On my own blog, The Simple Activist, I recently wrote about the actual cost of a candy bar. Many of those costs are political, actually.
Think about it. While you’re standing in the checkout line looking over that rack of chocolate and doing battle with your temptations, you are not thinking about the political ramifications of that purchase. You’re thinking about your diet, you’re thinking about nutrition, you’re thinking about cravings, you’re thinking about your weakness, you’re thinking about what you won’t eat later today or how you will exercise to justify buying 300 calories worth of candy.
I bet buying candy being a political act never crosses your mind.
But it is, in two main ways.
First, in resources used and choices foregone. (Those I’ve covered at greater length in my entry on this topic.) Resources are becoming scarce enough on this planet that using them is now political: interests battling each other for the right to use them to give American consumers things they “need” and, more importantly, line the pockets of the providers, who, in turn, line the pockets of the politicians who made them winners in the resource-allocation battle.
Second, the purchase price of a candy bar contributes to what the candy industry pays for lobbying to shape federal, state and local law and policy. This means that, no matter what they’re lobbying for, when you buy a candy bar, you are supporting that voice and that issue because you have helped pay for it.
Here’s just one example. In 2005, California was considering a bill that would have required candy being imported from Mexico to be tested for lead content, and imposed lead-level standards on imported candy. The bill passed – in spite of the lobbying efforts of the candy-manufacturers’ trade association, the National Confectioners Association, to defeat it.
Ok – what that means is that every candy bar I bought in 2005 partially supported the candy makers’ efforts to be allowed to sell candy with lead in it to consumers, including children, who are the most susceptible to damage from lead poisoning. Mea maxima culpa, I knew not what I did.
You might say Mexico Schmexico, who buys Mexican candy anyway? You do, probably. Much of the American candy industry went outside the borders when the sugar lobby here (don't even get me started) became powerful enough to make American sugar financially unsavory for the candy makers. Hershey has plants in Mexico. So does M&M/Mars.
It’s enough to make you revamp your idea of candy being a comfort food, isn’t it?
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