Necco candy buttons
Remember Necco's classic candy buttons? Heck, who doesn't? If you went to a candy shop as a kid, or visited Disneyland, or did any number of relatively amusing childhood sugar-eating things, you are probably perfectly familiar with them, even if you haven't eaten them for 10 or 20 years.
The buttons come in three basic flavors: "Yellow," "Pink" and "Blue," with the demi-flavors of "Blueish-Yellow" and "Pinkish-Yellow." They come in long orderly lines, stuck to plain strips of paper. And the flavors! My God, the flavors!
Yellow definitely tastes a little like lemon, with a papery aftertaste. Pink may possibly be a classic strawberry-wrapped-in-paper flavor. However, it may not. Blue is unclear, but there's defintely a distinct paper tang to it.
So why eat a candy that causes you to expectorate colored spitwads every few minutes? Excellent question. The main selling point of the damn things seems to be nostalgia, a la "Hey, remember when you were a kid and you'd eat anything? Even little glops of colored sugar stuck to sheets of paper? Why did your parents let you have this stuff? Didn't they care about your health? Anyway, here the damn things are. Buy 'em if you want 'em."
If you visit Necco's incredibly ratty website, you won't really find any explanation for the buttons — they're just there, amongst all the other candy from the 1950s that somehow hasn't died. You will, however, find a graphic that definitely looks like a drug deal in progress, albeit a drug deal undertaken by two giant anthropomorphized boxes of candy, cheered on by all their friends.
The truth is, the explanation for the continued existence of candy buttons is complicated. It hits right at the heart of the age we live in. Things have gotten more and more processed. Things have gotten more and more precise. Even crafts have gotten more and more perfectly and mechanically "authentic." QVC and any number of "global village" type stores hawk authentic handicrafts that are guaranteed to be one of a handful of precisely controlled designs, quality assured, money returned to those dissatisfied.
Well, Necco's candy buttons bring a newsflash from the past: Something is ALWAYS wrong. Buttons glop together. There are micro buttons where the nozzle screwed up. Colors blend together, and every single piece is 100 percent guaranteed to have paper stuck to it. There is no money back guarantee.
But the result is something pretty legitimately fun. Eating them takes some work, and some thought. There's a trick to minimizing the paper. It's not like Skittles or some other modern abomination that you just open and eat — candy buttons take some subtlety to master. They reward the precision tearing and manicuring of the buttons. And their sweet flavor has a beautiful simplicity that puts them right up there with rock candy.
So go ahead — go your local hardcore candy store, and see if you can't scare up some candy buttons. Take an afternoon, and peel some paper. Make some real lemonade, with lemons and sugar and water. Grill up a steak or a nice block of steak-flavored tofu. It's okay if it takes all day — there's nothing on television, and the world's a pretty nice place when you just kick it, like they did before electricity.
Thanks, Necco.
