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Candy corn. What is that name? Whose idea was this, to pair a vegetable with the sugary treat for schoolchildren? It's neither beast nor fowl, neither corn nor candy. It is a strange breed, maybe even a fraud. Yet despite all of this, candy corn continues to exist. It possesses such potent favorability, in fact, at least among the flavor-deciding people of Nabisco and Kraft Foods, that they are offering a limited-edition Oreo with a candy-corn flavored-and-colored filling, a filling which imitates the virulent yellow-and-orange of the original awful treat. These monster-hybrid-cookie things, which look nuclear, will be sold exclusively in Target stores as soon as September 10.

Let's crack this candy corn conspiracy wide open. Candy corn is terrible. It is waxy, brittle, and hard—yet strangely chalky, with a wiggly kind of flexibility to the mouthfeel, all at the same time. It makes your teeth hurt from the first bite, partly because it's so sweet and sugary as to, well, make your teeth hurt, but also because it often becomes impervious to the teeth while sitting in your kitchen cabinets or in that pumpkin you keep your Halloween candy in, if you're six, for months at a time because you eat every other edible thing in your home before you turn to it. It looks like no thing of nature—the colors are so bright as to be blinding; the stripes—yellow, orange, white—appearing in inconsistent manufactured varieties. Yes, there's that fleeting moment of pleasure when you decide to bite off only the white portion, or perhaps just the yellow at the top, and you manage to do it perfectly, for once and for all, but then the sugar goes straight to your head and you have to lie down for a bit, and then you inevitably nap too long and wake up with a headache and pretty much your day is ruined.