We all know what candy corn is so what, beyond wanting to salute this Halloween treat, is there to say? OK – the 30th is National Candy Corn Day.

Predictably, I turn to the internet and am immediately waylaid into a serious detour.

Internet: do I cap it or not? The source itself tells me that last April the Powers-that-be decided it – and web – were so common they no longer merited the capital I. (Then along comes TIME with their cover story on the Internet, usage they continued throughout.) I’ll opt for the small letter and save one editor some work.

Which isn’t at all what I wanted to talk about.

Candy corn – do you love it or hate it? Bill Mann on the you-know-what claims there can be no middle ground, calling it the lima beans of candy. “It’s perennially the last thing left in many trick or treaters’ bags every year, and much of it gets tossed. I cannot abide even the sight of those cursed little isosceles triangles, leave alone their gooey taste and the cheap and overpowering sugar rush they impart.”

He does have fun ridiculing the subject with his five things I bet even you didn’t know about the candy. If I may steal openly:

1) The CIA uses it as an “enhanced interrogation technique” getting more sensitive information than waterboarding ever did.

2) Dentists and their staff hate the stuff. Of course it’s great for business except nothing can completely get that goo off patients’ teeth. It frequently takes an industrial power washer, an “unwieldly process generally performed in the dentist’s parking lot.”

3) There are landfills entirely full of the stuff. Non-biodegradable, it requires special sorting before being trucked to out-of-the-way sites. He mentions one at the “federal nuclear storage site out in Hanford, WA. EPA officials there say they’re as worried about candy-corn leakage into the aquifers as they are about nuclear-waste seepage.”

4) All candy corn was manufactured in 1917, the unwanted byproduct of a wartime manufacturing experiment to make flotation devices for U.S. troops. “Candy companies now sell their extra yearly surplus to Third World Countries, who use it to pave roads.”

5) It isn’t really corn! (Though it does contain corn syrup.)

Actually, it was invented by George Renniger in the 1880s. Beginning in 1900 it was manufactured by the Goelitz Candy Company (who called it “Chicken Feed”), well known now as the Jelly Belly Candy Company. Originally made by hand, machines do it now, adding each sweet white syrup colored with artificial food coloring in three steps: the white, the orange and the yellow. Lastly, it’s glazed to give it a shine.

One site tells me twenty million pounds are made each year while another raises the total to thirty-five million. You might be surprised to know that 43 percent of us bite off the white end first, 10% start at the larger yellow end and 47% just pop it into their mouths. (It can also be rolled into a ball and deep-fried.)

In case Halloween passes and you still hunger for more, look for brown, orange and white (“Indian corn”) for Thanksgiving; green, white and red for Christmas (“Reindeer corn”); pink, red and white “Cupid Corn” for February; and pastel for Easter. One might also find blackberry cobbler corn, freedom corn as well as caramel apple, green apple, carrot corn, even s’mores and pumpkin spice variants.

I confess I could live happily ever after without the stuff. I bought it last year to get photographs for this column and happily sent it home with my daughter. Then I lost the pictures so guess I’ll have to do it again.

But that’s it!

Susan Crossett has lived outside Cassadaga for more than 20 years. A lifetime of writing led to these columns as well as two novels. Her Reason for Being was published in 2008 with Love in Three Acts following in 2014. Both novels are currently available at Lakewood’s Off the Beaten Path bookstore. Information on all the Musings, her books and the author may be found at Susancrossett.com.