Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America Read Online Free PDF Page B

tell me what flavor white is supposed to signify. Pineapple? Coconut? Isopropyl?
Lime LifeSavers : The LifeSavers people haven’t figured out by now that no one likes this flavor?
Coconut : We now come to an area where I depart from the rational and enter the realm of the phobic. Oddly, it isn’t the flavor of coconut that troubles me, but the texture, and specifically that stringy residue utterly impervious to the normal processes of digestion. In short, I feel as if I’m chewing on a sweetened cuticle. Anyone who’s eaten a Mounds knows exactly what I’m talking about. The chocolate and corn syrup dissolve quickly enough and one is left with those stubborn fibers which lurk in the mouth and, eventually, maroon themselves in the crannies of one’s teeth. The exceptions to this embargo are products in which the coconut is either toasted or combined with other crunchy ingredients, thus obscuring the cuticle effect. The example that comes to mind is the brash and ridiculous Chick-OStick, a wand of peanut butter encased in brittle and sprinkled with toasted coconut.
White chocolate : When I was eight or nine years old I flew from California to New York with my twin brother, Mike. We were unchaperoned and therefore doted on by the stewardesses, who snuck us each a special dessert from first class: a white chocolate lollipop. I wolfed mine down and, shortly thereafter, got violently ill. This was mortifying at the time. In retrospect, I’m sort of proud of myself.
Vomiting strikes me as proper response to white chocolate, which is, in fact, not chocolate (as it contains no cocoa) but a scourge visited upon us by the inimical forces of Freak Evil.

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    CARAVELLE: AN ELEGY
    Art arises from loss. I wish this weren’t the case. I wish that every time I met a new woman and she rocked my world, I was inspired to write my ass off. But that is not what happens. What happens is we lie around in bed eating chocolate and screwing. Art is what happens when things don’t work out, when you’re licking your wounds. Art is, to a larger extent than people would like to think, a productive licking of the wounds.
    Loss, after all, leads rather naturally to the quest. The Greeks want Helen. Odysseus wants to get home (eventually). Dante wants Beatrice. Ahab wants the whale. Proust wants his cookies. And so on.
    In the instant case, this entire book arose from the loss of a single candy bar. I am speaking of the Caravelle, though for many years I had no name to attach to this want. I had only memories. I had myself, at the age of nine or so, anxious, be -reft, on a bus downtown to meet the therapist assigned the dubious task of restoring my capacity for self-love, and I had Mac’s Smoke Shop, where all the essential vices were gathered in the smoky, crepuscular gloom with men who were somehow lesser versions of my father, sad and preoccupied, right there next to me but totally out of reach, and where a glorious central rack of candy, which was, in turn, gathered around this one candy bar in its bright yellow wrapper. It cost a quarter. There were two pieces per pack.
    What was the Caravelle? It was a strip of caramel covered in a thick shell of milk chocolate, which was embedded with crisped rice. Yes, I know. That’s the 100 Grand. But no one with even the dullest palate could ever have confused the two. The chocolate in the 100 Grand is mild and crumbly. The crisped rice is mealy and deflated. The caramel is the color of a washed-out varnish. And the balance is all wrong. There simply isn’t enough chocolate or crisped rice to sustain the salivary breakdown. As a result, you wind up with a mouthful of rubbery caramel.
    The Caravelle tasted more like a pastry: the chocolate was thicker, darker, full-bodied, and the crisped rise had a malty flavor and what I want to call structural integrity; the caramel was that rarest variety, dark and lustrous and supple, with hints of fudge. More so, there was a sense of the piece yielding to the