Hard to find a good kosher candy to throw at your kids

Sunkist Fruit Gems

     To be a Chicagoan — yes, I know I’m not — is to have a certain nostalgia about candy.
     Growing up here — OK, I grew up near Cleveland, thank you for noticing — meant to be aware of the enormous Brach’s factory on the West Side and the Spanish Revival Mars confectionery on Oak Park Avenue. Visits downtown were liable to give you a contact high from the cocoa aroma rolling off the Blommer’s chocolate factory.
     Being a fat kid — try snatching that away from me, you touchy chauvinists — I had a visceral understanding of the entire Brach’s line. The gorgeous slightly soft, matte milk chocolate stars. The shiny dark blobs of bridge mix, with its scorned peanuts and ultra vanilla creams.
     My mother played bridge — yes, in Berea, immediately west of Cleveland, geez, give it a rest, will ya? — and I would belly crawl, like soldiers on the “Combat!” TV show, into the living room, to snake my hand into a bowl and retrieve a fistful of mix, then scuttle back to my room to enjoy my prize. What a sight that must have been.
     And we — meaning Chicagoans and whatever unwanted interlopers manage to jam themselves among them — shouldn’t complain. Despite the insane sugar tariffs sending Chicago candy companies fleeing to Mexico, we still have a bounty: Ferrara Pan, churning out their vastly cool Nerds Gummy Clusters. Butterfingers and Baby Ruths are made in Franklin Park, which is not Chicago either, last time I checked.
     Some folks insist Tootsie Rolls are made in Chicago, though after a lifetime of being denied access to the factory, I hope you will forgive me for insisting Tootsie Rolls are actually made in the military dictatorship of Myanmar, excreted by emotionally-damaged French poodles trapped in inhumanely small crates and force fed a combination of high fructose corn syrup, industrial waste and the offal of rabbits who died testing cosmetics.

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