Candy Corn

Are you a hater or a fan?

Happy First of October! To welcome in one of the most wonderful months, please enjoy this installment of Halloween Heart, about Candy Corn! If you enjoy this piece, please forward it to a friend or consider becoming a paid subscriber to support my work.

As soon as I post a poll on my Instagram story––“Do you like candy corn? Yes or No?”––the votes are split. Right down the middle. One of the first responders is my friend, Amy. I already knew she loved Candy Corn, but I text her for more information. Tell me why you like candy corn please.

She responds immediately: I like the way that it feels when you bite into it.

I ask her to elaborate.

It tastes like hard plastic nothingness and then you bite down and it mushes really fun and squishy feeling like a hug on your tooth and all this sugary taste comes out, she types.

After I post the hot-button poll, a crush of candy corn thoughts barrage my DMs. Most of my friends with an affinity for Candy Corn say something about the texture. Elisabeth says that “it dissolves in your mouth like pure sugar!” Alison tells me that she likes both the texture and the taste and that she eats each individual Candy Corn in order from worst flavor and texture (the white bit, in her opinion) to best (orange). My friend Gillian simply describes it as “dreamy,” and Jack says they’re “delicious and unfairly maligned.”

When people don’t like Candy Corn, though? They really don’t like it. Lorna tells me that “it just tastes like stale sugar with fake coloring!!!” Megan says that it tastes fake and processed. My friend Rachael, an excellent cook, says it’s “not very flavorful, just sweet,” which she doesn’t like. When I do a quick internet search, I find people who take it even further than my friends and describe Candy Corn as “Satan’s earwax” and “the devil’s autumnal poison.” 

Candy Corn, originally called “Chicken Feed,” was invented by a Wunderle Candy Company employee named George Renninger in the 1880s. At first, it was a year-round, agriculturally-themed penny candy targeted at rural communities. The sugary “mellow creme” candies (called so because of their marshmallow flavor) were originally poured by hand into molds of all sorts of shapes including turnips, chestnuts, and clover leaves in addition to the corn we know now. Candy Corn really found its stride as a Halloween candy during the 1950s, when people began passing out candy to trick-or-treaters. The tradition has continued and now Candy Corn is manufactured by a number of candy companies, primarily Brach’s Confections. Brach’s produces seven billion pieces of candy corn every year. Most of these are the traditional Halloween flavor, but other varieties have appeared on the scene including pink and purple “Bunny Corn” for Easter, red and green “Reindeer Corn” for Christmas, and even red, white, and blue “Freedom Corn” for Independence Day. 

While Candy Corn is made by machine these days, much of the original recipe is still intact. Sugar and corn syrup are melted down and cooked with water and carnauba wax, a natural wax found on the leaves of carnauba palm plants in Northeastern Brazil. This cooked combination forms what is called a slurry (a mixture of solids that are denser than water), and it is to this that candy-makers add a touch of fondant and marshmallows, which give them their soft and chewy texture. This is because both fondant and marshmallows contain gelatin, which is collagen derived from animal bones, connective tissue, and skin. So, no, Candy Corn isn’t vegan. And the gelatin isn’t the only animal product in those sugary little triangles, either. 

After the gelatin-infused batch of slurry is heated once again, poured into candy corn molds, and cooled, it’s ready to be covered with what Amy referred to as the “hard plastic nothingness.” Here’s where things get really interesting.  

On a bag of Candy Corn, you’ll see in the list of ingredients that every piece is covered with what is known in the candy industry as “confectioner’s glaze.” When I go to Brach’s website, I click on “Ingredients” for candy corn and see “confectioner’s glaze (shellac),” but even with this addition, I would not have known the true story behind confectioner’s glaze had I not been hunting for something interesting behind the waxy, bland candy corn (Sorry, no, I am not a fan.).

