Okay, there was one time a creep dosed a bunch of kids. It happened a long time ago. We may never know whether Willliam V. Shyne, a dentist from Fremont, California, was fed up with the sound of small, costumed pedestrians at his door. Or trying to teach kids a misguided lesson about candy consumption. Or simply deranged. But on Halloween night, 1959, he handed out 450 candy-coated laxatives to dozens of children, sickening 30 of them. He fled charges of “outrage of public decency” and “unlawful dispensing of drugs,” resulting in a manhunt that was covered in national publications . By the time it all blew over, America’s days of carefree trick-or-treating were history.

Shyne was one bad apple, but the incident seemed to stoke the nation’s fears. In October, 1970, The New York Times ran a sensational, unsubstantiated report claiming that:

“[The] plump red apple that Junior gets from a kindly old woman down the block … may have a razor blade hidden inside. The chocolate ‘candy’ bar may be a laxative, the bubble gum may be sprinkled with lye, the pop corn balls may be coated with camphor, the candy may turn out to be packets containing sleeping pills,” among other horrors. The reported cited a warning from New York State’s Health Commissioner claiming “pins, razor blades, slivers of glass and poison” had “appeared” in treats gathered by the state’s children.

According to Best, such dangers are the unproven stuff of legend. And yet the fear of tainted candy persists even today. So the question remains: if Halloween sadism isn’t really happening, why is everyone so scared of it? Why do we keep repeating the same story about a razor hidden in an apple?

It’s partly a story about community, how the breakdown of the American social fabric led to fears the folks next door might poison your kids. But it’s also a story about food. Because Halloween, like most holidays, centers around eating—and the delight and anxiety surrounding it reveals a lot about our changing relationship to food.

In the early 20th century, the worry wasn’t tainted Halloween goodies. It was that the local kids would take their pranks too far. The holiday was primarily a night of mischief, and the threat of cheeky vandals kept everyone on guard. In his 1959 essay “Halloween and the Mass Child,” the sociologist Gregory P. Stone looked back on the Halloweens of his 1930s childhood, long nights of labor-intensive devilry; one year, for example, Stone and his crew dismantled someone’s front steps, took down his rain gutters, threw the eaves onto the porch with a terrible clatter, and hoped that in the resulting chase their startled neighbor would careen off the stepless porch and into the evening air.

Sweets of any kind—let alone great hoards of packaged, mass-produced candy—simply weren’t a part of it.

“It was long, hard, and careful work,” Stone wrote. “We had no conception of being treated by our victims, incidentally, to anything except silence…irate words, a chase (if we were lucky), or, if we were lucky, an investigation of the scene by the police.”

The practice of trick-or-treating became common as a kind of friendly extortion: If plied with treats, children might be willing to forgo their tricks. “The practice is ostensibly a vast bribe exacted by the younger generation upon the older generation,” Stone wrote, a “payoff in candy, cookies, or coin for another year’s respite from the antisocial incursions of the children.”