January 16, 2004

The perfect food:

In the 1930s, Admiral Byrd took 2 1/2 tons of NECCO Wafers to the South Pole -- almost a pound a week for each of his men during their two-year stay in the Antarctic. During World War II, the U.S. government ordered a major portion of the production of the wafers. Since the candy doesn't melt and is 'practically indestructible' during transit, it was the perfect food to ship overseas to the troops.


I never really knew what the Necco colors stood for. It was always just mint, chocolate, licorice, and the horrible ones.

Nor did I realize there even could be such a thing as a "candy alliance," let alone “one of the candy industry's most powerful alliances."

Strange how reconfiguring them as message-imparting hearts makes them seem so much better. Text beats taste.

4 comments:

Icepick said...

From the previous post: Isn't it ridiculous to update a post that's nearly a year old? (It's 1/6/05 as I write this.)

Not as ridiculous as commenting on it over EIGHT YEARS LATER. So HA!

This is blog-tending gone mad. Don't I realize the old posts sink into oblivion? These old posts don't really exist at all.

They're now part of the archeological record. Or would be if all the storage media weren't so vulnerable to destruction over time, and certainly won't make for useful fossils. Someone needs to get to work transcribing all of this stuff to clay tablets to be stored in the world's deserts, STAT. Or perhaps some metal alloy, and we can get various 3-D printers to work doing all the work. We can store all this crap in the caverns that were to be used for storing nuclear waste under Yucca Mountain.

Icepick said...

Or perhaps we could use Necco Wafers for the storage medium.

Icepick said...

That's eight years on commenting to the update, and nine for the original post. Sheesh, I can't add this morning.

Serket said...

Thanks for the history and information on NECCO Wafers. This morning my mother-in-law said that you can't get them in stores anymore and asked my wife to check online for some to give to her grandma. Wikipedia says that they were brought back in November.