What's Nostalgia Got To Do With It? —
People Pay Good Money For This Sort Of Thing
Vol. I, Issue II - Oct. 2010

Like most kids, I’m a byproduct of parental paranoia—that peculiar brand of over-prudence out of which mothers have made a science. I’m not writing about looking to the right and left before crossing the street. I’m talking big-time scares, cancer threats and impending death. The kind that afflicted every small schnozz pressed too closely to the television or the cells of every kid who didn’t wait fifteen seconds before opening a microwave door.

I’d sit so close to the TV screen, I’d get caught in Egon Spengler and Peter Venkman’s cross beam as they zapped the Marshmallow Man into psychokinetic oblivion—thereby subjecting myself to the kind of radiation that bred and fast-tracked the spread of cancer cells in the body. Or so went my mother’s prognosis. You felt terrible things with this knowledge as you pressed your hand against the TV screen and an electric current buzzed through your flesh like an admonishment. You even spent the better part of the afternoon wondering what black death was coursing its way through your veins with the terrible urgency of your young imagination.

The four “cancer-causers” that spawned childhood fear because of their terrible proximity to my everyday reality were TV screen radiation, glazed cherries, red Chiclets, and that most glorious of inventions: the red hotdog. Barring TV radiation, most, if not all, contained a dye called Red 40. Banned in Switzerland, Denmark, France, and Sweden, Red 40 has been approved by our own FDA despite claims that it adversely affects the behavior and intellect of children. The dye’s unfortunate sibling, Red 2, a suspected carcinogen that used to be found in Jell-O, Kool-Aid and certain pet foods, has been banned in the USA since 1976.

But where public paranoia ends and real cellular threat begins is a proverbial thin line. Tumors in pregnant rats, far-flung Russian studies, and behavioral discrepancies notwithstanding, tests on the dye remain inconclusive. What remains certain is the use of the red colorant as a visual draw toward the consumption of food and beverages targeted at children. And where young attention is most ardent, parental fear is multiplied. The two worked at such cross purposes in my own childhood that the tension I felt between them was electrifying.

My own sense of the forbidden wasn’t a temptation mastered by yielding to it (thanks anyway, Mr. Wilde). It was the sense of wanting to know what all the paranoia was about. I can remember rare afternoons in the small park in the village where I grew up. The park was off the main road, hidden from view, and nondescript but for a thin line of trees lining park parameters and a single soccer goal, net ripped with the dramatic flourish of a fishnet stocking. I’ve lost count of the times I ducked inside the shade of an acacia tree, slightly winded after a brisk run from home, clutching irresistible contraband—a small red box measuring 1 ½ x 13/16 x 5/16 inches that made a telltale takka takka sound as it jiggled in my pocket. Safe from parental supervision, I’d empty its contents into my shaking palm, half-thrilled and half-afraid. I’d pop three or four pieces at a time, and the taste on my tongue was as lush as an innuendo—what goes in hard and red then comes out soft and sticky? And the answer was always the giddy thrill of my best-kept secret: the now-defunct bittersweetness of a Cherry Chiclet.

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