Photo by Kensie Wallner

Vegan Food Review: Halloween Candy

By Alice Christianson
Staff Writer

Vegans may need extra planning and research to locate appropriate candy to share with friends and neighborhood trick or treaters. Fortunately, this has been done for you on-line. Check out Peta’s website: PETAKiDS.com to view a long list of candy and other snacks.

An excellent source of vegan candy is http://www.NaturalCandyStore.com. If you click on “special diets” you will find a very long list of vegan treats that they sell.

If you are interested in vegan chocolate, you will have to order much earlier- I’m guessing early September. Their dark chocolate, vegan “bites” (Equal Exchange’s organic and fair trade dark chocolate bites, or Divine Chocolate’s fair trade bites) are sold out by early October. Dark vegan chocolate is expensive, even the individually wrapped bites, and don’t expect to find any locally. Let me know if you do.

Skip the chocolates and consider this brief but not complete list of vegan candy: Airheads taffy, Blow Pops, Brach’s Root Beer Barrels, Dots, Dum-Dums, Hubba Bubba bubblegum, Jolly Ranchers, Laffy Taffy, Lemonheads, Mambas, Mike and Ike, Sweet Tarts, and Twizzlers.

Sierra Club’s recent email on “greening Halloween” suggested giving out vegan candy, and also encouraged readers to avoid products with excessive packaging. I don’t know how the latter can be done in this day and age.

Decades ago, you might have been able to hand out freshly baked cookies or throw in a handful of Dots, or Lemonheads into the Halloween bags. Now, if candies or treats are not individually and commercially packaged, parents will not allow their children to eat those candies. And apples are not a welcome treat.

If you want to celebrate Halloween with area children, the only “green treat” that you may be able to come up with is a recycled costume to wear.

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