Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America (2004)

I picked up on this when it was still new off of an NPR story, with aptly named author Steve Almond carrying on infectiously about a candy factory he had toured as part of putting this book together. He was talking about coconut coming down from up above like snowflakes, settling into the softening chocolate of a candy bar whose name I didn't get, or can't remember—maybe the Idaho Spud? It's a great book, actually, as much fun to read as it was to hear him that day, part candy bar history, part new journalism as he tours obscure Mom 'n' Pop candy bar factories (candy still a regionalized industry but rapidly fading), and part memoir, getting his personal life mixed up in it like the candy that melts on your hand, before your mouth. I don't know much about Almond—I know he's written fiction, and some other cultural criticism, and I have the sense that people love him and hate him, although I don't know the specific issues involved with all that. He seems to curry controversy somehow, that's my impression. Anyone trying to watch their weight will have a hard time while they read this, I know that much from personal experience. I actually found myself looking at candy displays in a way that I hadn't since I don't know when, and tried some of the more localized choices available to me—the Idaho Spud actually one of them. I remembered how people in my family were kookoo for Nut Goodies when I was a kid, a favorite of another region. Somehow I drifted over into the corporate choices like so many of us. I still like Snickers and Milky Way and M&Ms, Hershey's and Nestle's chocolate (the latter more than the former, but neither is what you could call really good chocolate, as I understand better now). From his picture, Almond is skinny enough to count the rib bones, so I guess he's got the metabolism for an infatuation that is bringing so many of the rest of us down. I tend to think of candy as a kind of evil nowadays. But Almond's book got me out of that for the time it took to read it. I probably gained five pounds while I was at it too, drat it anyway.

In case it's not at the library.