Posted on 10/28/2010 4:20:43 PM PDT by mojito
FOR Samira Kawash, a writer who lives in Brooklyn, the Jelly Bean Incident provided the spark.
Five years ago, her daughter, then 3, was invited to play at the home of a new friend. At snack time, having noted the presence of sugar (in the form of juice boxes and cookies) in the kitchen, Dr. Kawash, then a Rutgers professor, brought out a few jelly beans.
The mother froze. Her child had never tasted candy, she explained, but perhaps it would be all right just this once. Then the father weighed in from the other room, shouting that they might as well give the child crack cocaine.
“It was clear to me that there was an irrational equation of candy and danger in that house,” Dr. Kawash said in a recent interview. “And that was irresistible to me.”
From that train of thought, the Candy Professor blog was born. In her writing there, Dr. Kawash dives deep into the American relationship with candy, finding irrational and interesting ideas everywhere. The big idea behind Candy Professor is that candy carries so much moral and ethical baggage that people view it as fundamentally different — in a bad way — from other kinds of food.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Poor kid will never have memories of eating a bag of M&Ms warmed by the sun on a hot Summer day.
No desserts/candies before the age of five for our children and now they enjoy an occasional sweet but prefer fruit.
I am happy with our parenting decisions.
Great article! I can relate to her relationship with candy. I love homemade candy but steer away from making it because I would be the only person eating it. Mmmmmm, mmmmm, good!
I am addicted to Reece’s dark chocolate peanut butter cups. To die for.
It gets weird when people have food fetishes like this. It's almost always one of:
a) genetic (ie.. cilantro, 5% of people really can't stand it, and have a genetic marker)
b) cultural (don't eat dogs)
c) Serious, serious deep seated emotional problems.
I have professionally fed 10s of thousands of people over the years, and that's my considered opinion based on experience.
/johnny
And birds explode when they eat wedding rice. Barnum was right. What kind of helicopter do you use?
No, not really.
Crack is 'WAY more expensive than jelly beans.
What an idiotic thing to say.
Pathetic.
They can do all they can. Candy is like the Ring in Lord of the Rings. It WANTS to be found.
True story:
My wife did not want our first baby to be exposed to candy very early, lest she develop a sweet tooth. I obliged, and never brought any into the house.
Then, I went to pick up the mail at my private mailbox in my wife’s car (’74 Dodge Dart with a front bench seat), as mine was in the shop. I was sent a cheap net bag of chocolate coins in gold foil, courtesy of the phone company we switched to. I put the mail in the passenger seat. Little did I know that the netted sack had an opening. Chocolate coins slipped out the opening and into the bench seat.
The next day, my wife is on the road with her car. The baby is with her. She needs her diaper changed. She places the baby on the passenger seat, and while she changes the diaper, the baby exclaimed “Num-num-NUMM!”
The baby’s face had been towards the part where the candy slipped between the seat. She was easily able to slip her small arm between the upper seat back and lower seat, and had grabbed one of the coins, chewing through the foil in her 9 month old mouth, all while her mother was concentrating on the business end.
Children will get candy. No point in fighting it.
I am allergic to chocolate and corn and most all candy is made with corn syrup. So I don’t eat much candy but at the Mexican restaurant they bring the bill and give you these little sugary things with pecans in them...... yummmmmmmm!
LOL !!
Back in the day I had a friend from church that homeschooled her kids. I went over to their house one day and she asked her 5 year old what were the two most important rules to remember. He said don’t talk to strangers and never eat chocolate.
Equating stranger danger with chocolate ?
It just now dawned on me she probably was a moonbat. He was not allergic to chocolate because I asked him. He said his mother said chocolate rotted your teeth.
Well yeah, if you eat it 24/7 !
I was like your wife when it came to our first child. i refused to let her even have a piece of cake or a lick of ice cream. then she died. without ever having had a little sucker!
I did not make that mistake again.
I think a lot of obesity problems are actually caused by parents trying to impose a 100% “healthy” diet on kids. They know candy (and other sweets) are good, they want some, they see other kids eating it—before you know it, they have a food disorder over it. Once they are away from their parents’ authoritarian food restrictions, they tend to overindulge on all that tasty stuff they were never allowed to have as children.
I am so sorry. But you loved your little girl, and that’s the most important thing of all.
“then she died. without ever having had a little sucker!”
Very sad. I hope the Lord is giving her some tootsie pops in heaven. I do not speak flippantly; I mean it. I hope she is happy and blessed with Him.
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