Here is what I found: Shellac is made from lac-resin, which is, in essence, the secretion produced by lac-insects, a species of the superfamily Coccoidea, or scale insects. There are other species of lac-insects, but the kerria lacca are the ones most commonly cultivated for their resin-making properties, mostly in India and Thailand. Male lac-insects are crimson-colored beetles whose only purpose is to crawl around the encrustations, searching for females with whom to mate. The females, the main producers of lac, do not have legs or wings, but are instead red, whoopie-cushion-shaped blobs with tubular openings at either end. These females feast on tree sap and simultaneously produce lac from their dermal glands. This lac builds up and hardens around them, creating brown and amber-colored bulbous shells around the twigs.

When it comes time to harvest, people scrape this “stick lac” off the trees. It is then bundled and submerged in water, where it soaks for a few days. Then it is dried and crushed into tiny amber chunks known as seed-lac. People melt the seed-lac over charcoal fires, where it can then be turned into waxy buttons, not dissimilar from the lac wax seals still used by the Indian Foreign Post Office today. It can also be turned into long, sheer sheets of lac, which are then dried and crushed into flakes. These flakes can be dissolved and used to produce the binders and shellac found in natural wood varnishes, citrus and apple coatings, lipstick, mascara, nail polish, and, yes, the shiny, hard coating of Candy Corn. 

Natural resins have been used by humans for thousands of years. People in ancient Egypt used pine resin in the mummification process, painting each strip of linen wrapped around the mummy with resin in order to seal it and help preserve the body. In addition, resins were used as varnishes, and objects such as statues painted with black resin were discovered in Tutankhamen’s tomb. Later, and on a different continent, people in the Mongol empire bound the first-known compound bows together using pine resin in the 1200s A.D. Scientists started developing synthetic resins (the main component of plastic), in the late 1800s to early 1900s, and ever since they showed up on the scene, their production and usage has eclipsed that of natural resins, such as lac-resin, or plant-based resin such as those used in Ancient Egypt and the Mongol Empire. 

India produces half the lac that it did in the 1950s (when it was often used in making gramophone records). The folks at PETA would be happy to hear this. An online petition with over 40,000 signatures urges Tootsie Roll Industries and Ferrara (the conglomerate that owns Brach’s) to replace their confectioner’s glaze with something other than shellac. Not only is it unappetizing to customers, they say, it is cruel: “Some 100,000 bugs die to produce about one pound of shellac flakes.” While it is true that many dead lac insects go through the refining process on their way to becoming lac, many of these insects are already dead. The mature males die two to three days after mating with the females. The females, who are fixed in place, lay anywhere from 200-1000 eggs (which hatch within eight hours), secrete lac and form encrustations around themselves, and then die. The entire life cycle of the lac-insect lasts about six months. If the seedlac is to be made into dye, the dead lac-insects are left in the mix, because their hemolymph, which is to insects what blood is to humans, makes the dye red. 

But 80% of the world’s lac is produced in India, and its harvesting and production provides a livelihood for many farmers, mostly in the eastern region of Jharkhand, a place that is rich in resources but that experiences high levels of rural poverty. 

When I typed “candy corn” into my search engine, I would never have guessed that the series of research rabbit holes would lead me here, to entomology professors’ lectures uploaded to Youtube, to wood varnish websites, even to a photo of a headstone uploaded by a man named Jacek from Poland, who used shellac to make the raised metal words describing his loved one shine. (For more information, check out the very informative YouTube video I’ve posted above.)

I have always dismissed Candy Corn. As waxy, as bland, as disgusting. My husband is not a fan of it either, and after sharing my discoveries, I ask if he’d be interested in trying it again. “No way,” he says. “Especially since now I know about the beetle barf.”

But I’m not so sure. Eating insects’ secreted encrustations? What’s more Halloween than that? As with most things having to do with Halloween, it just takes a little curiosity and a little digging to discover something truly fascinating.

Coming up next week: Skeletons.

You are reading Halloween Heart, a subsection of Kaia Preus’s Substack With Love From My Kitchen Table. Much time and effort goes in to writing each essay. To support her work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Payment goes directly to lattes and babysitting money so Kaia can keep writing. Another great way to support Kaia is to share these posts with a friend by forwarding the emails.