People are either fascinated or apalled by my eating habits. The New York Times once interviewed me about them and the writer, David Colman, and I enjoyed an especially satisfying trip to the Hershey store in midtown, which is pretty much my church. If you’d like to read this piece, there’s a link to it in the Interviews section of this blog.
To summarize: I enjoy the diet of an independantly wealthy four-year-old orphan. I eat only want I want, which tends towards milk chocolate, certain breakfast cereals, baked goods and water. I’ve also written about this in my essay collection, I Shudder.
After the Times piece was published, the Hershey people sent me a delerious collection of wonderful treats, including a Hershey’s Kiss as big as my head, which was filled with a trove of regular-sized Kisses. It was a Hershey’s Kiss which gave birth. It was a hive.
I also received a Hershey bar so large that it arrived in its own gleaming silver tote bag, packed with dry ice. This Hershey bar knew how to travel.
At the M&Ms store, across the street from the Hershey flagship, you can get M&Ms in custom colors, including khaki, magenta and silver. There used to be a mystical machine in the store, where if you stood on a circle embedded in the floor and held onto a lever, the machine would predict your personal M&M color. Can your therapist do that?
At another M&M store, which I think was in Vegas, you could buy a round dining room table and matching chairs, all shaped like M&Ms.
I feel towards the Hershey corporation the way some people feel about Walt Disney: if there’s a dark side to the empire, I don’t want to know about it.
Strangers who find out about my diet will sometimes approach me and in urgent whispers, confess similar habits. I encourage these people. I’m like a rehab counsellor who tells addicts, “You should really inject more heroin. It’s the best.”
I love that in marketing journals, candy products are referred to as “confections.” It’s a giddy, appealing word. Why would anyone want grains or beef or poultry, when they could have a confection?
While I try not to play favorites, I’m currently having a major Payday moment. Payday bars are clusters of salted peanuts cemented with something sweet and caramel-esque; I’m not sure precisely what this connective stuff is, but it tastes heavenly and makes the peanuts, and me, so happy.
The above photo is either a spaceship shaped like a Kiss, or a Kiss discovered on another planet, where it was rightfully worshipped.
Our family beagle, at an advanced age, died after leaping onto a table and devouring an outsize bar of unsweetened baker’s chocolate. While I know that chocolate is bad for most animals, I like to think that our dog died happy.
Of course, candy is an epic topic, and could never be covered in a single blog post. We’ll return to it.
