Best Candy

This is a bracket about sugar with no nutritional argument attached. Everybody already knows. That is not the round being played here.

The interesting thing about candy is how much of the appeal is texture rather than flavour. Gummy bears and jelly beans are close to the same sugar in different physical states, and people hold violent preferences between them. Hard candy is a twenty-minute commitment. Marshmallow is barely food and gets defended anyway. Sour worms deliver three distinct sensations in sequence and the third one is genuinely painful, which somehow functions as a selling point rather than a warning label. Thirty-two contenders, and the question is what you would actually reach for rather than what you would defend in public. Nostalgia counts here — most of what candy is, is nostalgia — but the format has an unkind way of exposing which childhood favourite you would not really eat today if a bowl of it were in front of you.

The photographs come from Wikimedia Commons, which is why these look like sweets somebody put on a table rather than product shots.