Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America [Audiobook, Unabridged] [Audio CD]

Steve Almond (Author), Oliver Wyman (Reader)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 24, 2004

Perhaps you remember The Marathon, Oompahs, Bit-O-Choc, or Kit Kat Dark. Where did they go? Driven by his obsession, stubborn idealism, and the promise of free candy, self-confessed candyfreak Steve Almond takes off on a quest to discover candy's origins in America, to explore little companies that continue to get by on pluck and perseverance, and to witness the glorious excess of candy manufacturing. Part candy porn, part candy polemic, part social history, part confession, Candyfreak explores the role candy plays in our lives as both source of pleasure and escape from pain. By turns ecstatic, comic, and bittersweet, Candyfreak is the story of how Steve Almond grew up on candy---and how, for better and worse, candy has grown up too.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Picture a magical, sugar-fueled road trip with Willy Wonka behind the wheel and David Sedaris riding shotgun, complete with chocolate-stained roadmaps and the colorful confetti of spent candy wrappers flying in your cocoa powder dust. If you can imagine such a manic journey--better yet, if you can imagine being a hungry hitchhiker who's swept through America's forgotten candy meccas: Philadelphia (Peanut Chews), Sioux City (Twin Bing), Nashville (Goo Goo Cluster), Boise (Idaho Spud) and beyond--then Candyfreak: A Journey through the Chocolate Underbelly of America, Steve Almond's impossible-to-put down portrait of regional candy makers and the author's own obsession with all-things sweet, would be your Fodor's guide to this gonzo tour.

With the aptly named Almond (don't even think of bringing up the Almond Joy bit--coconut is Almond's kryptonite), obsession is putting it mildly. Almond loves candy like no other man in America. To wit: the author has "three to seven pounds" of candy in his house at all times. And then there's the Kit Kat Darks incident; Almond has a case of the short-lived confection squirreled away in an undisclosed warehouse. "I had decided to write about candy because I assumed it would be fun and frivolous and distracting," confesses Almond. "It would allow me to reconnect to the single, untarnished pleasure of my childhood. But, of course, there are no untarnished pleasures. That is only something the admen of our time would like us to believe." Almond's bittersweet nostalgia is balanced by a fiercely independent spirit--the same underdog quality on display by the small candy makers whose entire existence (and livelihood) is forever shadowed by the Big Three: Hershey's, Mars, and Nestle.

Almond possesses an original, heartfelt, passionate voice; a writer brave enough to express sheer joy. Early on his tour he becomes entranced with that candy factory staple, the "enrober"--imagine an industrial-size version of the glaze waterfall on the production line at your local Krispy Kreme, but oozing chocolate--dubbing it "the money shot of candy production." And while he writes about candy with the sensibilities of a serious food critic (complimenting his beloved Kit Kat Dark for its "dignified sheen," "puddinglike creaminess," "coffee overtones," and "slightly cloying wafer") words like "nutmeats" and "rack fees" send him into an adolescent twitter.

...the Marathon Bar, which stormed the racks in 1974, enjoyed a meteoric rise, died young, and left a beautiful corpse. The Marathon: a rope of caramel covered in chocolate, not even a solid piece that is, half air holes, an obvious rip-off to anyone who has mastered the basic Piagetian stages, but we couldn't resist the gimmick. And then, as if we weren't bamboozled enough, there was the sleek red package, which included a ruler on the back and thereby affirmed the First Rule of Male Adolescence: If you give a teenage boy a candy bar with a ruler on the back of the package, he will measure his dick

Candyfreak is one of those endearing, quirky titles that defy swift categorization. One of those rare books that you'll want to tear right through, one you won't soon stop talking about. And eager readers beware: It's impossible to flip through ten pages of this sweet little book without reaching for a piece of chocolate. --Brad Thomas Parsons --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

