If you went trick-or-treating back in the 1990s and early 2000s, you may have noticed something: The candy tasted better back then. You aren’t imagining it. It’s not the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia playing tricks on you. It’s not the fact that your taste buds have “evolved.” The candy today truly does taste like hot garbage. And that’s because it is.

Take Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, for example. Despite claims that its “classic recipe” hasn’t changed, it has. Anyone who’s eaten them over the past two to three decades could tell you that by taste alone. But we have proof.

In the 1960s, Hershey added dextrose to the recipe. In the 1980s, industrial-strength preservative tert-butylhydroquinone (TBHQ) and citric acid joined the mix. And by 2006, Hershey had added polyglycerol polyricinoleate (PGPR), an emulsifier known to change the consistency of chocolate.

Snickers has changed substantially as well. The beloved treat once contained malted milk and sweetened condensed milk, but no more. Now it’s full of palm oil and “artificial flavor.” In 2019, the company also admitted to reducing the amount of chocolate covering it used for the candy bar.

Seemingly opposed to straightforward shrinkflation, however, some products such as Reese’s Chocolate Peanut Butter Mini Hearts Unwrapped took a more circuitous route and instead consist primarily of sugar and seed oil, containing 2% or less of cocoa. A chocolate candy that barely has chocolate in it? Why even bother to call it chocolate anymore? But it only gets worse.

Several of the world’s largest chocolate manufacturers have entered partnerships with companies developing lab-grown cocoa or chocolate substitutes. Mondelēz, Lindt, and Puratos are investing in lab-grown chocolate, while Mars, Nestlé, Cargill, and Barry Callebaut have joined up with companies developing cocoa-free chocolate substitutes. Some of these products are already on store shelves. Manufacturers expect others to become commercially available by the end of 2026.

But the question is, why? Why spend years and years intentionally creating an inferior product?

The corporations will tell you they’re saving the planet. Sustainability, innovation, environmental responsibility. They’ve got an entire vocabulary dedicated to making their business decisions sound like acts of charity, all while they slash and burn yet another palm oil forest.

But there’s another word conspicuously absent from all that gushingly saccharine corporate altruism: profit. Because while the marketing departments wax poetic about sustainability, the manufacturers themselves are advertising lower production costs, cheaper ingredients, and freedom from volatile cocoa prices. And therein lies the real incentive.

So what can you do when a company decides its bottom line matters more than the health and well-being of your child? Play the game better.

Each Dollar Is A Vote

Many moms whom I have personally spoken to this year are in alignment. They cannot, in good conscience, feed their child product instead of real, actual food.

Due in part to these mothers who refuse to accept the status quo for their families, there is a rapidly expanding market geared toward health-conscious consumers. And while not all of the options are perfect, they’re significantly better than the alternative.

For chocolate, MrBeast Feastables are a fantastic option. The brand’s current milk chocolate bar contains sugar, whole milk powder, cocoa butter, unsweetened chocolate, soy lecithin, and natural vanilla extract. So no seed oils, no artificial flavors, no ingredients you can’t pronounce, and nothing with a number tacked onto its name.

Unreal offers great alternatives to Reese’s, M&M’s, and Almond Joy, while Justin’s makes an excellent substitute for Reese’s if you prefer organic ingredients.

And for the gummy and hard candy enthusiasts, Solely, YumEarth, and SmartSweets all make good alternatives.

Of course, there’s a catch: the price. Buying high-quality candy for your own children is one thing. Buying enough for the entire neighborhood is quite another.

But that doesn’t mean you have to abandon the tradition altogether. You can still give them the magic of Halloween without giving them everything that comes home in their candy bag.

So here’s what I, and several other mothers I’ve spoken with, are doing this year. We’re still taking our children trick-or-treating, and we’re still leaving out candy. But at the end of the night, the candy our children collect will go into the bucket for the older trick-or-treaters still making the rounds. One mom I spoke to even came up with the clever idea of letting her son trade in his Halloween haul for a stuffed animal.

Our kids will still be eating candy on Halloween night. It’ll just be the candy we’ve chosen for them and the treats we’ve made ourselves.

Fright Night

Growing up, I remember the urban legends of razor blades hidden in caramel apples and shards of glass concealed in unwrapped candy. They were things our parents cautioned us about, things we looked out for even though no one we knew had ever received a razor blade on Halloween night, let alone an entire caramel apple.

But Halloween is different now. We might still scrutinize our children’s candy for evidence of tampering before handing it back to them, but what if the true threat was never glass and razor blades? What if it was never about a lone, rogue actor, but an entire industry of billion-dollar corporations continually searching for ways to pad their pockets at the expense of your child’s health?

What if the scariest part of Halloween wasn’t the ghosts, ghouls, and goblins, but the costume manufacturers shoved candy into? Today’s candy is forced to masquerade as food, but in reality it’s just an amorphous amalgamation of solvent-extracted oils, petroleum-derived dyes, and industrial preservatives.

What if the most frightening aspect of Halloween is that monsters no longer have to sneak dangerous candy into our children’s bags? We put it there ourselves.

***

Alicia Bittle is a mother of five whose work focuses primarily on the intersection of family, faith, and culture. She also writes for Evie Magazine.

This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

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My Kids Are Going Trick-Or-Treating. But They’re Not Eating The Candy.

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