Recently, in the middle of Nuremberg’s old town, I entered one of those new, brightly colored candy shops for the first time, which can currently be found all over German inner cities. After all, you want to keep fit and constantly push yourself to new limits, and this place seemed appropriately trashy. I also stand by my love for gummy bears and was secretly hoping to find a certain kind. So I let myself be sucked in. A childhood dream come true, it’s hell.
My self, instantly shriveled into a vegetative id, lets itself be smuggled helplessly along walls covered in pink and purple promises of happiness and fun made of plastic, fat and sugar, propelled by a pumping sound system that is otherwise only heard from the cars of posing country boys . A room like a large intestine that pushes me around in a circle and I’m already standing at the checkout. Behind me giggling groups of schoolchildren flood in like coke. I put my excessive demands on the cash register: a bar of Mozartkugeln.
I could have gone straight to the darkly paneled praline shop a few doors down, where boxes of fat bombs decorated with gold ribbons are waiting to end up in the leather bags of older ladies in felt hats before the sell-by date has expired. I’m probably not quite the target group of the new candy stores. But I definitely don’t count among the retired industrialists’ wives either. The gummy bear loving kid in me needs to find a home. only where?
Hybrid affiliations and differentiated taste preferences don’t really seem to be foreseen in the candy market. Or is that too crude? Up until a few years ago, there were still chocolate shops in inner cities, where you should be able to taste the origin of the cocoa like at a wine tasting. Even the citrus fruits previously grown on the same plantation. In the noughties, that fitted in with the ubiquitous incantation of the “new bourgeoisie”. If you invested time and money in expensive bars instead of chocolate-like palm fat, you could develop a certain cocoa competence with the same waist size, which you couldn’t buy anything for, but hey, other values were at stake here.
Many of those shops have since disappeared, giving way to those candy stores that pile up with glucose syrups of all shapes and colors and look forward to mutating people into instantly recognizable social classes. Because of course it’s like this: sweets are cheaper than healthy, and the market regulates it in such a way that the poor are fat.
But wait a minute. A pack of popcorn for ten euros? Packaged cotton candy as an investment? While some of these stores buy cheap leftovers, others seem to have evolved into bizarre delicatessens. It has been written that the boom in candy shops may be due to a kind of protest attitude on the part of young customers, the incorporation of an anti-aesthetic of the unhealthy and unreasonable: with sticky bars from the USA, Japanese goo from a tube and candy with a pop effect, young people are looking for “borderline experiences “ and a “counterpoint to healthy eating”, wrote the “Spiegel”.
Most importantly, these stores are a social media phenomenon that ironically has implications for the real world of shopping. The trade journal for marketing, advertising and media “Horizont” recently celebrated the candy shops popping up everywhere as a hope for the central locations stricken by the retail death. TikTok is identified as the biggest “growth driver”: Thousands of young people film their purchases and their yield (“Hauls”), some shops even have their own selfie corners.
It remains to be seen what consequences the restrictions on advertising for sweet, fat and salty foods recently called for by Federal Minister of Food Cem Özdemir for social media will have on this trend. But the candy store of arguments, it seems, only has glaring things to offer when it comes to overweight: either you eat burgers every day, or you’re vegan (with gender asterisks, of course). Either the state patronizes its citizens with sugar taxes, advertising withdrawal or veggie days, or the responsible consumer decides everything.
Most of us will be able to confirm that the fundamentalists are outnumbered in our own environment. Contrary to the climate of opinion fueled by many media, most people eat both. During the lockdown, for example, meat consumption fell because many company canteens were closed and people didn’t necessarily miss the meat if it wasn’t served to them as usual.
“Eating is a private matter,” begins a recently published article on Özdemir’s proposed law, a sentence whose ignorance of centuries of gastronomic reflection on the always social dimension of every meal renders speechless. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of ‘subtle differences’, which differentiated the upper and middle classes from the lower classes, is not dead. It has only returned as a zombie, the rule of gross differences.
The reactions from business, politics and the media to Özdemir’s move make it clear: despite the global hunger for sweets and the blurring of class differences, taste and social background suddenly play a major role again when talking about food. A columnist in “Spiegel” asks: “Should all insured people really always pay for the incorrigibly stupid and voluntarily fat?”
For some fellow citizens, fat people are apparently weak-willed junkies, for whom the already overburdened health system should not pay. Bad luck if you already had stupid parents, because unfortunately governments can’t do anything about it, it’s the sole task of the family to educate children to be critical media consumers and reasonable consumers.
The fact that this is nonsense has been proven and that a person first has to have a choice at all if he is to make a choice, which becomes difficult if, for example, water is more expensive than soda, is shown very clearly in the documentary “Dick, thicker, fettes Geld” by Sylvie Gilman and Thierry de Lestrade (available on arte.tv). If you look at developments in Chile, for example, where new, easy-to-understand warnings have measurably reduced the risk of parents putting harmful stuff in front of their children, even changed the norm of who the “cool kids” are (the ones with healthier food), you can see that that states are not so powerless in the face of the sugar-loving food and agribusiness.
The trend towards coarsening on the opinion market reflects the widening social divide. But as in earlier centuries, when an immovable corporate society prevailed and the scissors were therefore permanent, the carnival is enjoying fresh health. This can be seen on the RayFox YouTube channel, for example. Nicolas Aaron Rafael Neugart and his sidekick Flo are testing “the rarest, coolest and most viral TikTok candy in the world”.
Neugart lives and produces in Cologne, and it shouldn’t be a coincidence that the carnival stronghold has the highest concentration of such shops. Neugart opposes the different taste dogmas with his taste carnival, tied back to the Rabelaisian lower regions of the body: He “went out into the real world dutifully,” Neugart begins his story like a miller’s son in a fairy tale, and “as if the devil had noticed , he has thrown sugar in my way”. With a lot of fecal humor he goes through the “sugar hell”: “Hold on tight, you’re about to fart from shock”, he introduces a chewing bar, variety “orange cream taste”. Sidekick Flo: “The coolest thing is it says ‘Low Fat Snack’, hahaha!”.
With all regressive jokes, this self-test also shows the awareness of how unhealthy it all is. At the same time, it is also a celebration of the food industry’s abstruse wealth of ideas. Praise and insult, disgust and lust are as inseparable as caramel-glued jaws: Of course, the teeth will “rotten within five seconds”, but the YouTuber awards “ten out of ten points”. Of course, this is also a satire on the constant need to evaluate oneself. And that is exactly where a liberating effect lies, which one must first be able to afford.
“Aha! Ten minutes of everyday knowledge” is WELT’s knowledge podcast. Every Tuesday and Thursday we answer everyday questions from the field of science. Subscribe to the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Deezer, Amazon Music, among others, or directly via RSS feed.
