Episode 11 - The Candy and Cane Murders
Candy canes feel harmless — festive, nostalgic, impossible to take seriously. But this episode asks a simple question: why do we trust sweet, familiar objects so easily?
We start with a real-world reminder that even a cane can hide danger, then trace the history of sugar itself — from chewed sugarcane in Southeast Asia to hand-pulled sugar sticks in medieval Europe. By the 1600s, refined sugar had become a global luxury, produced almost entirely through enslaved labor on Caribbean and Brazilian plantations. Those early sugar sticks — the ancestors of candy canes — were symbols of wealth built…
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