A Spiteful Ode To My Yellow, Orange, and WhiteStriped Lover

Oh candy corn, oh candy corn, There are so many nauseating problems with you But there are also oh so many reasons Why I adore your sickly sweetness, too.

—Spiteful Lover of Candy Corn, Haley Creighton

ARTICLE By Haley Creighton

Photo by Katherine Kim

Illustrations by Christine Cheng

Candy corn.

You are perhaps the most controversial candy in existence, aside from Almond Joys and Mounds, which people only like if they are elderly or if they hit their head when they were younger. People want to kiss you, or they want to kill you.

As for me, I love and hate you. Hate is a strong word, I take that back — I love and am a very tasteful critic of your flaws.

Candy corn, you are so weird. In a single sentence, you are a food-coloring-soaked triangle of wax that tastes like dried-up fondant. You don’t sound super appetizing, and to a lot of people, you aren’t. Sometimes, you’re not appetizing even to me, a devotee! Absurd, isn’t it? But the thing is, that simple description simply can’t capture all you are, with your hordes of flaws and your hidden merits.

Your flaws — they are many. And I mean it. You make people want to barf after eating just three pieces, each the size of a wicked witch’s fingernail and just as yellowed. You turn tongues a concerning shade of pink even though you’re orange, yellow, and white. Your chemical food coloring destroys any nutrients you might have otherwise had, so you’re basically sweet poison, and the gelatin in you is made from the tendons, ligaments, and bones of I don’t even know what animals, which I just found out two weeks ago and am still adamantly refusing to process.

On top of all of this, your hard outer coating apparently comes from bright red lac bugs, so you are essentially a capsule of decomposing matter. A shell encasing bones and tendons and sugar and poison — delicious! Every day, I wonder whether I should ever even think of purchasing another bag of you from Acme again. It becomes harder to return to you every day.

However, as humans, we tend to focus first on the negatives. It is not fair to only shine light on what is nasty and gross and sus (very, very sus) about you, without examining your beautiful qualities as well. Or, as they say, I’m sure you have rehabilitation can solve. And we can’t forget the way your appearance heralds the coming of fall: as soon as you appear at CVS, the air begins to chill, Halloween decorations appear pasted in storefront windows, and everyone, as if under some strange collective spell, begins to complain that pumpkin spice lattes are basic. You simply have that magic that calls forth the changing of seasons. When I see you, I think of apple picking and haunted hayrides, of sitting on a scratchy rectangle of hay back on a Massachusetts farm, clutching a bag of you protectively in my fist while my sisters stuff you furiously in their mouths next to me. You are the food that connects my sisters and I together. You carry the sweetest memories for me. (Get it, sweet See what I did there? All right, I’ll stop). a good personality, so I can get past your looks.

Take your intriguing, sensual texture. Some call it “chalk-like”; I call it “somewhere-vaguelybetween-chewy-and-crumbly”, perfect for sinking teeth into. It’s comforting in some way, cutting through the lines between orange and yellow and white, just so satisfying when you get it exactly right. Then there’s your boldly sweet taste: too strong for people who can’t hold their sugar, but just right for me, someone with a raging sweet tooth and a dangerously soaring sugar tolerance that has landed me in a severe sugar addiction no

In all, composing this ode to you has both increased my ardent adoration for your sugary inner beauty and heightened my (somewhat) reluctant disgust. But, as they say, there is a fine line between love and hate. I truly love you, candy corn, for all the magical memories and dangerous sugar highs you bring me; and I feel like violently vomiting each time I think about what you are and what I am willingly consuming.