliable."
"That's bullshit! People on the internet tell me they're reliable all the time!"
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What I don't remember is any convictions.
For some reason, probably snarkiness at my instructor of 20th Century History, I decided to do a quick paper on this and dove headlong into the Law library at UBC. Guess what I found?
Almost all those arrests in Canada and the United States were on "suspicion" of adulterating the treats and I the only charges I found were against nuclear family members or one step away and even then just a slight scattering of convictions.
(Remember, in the 40s, 50s and 60s no one talked about this because the "Leave It To Beaver" household was worshiped and none of these things ever really happened unless the parent, sibling, aunt, uncle or grandparent was a serious nutbar. Perhaps not even then.)
I got a big fat F on that paper and when I appealed it the instructor hadn't checked my bibliography, footnotes and citations she just didn't believe me cause it HAD to be true. I got a 75% later cause of my horrendous spelling when I typed it up at 3:30am.
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It does happen.. rarely though...
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Re: It does happen.. rarely though...
Another anecdote without any actual evidence. I don't doubt that you may have been told that, but that is the very definition of anecdotal, like 99.99% of all these stories.
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Candy
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PCP
http://www.snopes.com/horrors/drugs/suckers.asp
While the article says that there is no connection to Halloween, there is a good bit of information there to suggest that being vigilant is always a good idea.
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Re: PCP
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Good way..
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Re: Good way..
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we all know that "correlation does not equal causation" so i'm just bringing this up because there's no real proof offered either way and this seems like it's being presented as "told-you-so" fact.
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it's not beyond belief that the evil corporations could pull strings to get the news to blow up a single incident or two way out of proportion. that would cause the people to stop eating non-major-manufacturer candy, so from then on there'd be no way to compare the rate of tampering would be greater or less with home made vs store bought.
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Popcorn
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