The appropriately named Almond goes beyond candy obsession to enter the realm of "freakdom." Right up front, he divulges that he has eaten a piece of candy "every single day of his entire life," "thinks about candy at least once an hour" and "has between three and seven pounds of candy in his house at all times." Indeed, Almond's fascination is no mere hobby—it's taken over his life. And what's a Boston College creative writing teacher to do when he can't get M&Ms, Clark Bars and Bottle Caps off his mind? Write a book on candy, of course. Almond's tribute falls somewhere between Hilary Liftin's decidedly personal Candy and Me and Tim Richardson's almost scholarly Sweets: A History of Candy. There are enough anecdotes from Almond's lifelong fixation that readers will feel as if they know him (about halfway through the book, when Almond is visiting a factory and a marketing director offers him a taste of a coconut treat, readers will know why he tells her, "I'm really kind of full"—he hates coconut). But there are also enough facts to draw readers' attention away from the unnaturally fanatical Almond and onto the subject at hand. Almond isn't interested in "The Big Three" (Nestle, Hershey's and Mars). Instead, he checks out "the little guys," visiting the roasters at Goldenberg's Peanut Chews headquarters and hanging out with a "chocolate engineer" at a gourmet chocolate lab in Vermont. Almond's awareness of how strange he is—the man actually buys "seconds" of certain candies and refers to the popular chocolate mint parfait as "the Andes oeuvre"—is strangely endearing.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Audio CD
• Publisher: HighBridge Company; Unabridged edition (May 24, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 156511910X
• ISBN-13: 978-1565119109
• Product Dimensions: 5.7 x 4.9 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.3 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (106 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,210,723 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #62 in Books > Books on CD > Cooking, Food & Wine

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars I Laughed Myself Silly At the Beginning, June 9, 2006

By 

Axis "Freelance Media Designer" (Tampa, FL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Candyfreak: A Journey through the Chocolate Underbelly of America (Hardcover)

If Steve Almond is a candyfreak, then I'm a candywhore. I'll take it where I can get it and I'm not half as discriminating about its origins.
That said, you can't help but laugh outright at the sugar-fanaticism of a man who gets faint with joy witnessing the birth of chocolate bunnies and is rendered speechless at the thoughtless waste of even one piece of chocolate, recalling, "I stood there in a cloud of disillusionment...I'm someone who has been known to eat the pieces of candy found underneath my couch."
Goaded by the disappearance of his adored Caravelle bar, Almond (yes, he talks about the name) tours independent candy companies (read: anyone other than Mars, Nestle, or Hershey) to, "chronicle their struggles for survival in this wicked age of homogeneity, and, not incidentally, to load up on free candy."
The best laughs are all in the first five chapters. I giggled, chuckled and guffawed my way through the author's confessions of freak-like candy-hoarding, reveling in the kind of sweet self-effacing wit only a candy junkie could muster.
From there, it's mostly an historical tour of the four candy companies he visited, fascinating and richly detailed, yet interspersed with progressively more disturbing moments of personal crisis. At one point the author himself notes, "I realize that I am oversharing," a phrase that, in a work of humor especially, should be immediately followed by the words, "so I'll quit while I'm ahead." No such luck. From that point on, we are treated to sad reflections on how one may ineffectively attempt to use candy to fill the void created by emotionally unavailable parents, an alarming, overly personal description of penile hypochondria, and finally, how Dubya, terrorists, college hockey players, and Reaganomics are to blame for everything from airport security to the author's inability to give up pot and find love. I found the experience much like seeing a houseguest naked -- you don't know whether to avert your eyes and mumble an apology or pretend it's hilarious and hope he laughs along.
The erratic emotional pitch of the book can be summed up by Almond's description of a candy-orgy during a San Francisco layover; "A brief jolt of good humor...followed by a plunge into hypoglycemic grumpiness." If this book were a candy bar, it would start with a light, crispy, sweetness, get sort of sticky and tasteless in the middle, and end heavily with an artificial, saccharine jolt, leaving the reader with a nasty aftertaste and the vague notion that he should have quit after the first bite.
Perhaps if Almond has just stuck to candy, the last bite...er, page would have been as good as the first.

44 of 54 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars witty & sweet., April 23, 2004

By 

Felicia Sullivan (New York, ny United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Candyfreak: A Journey through the Chocolate Underbelly of America (Hardcover)

Review: From Small Spiral Notebook

In Candyfreak, Almond parlays his own obsession with chocolate into a quest to seek out the sources and practices of today's chocolate confection, as well as to learn about the forces that have overwhelmed the artistry and pluck of individual chocalatiers into the mechanized behemoth of American mass culture. Throughout, Almond tempers his political urgencies with his own disarming awe and glee at the industry and its products, and he also deals with unfolding family tragedies. His grandfather is dying, while at the same time Almond realizes his lifelong zeal for chocolate both saved his life and "broke his spirit." If it sounds like too much to cram in, perhaps you've not read Almond's ambitious book of sort stories, My Life in Heavy Metal, a book that will give you faith in Almond's ability to multi-task, regardless of genre.

