Other European Pleasures:

Please believe me when I say I don’t generally practice or enjoy food photography (obvious exception: food blog/cookbook genres). I might even go so far as to say I generally dislike it pretty seriously—like a taunting postcard: “Hey! Look how great life is in the food-burgeoning first-world!! Catch ya later!”

That said, I did a little food photography.

Two things that seem to me to dominate the confectionery scene of Heidelberg are (obviously) chocolate and (perhaps obviously? It seems like a Thing here) gummies, the latter of which contains an important subculture I want to write about because I think it’s the best: licorice. Or, auf Deutsch, Lakritz. But only black licorice is really interesting because it totally divides the room and, in my experience, most Americans don’t like it. We have Twizzlers, sure, but I don’t think they even sell salted licorice in the States, and probably because it is so weird. Weirdly awesome!!!

While regarding the unpopularity of licorice, it quickly comes to mind, too, that its sinister associative web has been massively expanding ever since the advent of Candy Land’s 1980s edition, in which the villain, Lord Licorice, is named after and, of course, made of it. While doing my homework on the subject of Candy Land, I came across a few other facts (Wikipedia, naturally) that have brought me up to date:

“Before the 2004 version, there were colored spaces marked with a dot. A player who lands on such a space is stuck (all cards drawn are ignored) until a card is drawn of the same color as the square. In the 2004 version, dot spaces were replaced with licorice spaces that prompt the player landing on it to simply lose his or her next turn.”

(In my search for Lord Licorice’s picture, I came to someone else’s blog in which 2 different writers (a poster and then a commenter) confess to having had crushes on Lord Licorice. Funny—I thought about this and the only desire I remember experiencing in relation to the characters of Candy Land was the desire to be Princess Lolly, but considering the patently Freudian schematics of the game, this is perhaps just as creepy, amounts to exactly the same thing.)

So this is all pretty compelling, right. People totally hate it, it’s got a bad U.S. rep. The original intention of this posting was to write about this general disagreeability of licorice, to share my positive experience with it and its European-approved pleasures, post some pictures, and to redeem licorice from the sad, albeit small, pile of American Confectionery Rejects.

But unfortunately that cannot be the case. After having eaten nearly all the licorice you see pictured here, plus more in my zeal to taste (probieren) and experience a wide variety to photograph and recommend to you, I found out, in my untimely research, that licorice is poisonous.

Kind of. While it should also be noted that licorice claims a handful of health benefits, particularly within traditional Chinese medicine and herbalism, it seems that its excessive consumption (that includes the candy, and certainly describes its presence in my diet the past 3 weeks) is toxic to the liver and the cardiovascular system, and may produce hypertension and “oedema.” Wiki: The European Commission 2008 report suggested that “people should not consume any more than 100mg of glycyrrhizic acid a day, for it can raise blood pressure or cause muscle weakness, chronic fatigue, headaches or swelling, and lower testosterone levels in men.” Hmm. Whoops—apparently Haribo has an advisory with regard to moderation as well, but I suppose it’s entirely possible that my limited knowledge of the German language could have obscured that information.

So none of this really explains the popularity of licorice in Europe, and I’m unable to be its advocate and champion after all. We still have the vilified herbaceous member of the Plant Kingdom (Helichrysum Petiolare) and its unlikable translation into the world of (U.S.) confectioneries, as well as its subsequent personification as the would-be-ejected, swarthy, anarchistic outsider of the resplendent Candy Land. This is sort of cool, actually, because that might make Candy Land the most widely proliferated contemporary fable. For if your experience is the same as mine and your palate has failed to sense danger in its peculiar flavor, your DNA may be working its way out of the gene pool. And/or Candy Land functions as a grim and practical warning of what the Wikipedia describes here: “Comparative studies of pregnant women suggest that liquorice can also adversely affect both IQ and behaviour traits of offspring.”

Off topic but FYI—in the 2002 revision of Candy Land the character Plumpy was removed entirely. What is going on??