An Ode to White Trash Candy

With Halloween so near, a girl’s thoughts turn to sweets. Nobody eats more candy than White Trash kids. It’s a major food group. It’s a cheap way to shut the kid up, and since WT parents don’t give a damn if their kid runs wild as long as it’s outside the house/trailer, the sugar high isn’t a problem.

Looking back on all the candy of my youth, I tried to decide which were the trashiest of all.

Anything cheap, of course, is good for WT-ness, but it’s the spirit I’m looking at, the very essence of the candy: what it means, and why we’d buy it.

So, the top 3 picks of WT candy from my childhood are…drumroll…

#3: Big League Chew

Somebody brilliant came up with the idea of shredding bubble gum and putting in a ‘tobacco’ pouch! So you could chew and spit just like the ‘real’ baseball players. Grape was the best, because it turned your spit purple.

#2: Candy Cigarettes

The mind boggles at the pure audacity. Nobody ever thought to question these when I was a kid, and parents picked up a pack for the kid, while they bought the ‘real’ thing at the Piggly Wiggly. Considering the fuss everyone made over a cigarette company using a camel cartoon to ‘lure’ kids into the evils of smoking, the idea that at one time, it was perfectly okay to market cigarettes as tasty and fun, is just amazing.

If you had candy cigarettes, you’ll probably remember they tasted pretty nasty. But it was fun to ‘puff’ on them and blow the dusty sugar out of your mouth for ‘smoke.’ The one candy that always made you feel grown up…and got you started on a lifetime of dangerous addiction. Woo-hoo! That attitude—the screw you, I don’t care, go ahead and die, whatever—is so WT, it must be applauded.

It’s really hard to find candy cigarettes anymore, once people jumped on the PC bandwagon. You can get them at a few stores, but they’re called candy ‘sticks’ now, and don’t have that cool cigarette-pack look anymore. Interestingly, nobody ever protested Big League Chew; you can still get that anywhere.

#1: Homemade Cinnamon Toothpicks

Candy stores sell these now, in cute little crinkly packages, but I’m talking old skool toothpicks. Every WT kid-turned-entrepreneur could be counted on to show up on the school bus Monday morning with a plastic baggie of these fiery sticks. 10 cents apiece, or 6 for 50 cents. Maybe that was a deal, or maybe the WT kids just weren’t too good at multiplying. Whatever the case, they were sold out in minutes.

The toothpicks were ‘illegal’ in school, which made them extra fun, plus after you held some you could rub your fingers over your friend’s eyes and give them one hell of a burn. Heehee.

Now, these toothpicks were amazingly easy to make, and making your own would be way cheaper than buying them, but there was etiquette involved. You did not make any unless you were an established pusher of said toothpicks. And NOBODY but the WT were approved pushers. This was White Trash turf, and any time a middle-class kid tried to horn in on the action, he could expect his ass to be kicked and his toothpicks to be stolen. Donald Trump has nothing on the WT toothpick-sellers.

What candy best represents your childhood?

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