As I recall, there are a couple of you on rctn and/or rfc, in which case I hope you enjoy this column from today's Boston Globe.
Felice
-------------------------------------------
By Sam Allis, Globe Columnist
We should remember as we approach Valentine's Day that it remains the most obnoxious among our many obnoxious holidays designed to alchemize emotion into cash. The upside, of course, is the bald excuse it provides the Observer to visit the Necco plant, where 8 billion candy hearts are made each year, out in the moonscape of Revere.
To drop in on a candy factory these days is like touring a crystal meth laboratory as far as the food police are concerned. (We are our own worst enemy here.) Candy and other delights that hermetically seal our arteries, such as tiramisu and creme anglaise, are reduced to memories in our besotted quest for good health. Recommended consumption at dinner now consists of dead fish and roadside greens.
Halloween aside, candy is a quaint concept in 2006. After-dinner mints are as rare as they are weird. Someone may bring out a box after the bird at Thanksgiving, but that just doesn't happen with takeout from Doyle's on Tuesday nights. Ribbon candy, once a Christmas staple, disappeared with cigars. Life Savers still sell, largely it seems, to ex-smokers resigned to trade cigarettes for wholesale tooth decay. But when was the last time you saw anyone older than 12 take down a 3 Musketeers?
Childhood, after all, was the last time we ate things we weren't supposed to on a regular basis, and common candy is as redolent of this period of our lives as baseball cards. (Forget anything with ''chocolatier" in the label for people who shop for pearls at Mikimoto.) Both carry the scents of a drugstore, all mint and malts and medicine, and attendant misbehavior. Good & Plenty takes me back to the thrill of getting thrown out of a Saturday afternoon movie.
My own theory on candy consumption is that it spikes among the young and the old. The first cohort couldn't care about healthy eating and the second has thrown in the towel on the idea. Middle-aged adults, meanwhile, graze occasionally on Nestle Crunch and pound treadmills like crazed gerbils. I bounced this off of Lory Zimbalatti, Necco's marketing manager, who took no issue with it.
Which brings me to the New England Confectionery Company, which makes Necco Wafers in a mammoth 820,000-square-foot facility that resembles a Lockheed Martin assembly plant. The Observer has been ingesting tons of them since John Foster Dulles was secretary of state. They are to candy what the great Fig Newton is to cookies.
Necco, the oldest candy maker in the country, started churning out the wafers in 1847, and today sells 4 billion of them a year. People consume 120 of them each minute worldwide. (Candy lends itself to fabulous factoids.) I could go on. I will.
During one trip to Antarctica, explorer Richard Byrd took 2 1/2 tons of the wafers with him, according to Necco, which provided almost a pound every week for each of his men for two years.
It's not just humans, either. All of the Necco sugary detritus accumulated from the confection process of wafers and the Sweethearts Conversation Hearts goes to hog farmers, whose pigs crave the stuff. (You can't make this up.) Zimbalatti told me Necco has a contract with a pig farmer from New York State who comes and hauls the sweet garbage away. Cows, horses, and elephants, she adds, also adore it.
Equally arresting, if a bit unnerving, is the shelf life of the wafers. It appears to be eternal. A Necco lab manager recently found a roll made in
1952 and reported that, aside from some loss of flavor, it tasted fine. My question is this: Could a wafer withstand nuclear attack?I happen to prize licorice and clove (black and purple) over the other six flavors. No one is lukewarm about licorice, Zimbalatti informs me; people either love it or hate it. Chocolate (brown) is the most popular flavor nationally but not in the Northeast, where wintergreen (white) holds sway. In the Midwest, by contrast, ''You can't give away wintergreen," says Jeffrey Green, the company's vice president for research and development. ''They think it tastes like Pepto-Bismol."
The tiny Sweethearts may taste good but, let's be honest here, they're snores if you bother to read them. The 10 new sayings for 2006 include yawns like ''Call Home," ''Sweet Home," ''Go Home," ''Home Soon," and ''Home Sick."
These make Hallmark cards read like ''Lady Chatterley's Lover." Necco clearly needs some pizzazz here. Foodies are already reeling from the disastrous decline in the quality of Chinese fortune cookie messages, which now read like computer prompts. So the Observer floated to Zambalatti and operations czar Bill Leva the nifty idea of a new line of adult Sweethearts with some racy words on them to light the Valentine fires. They blanched.
Never mind. The company will unveil in the next few months a new line of Necco Wafers. This news is huge, right up there with the latest on Iran's nuclear schemes, because aside from its brief experiment with a line of tangy fruit flavors in the mid-'90s, Necco hasn't touched its flavor lineup since the 1930s.
The big question, of course, is what will the hogs think?
***