Scary Food Stories for Halloween

There’s always been an uneasy link between Halloween and scary food. Growing up you couldn’t shake the fear of poisoned candy and always had to throw away Mrs. Gordon’s handmade candy apples because they were, well, homemade. Scary stories about tainted candy and that dark house on the corner were an essential part of the evening’s festivities.

Now that most of us have traded candy gorging with sewing costumes at midnight for our kids or simply handing out the candy, we have adult horror stories to take the place of those that scared us so much as kids. In honor of today, we’ve harvested some current food trends you can be really scared about.

1. Sandra Lee is one of New York’s 50 Most Powerful Women, according to Crain’s New York Business. We have nothing against Sandra and more power to her, but we’re scared that there were not other contenders more influential than someone who makes semi-homemade food on television.

2. Monsanto, the world’s largest producer of genetically modified crop seeds, is excited about its new product: crops that are herbicide resistant. P.J. Huffstutter notes in the Los Angeles Times that “Soon, people will be thumping melons bred to be a single serving and shucking sweet corn genetically modified to enable farmers to spray the fields with the company’s weed killer, Roundup.”

3. It seems that all is not natural in Skinny Girls cocktail products, a discovery that prompted Whole Foods to pull it off the shelves. The Huffington Post quoted an anonymous Whole Foods employee who stated that the store is committed to natural foods for its high-end consumers, not “novelty products shaded with secrecy.”

4. We know on some level that all foods raised on this planet have likely come in contact with all sorts of gross-making things like flies, rodents and just plain dirt. But somehow the FDA’s chipper descriptions of safe “insect filth” levels in everything from allspice to wheat flour makes our neck hairs stiffen. Peanut butter lovers? The FDA Defect Levels Handbook states that 30 or more insect fragments and 1 rodent hair per 100 grams in peanut butter are considered safe. It’s only an “aesthetic” issue. (To be fair the FDA states that in the vast majority of cases the food list contamination levels do not come close to the maximum.)

5. It’s official: NYU Medical Center has declared obesity a pandemic. Frightening statistics: 68% of Americans are obese, 17% of which are children. (This is 3X the number of obese children than in 1980.)

6. Your mind doesn’t know which way to go on this one. “It made my heart seize,” states Toque editor Amy Zavatto. A long shelf filled with more than 6,800 bottles of booze collapses in a Wisconsin store, narrowly missing the clerk sweeping the aisles. Aren’t afraid yet? Watch the video.