CANDY
Fruit substitute. 1. A rich confection, such as a strawberry sucker or a chocolate mint, designed to communicate with our taste buds for sweetness and, secondarily, with our receptors for sour, bitter, or salty tastes. 2. A food product designed to mimic the usually sweet taste of ripe fruit.Usage: In U.S. supermarkets, the three best-selling candy bars--M&M's, Snickers, and Reese's Peanut Butter
Cup (Krantz 1991)--contain nuts, and are crunchy rather than merely soft.
The top three successfully combine sweetness and nuttiness in a proven
evolutionary formula for primates. So tasty are these and other candy bars that,
according to the Hershey company, two-thirds are eaten immediately upon
purchase.
M&M's. Colorful, nut-sized M&M's are among the
most popular fruit substitutes of all time. Their crisp, candy coatings encase
milk chocolate mixed with finely ground peanut powder. On average, U.S. citizens
swallow 11,000 M&M's in a lifetime (Heyman 1992), liking the orange ones
least. (N.B.: The primate
brain decodes orange as a warning (or aposematic)
coloration sign, often associated with poisonous snakes, insects, and
berries.)
See also COCA-COLA, EXISTENTIAL CRUNCH, NUT SUBSTITUTE.
YouTube Video: Watch a lighthearted attempt to make an already crunchy candy even crunchier . . .Copyright 1999 - 2016 (David B. Givens/Center for
Nonverbal Studies)
Drawing of "Showing My Nonverbal Side" by my son Aaron M. Huffman (copyright 2012 by Aaron M. Huffman)