Nerds Candy Corn
In a California suburb, time is seasonless. The months get swallowed up in pleasant monotony. To mark time, I have learned the cues of the land. Few cues are more reliable than the Walgreens holiday aisle.
Before September was out, fresh candy colonized this aisle. Every shelf is now populated with bright colored bags, some small, some weighing multiple pounds. These tactless sacks are the heralds of Halloween, here to magnetize the eyes and melt on the hands of eager, screaming children. The candies come in all sizes and shapes, running from mini to fun to double King, each promising a sweeter, chewier, or stranger flavor than the last. These promises hold varying levels of truth.
Candy corn is a liar. It in no way resembles corn, but its flimsy costume is not the problem. The real issue is its consistently empty promise that it will be a good time. Back when I was an eager, screaming child, I would fall for its guiles every year. My failure to learn became my own private tradition, a cycle of desire and disappointment.
After many years of abstinence, I reencountered the corn as an adult. I was no longer drawn by its orange glow, its modest stature, or even the gentle dimples along its length. Still, I felt a familiar impulse, an unfounded hope I wanted to embrace. I snatched a bag, paid the fee, tore it open, and popped the kernels into my mouth. There the kernels drove home their eternally unchanging punchline: nope, still bad.
Twice the fool, I resolved to never again pay for this stuff. I have better vices now anyway. How long has it been since my last kernel? A lifetime, it seems. Not since before the pandemic. Maybe not since my divorce. If I'd had to guess where my next candy corn kernel would come from, I would have thought of a chance encounter by the punch bowl, something to occupy my teeth during a conversational lull, if only to remind myself I’d made the right choice.
Then, standing in the Walgreen’s holiday aisle, I saw Nerds Candy Corn.
Confronted with such a conceptual train wreck, I could not turn away. The bag explains the candy. The outside is a candy shell, the inside is soft and chewy. These are answers to a question I hadn't thought to ask. More important questions remain unanswered, e.g., Why? Who did this? And for whom? The cartoonish Nerds have no answers. They hop around the bag in mindless glee. A purple Nerd with a witch hat stares down into the bag, licking its lips. Are these things cannibalistic? Curiosity opens my wallet, and I take home a half-pound bag to evaluate.
The first torn corner releases a familiar, curious aroma—not the stale vanilla of candy corn, but the odd acidity of Nerds. I can picture them so clearly, itty bitty crunchy sugar pebbles, shuffling in their little cardboard box. My very first kernel, strawberry grape, immediately subverts this memory, yielding immediately to the tooth and releasing a punchy blast of fruit flavor. The texture is sublime. The outer shell is waxy, extremely tooth-sinkable, while the interior is just as soft and chewy as advertised. Taken together, the average texture resembles that of candy corn.
The next one, orange on the outside with a cherry watermelon interior, is blindingly sour. An immediate pucker seizes my mouth and crawls up my face, causing involuntary squinting contortions as my nerves process the unnaturally low pH. Suddenly the designers’ intentions snap into focus. After the sour shell draws out the saliva, the profoundly juicy interior splashes relief. The sour hit is reminiscent of Warheads. A quick scan confirms my suspicion. The active ingredient is malic acid.
Malic acid is abundantly found in grapes, watermelons, and cherries, flavors that all feature prominently in Nerds Candy Corn. These caricatures, fully abstracted from their original fruits, add yet more layers to the synthetic legacy of candy corn. Halloween no longer points back to the harvest. It points back to itself, a combination of nostalgia loops and novelty arms races that iterates endlessly through the years.
In 1969, conceptual artist Alvin Lucier made a recording of his voice. He spoke into a microphone, played it back into an empty room, recorded the result, played it back, and recorded it again. He repeated this process ad nauseum, his voice a little vaguer and more echoey with each generation, until it had been supplanted entirely by resonant frequencies, glassy harmonics that ring and fade, their volume swells the sole reminder of his original speech pattern. The information was destroyed. All that was left was what the room said back. Perhaps that is all the room heard in the first place.
Nerds Candy Corn is the Alvin Lucier recording of harvest-themed candy. It takes the raw material of candy corn, the original liar of Halloween sweets, processes it through the nostalgic 1980's lens of Nerds, one-ups itself with a Gushers-like double layer texture contrast, borrows from the hyperacidic pucker contest of the early 90's, combinatorializes six different flavor profiles into six overlapping pairings, and loads it all into a family-sized bag. A keen eye can trace the logic, walk through the chain of influences that led us to the current baffling candy-shelf metagame in which a bag like this makes sense. It doesn't make the past any less dead.
Will Nerds Candy Corn be a candy kids remember fondly, a candy they will eventually look back on and wonder if it is still made and sold today, hoping their children and their children's children will get some of those stolen moments for themselves?
Surely not. It's too finicky, too gimmicky, and above all too derivative.
I still want another bag.
