The urban legends of razor blades, poison injections and demonic worms encased in the cores of candy apples may have never been confirmed as fact, but something dangerous does lie in this autumn confection: the apple itself. Almost offensively sweet in its classic American incarnation, with a hard shell that threatens immediate tooth loss with every bite, the candy apple has comparable cousins all over the world, from France and Brazil with their ‘apples of love’ (also a curious old-fashioned name for the tomato), to sugar-coated hawthorn berries in China. In all cases it’s the same collusion between fresh natural purity and man-made saccharine stickiness, and while candy certainly carries an unnatural association with permanence, the fragile fruit inside will not last forever. I found this out the hard way recently, when I neglected to put a gift apple in my mouth (no, I will not double back to erase that horrible pun), and left it in a cabinet to await a future sugar craving. An investigation of the object a few days later revealed a rotting apple sheathed within the bright red exterior, and the realization that while sugar preserves itself, it hastens the destruction of organic matter, apparently releasing a not-unpleasant apple pie smell in the process. A more intrepid food explorer might have cut the apple in half to investigate its insides, but I feared the inevitable mixing of rot mush with sticky candy coating, and so was content to rest the doomed fruit in my palm and photograph its last pre-trash moments. Happy Halloween!
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The coded language of snacks, sandwiches and seasonings, in NYC and beyond.
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