Almond's prose packs a sensory wallop at all times. It is also candid, direct, and muscular- he wastes no space. Because of his economy, his writing is akin to the best candy: all good stuff, no fill or the useless air that puffs up the wretched Three Musketeers bar. When he rattles off the names of regional candybars now gone to mass marketers, he says their names are "incantatory poetry." When he says he doesn't like coconut, he says it's like "chewing on a sweetened cuticle." The writing says it: candy, chocolate in particular, for Almond is a passion, a "freak." And like all freaks, Almond has his rage, and the loss of a particular candybar, the Caravelle, and his subsequent despondency and rampage after any sign of it led him to consider the book.

Almond meditates on the sources of his "freak," including its lineage. His father's passion for Junior Mints he sees as a thing to awe: "I loved watching him eat these, patiently, with moist clicks of the tongue. I loved his mouth, the full, pillowy lips, the rakishly crooked teeth-the mouth of a closet sensualist." After some consideration of the roots, however, he's off, interviewing confectioners, visiting factories and tasting candy fresh out of the "enrober" (a device to which he devotes many fine lines), squirreling away samples, and trying to see what did happen to chocolate in America. The short answer is, well, the same thing that happened virtually to every worthwhile thing from beer to sports: mass distribution, mass advertising, mass culture, mass dumbing down.

The short answer doesn't do justice to Almond's work because Candyfreak does what the best creative nonfiction does: reports something in unerring detail, educates about a topic we thought we knew a thing or two about, tells a story both about the author and about the subject, and delivers the whole package in style. Almond's fevered style-known to many from his short stories-here finds a subject about which many folks feel feverish, and the result is one of the most entertaining books I've read in a while.

Almond's tries to balance political fantasy and the reality of the urge: "In my own pathologically romantic sense of things, I viewed [little] companies as throwbacks to a bygone era of candy, when each town had its individual brands. And the good peoples of this country would gather together, in public squares with lots of trees and perhaps a fellow picking a banjo, and they would partake of the particular candy bar produced in their town and feel a surge of sucrose-fueled civic identity. What I really wanted to do was visit these companies-if nay still existed-and to chronicle their struggles for survival in this wicked age of homogeneity, and, not incidentally, to load up on free candy."

While he showcases opinions and can seem hostile at times in his discernment, he is not faddish or uncritical: "The new chocolate specialty products are equally pretentious. I ask you, does the world truly need a bar infused with hot masala? The latest rage, as of this writing, is super-concentrated chocolate, with a cocoa content in the 90 percent range, a trend that will, in due time, allow us to eat Baker's Chocolate at ten bucks a square."

Opinionated, deftly and surprisingly written, thoroughly experienced, and surprisingly moving, Steve Almond's Candyfreak will have you wandering into specialty stores hoping they have candy racks. It will have you looking down your nose at M&Ms, for perhaps the first time in your life. It will have you cruising the Internet for the Five Star Bar, hoping the taste lives up to the writing. It will have you thinking about chocolate for weeks afterward, more than you ever have. And it will have you wanting to return to the book, again and again, to find those sentences, those toothsome, goo-on-your-chin, crunchulicious miracles of sentences, and to wish everyone you know the pleasure of experiencing the world, for a little while anyway, mouth first.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A terrific read for many reasons, May 20, 2004

By 

P. Keating (Weston, MA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Candyfreak: A Journey through the Chocolate Underbelly of America (Hardcover)

With all due respect to other reviews that critize Almond's style and 'voice', I thoroughly enjoyed the playful and often philosophical narrative in this hugely interesting and entertaining book. It's one of the best books that I've read, devored really, in years. Candyfreak isn't a simple book to categorize; it's not just a history of candy, it's also a fascinating, and indeed personal, journey that captures in very funny and vivid ways the people and places where candy is made and revered. Sure, Candyfreak has a lot of interesting information about candy and its history, but for a non-candy lover, it never comes across as boring or dense. This is a book that I enjoyed because of the energy and honesty of the author and his ability to fuse laugh-out-loud humor with real insight and vulnerability -- about his own experiences as well as the changes in American culture and choices as exampled by the candy industry.

I have recommended this book to people of all ages and no one has found its content objectionable. The consistent feedback from those who have read Candyfreak is that it is fresh, funny, and poignant, without being maudlin. These days, when the new non-fiction section is dominating by heavy, monolithic chronicles and political slams, Candyfreak stands out as a jewel of a book that is tasty on many levels and flavors. I think you'll enjoy very much.