crafts - Attention, Necco-lovers (long)

As I recall, there are a couple of you on rctn and/or rfc, in which case I
hope you enjoy this column from today's Boston Globe.

Felice
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By Sam Allis, Globe Columnist

We should remember as we approach Valentine's Day that it remains the most
obnoxious among our many obnoxious holidays designed to alchemize emotion
into cash. The upside, of course, is the bald excuse it provides the
Observer to visit the Necco plant, where 8 billion candy hearts are made
each year, out in the moonscape of Revere.

To drop in on a candy factory these days is like touring a crystal meth
laboratory as far as the food police are concerned. (We are our own worst
enemy here.) Candy and other delights that hermetically seal our arteries,
such as tiramisu and creme anglaise, are reduced to memories in our besotted
quest for good health. Recommended consumption at dinner now consists of
dead fish and roadside greens.

Halloween aside, candy is a quaint concept in 2006. After-dinner mints are
as rare as they are weird. Someone may bring out a box after the bird at
Thanksgiving, but that just doesn't happen with takeout from Doyle's on
Tuesday nights. Ribbon candy, once a Christmas staple, disappeared with
cigars. Life Savers still sell, largely it seems, to ex-smokers resigned to
trade cigarettes for wholesale tooth decay. But when was the last time you
saw anyone older than 12 take down a 3 Musketeers?

Childhood, after all, was the last time we ate things we weren't supposed to
on a regular basis, and common candy is as redolent of this period of our
lives as baseball cards. (Forget anything with ''chocolatier" in the label
for people who shop for pearls at Mikimoto.) Both carry the scents of a
drugstore, all mint and malts and medicine, and attendant misbehavior. Good
& Plenty takes me back to the thrill of getting thrown out of a Saturday
afternoon movie.

My own theory on candy consumption is that it spikes among the young and the
old. The first cohort couldn't care about healthy eating and the second has
thrown in the towel on the idea. Middle-aged adults, meanwhile, graze
occasionally on Nestle Crunch and pound treadmills like crazed gerbils. I
bounced this off of Lory Zimbalatti, Necco's marketing manager, who took no
issue with it.

Which brings me to the New England Confectionery Company, which makes Necco
Wafers in a mammoth 820,000-square-foot facility that resembles a Lockheed
Martin assembly plant. The Observer has been ingesting tons of them since
John Foster Dulles was secretary of state. They are to candy what the great
Fig Newton is to cookies.

Necco, the oldest candy maker in the country, started churning out the
wafers in 1847, and today sells 4 billion of them a year. People consume 120
of them each minute worldwide. (Candy lends itself to fabulous factoids.) I
could go on. I will.

During one trip to Antarctica, explorer Richard Byrd took 2 1/2 tons of the
wafers with him, according to Necco, which provided almost a pound every
week for each of his men for two years.

It's not just humans, either. All of the Necco sugary detritus accumulated
from the confection process of wafers and the Sweethearts Conversation
Hearts goes to hog farmers, whose pigs crave the stuff. (You can't make this
up.) Zimbalatti told me Necco has a contract with a pig farmer from New York
State who comes and hauls the sweet garbage away. Cows, horses, and
elephants, she adds, also adore it.

Equally arresting, if a bit unnerving, is the shelf life of the wafers. It
appears to be eternal. A Necco lab manager recently found a roll made in
1952 and reported that, aside from some loss of flavor, it tasted fine. My
question is this: Could a wafer withstand nuclear attack?

I happen to prize licorice and clove (black and purple) over the other six
flavors. No one is lukewarm about licorice, Zimbalatti informs me; people
either love it or hate it. Chocolate (brown) is the most popular flavor
nationally but not in the Northeast, where wintergreen (white) holds sway.
In the Midwest, by contrast, ''You can't give away wintergreen," says
Jeffrey Green, the company's vice president for research and development.
''They think it tastes like Pepto-Bismol."

The tiny Sweethearts may taste good but, let's be honest here, they're
snores if you bother to read them. The 10 new sayings for 2006 include yawns
like ''Call Home," ''Sweet Home," ''Go Home," ''Home Soon," and ''Home
Sick."

These make Hallmark cards read like ''Lady Chatterley's Lover." Necco
clearly needs some pizzazz here. Foodies are already reeling from the
disastrous decline in the quality of Chinese fortune cookie messages, which
now read like computer prompts. So the Observer floated to Zambalatti and
operations czar Bill Leva the nifty idea of a new line of adult Sweethearts
with some racy words on them to light the Valentine fires. They blanched.

Never mind. The company will unveil in the next few months a new line of
Necco Wafers. This news is huge, right up there with the latest on Iran's
nuclear schemes, because aside from its brief experiment with a line of
tangy fruit flavors in the mid-'90s, Necco hasn't touched its flavor lineup
since the 1930s.

The big question, of course, is what will the hogs think?

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