If you're like a lot of Americans, you're about to make candy conversation hearts your Valentine. But only for a little while.
MyFitnessPal, a service that allows people to track their diet and exercise, compiled data about what Americans eat on Valentine's Day, at the request of The New York Times. (Under Armour, the fitness clothing company, recently announced it was buying the service.) It found the most Valentine-specific food is conversation hearts, those little pink, white and lavender hearts that say "Be Mine" or "Cutie." We're 3,777 percent more likely than normal to eat them Feb. 14, or at least MyFitnessPal's members were, according to their 2014 food diaries; that means candy hearts accounted for just shy of 1 percent of all the entries logged by the site's users on the day.
Of course, candy hearts aren't the only food that screams "romance." Last Valentine's Day, MyFitnessPal users were disproportionately likely to report consuming Champagne (up 208 percent from normal), steak (up 52 percent) and wine (up 78 percent.) Oysters, considered by some an aphrodisiac, were up 57 percent. People said "be my Valentine" with chocolate (up 36 percent) but they especially said it with things dipped in chocolate: Consumption of chocolate-covered foods ran at 323 percent above normal.
Strawberry consumption was also above normal, a trend confirmed by FreshDirect, the New York-based online grocer. This year, it has seen a spike in Valentine's Day demand for strawberries (both chocolate-covered and not) as well as various indulgence foods, like rack of lamb and black truffles.
But none of these foods match the Valentine's seasonality of conversation hearts. Last year, on a typical February day, candy hearts accounted for 0.21 percent of entries in MyFitnessPal users' food diaries, or about 1 in 470. For the other 11 months of the year, the figure was 1 in 11,500.
Even though the site has 50 million American members and millions of monthly active users, according to a site representative, there were 75 days last year when zero members reported having eaten candy hearts, mostly in the summer or early fall. (The candies have a mild resurgence around Halloween, presumably driven by cheapskates hauling out unused boxes of them from the previous February to give to trick-or-treaters.)
The New England Confectionary Co., which makes 2 billion Sweethearts brand conversation hearts a year, has a production schedule that matches this seasonal demand. "Typically, Sweethearts Candies production begins in the summer and continues with varying intensity through until January, as most retailers look to have their stores stocked for Valentine's Day during the first week or two of January," said Mary Lane, a social media specialist with the company. They are sold only in the Valentine season.
For most consumers, that is enough. "I hate them," emailed Michael Strain, an American Enterprise Institute scholar with expertise in labor markets and, apparently, candy. Liz Mair, a Republican strategist, asked to be quoted on the record about her distaste for the candies, but unfortunately described them with a word that is unprintable in The Times.
The other responses after seeking comment about conversation hearts on Twitter and Facebook were mostly similarly negative. "Chalk" and "chalky" were words that came up repeatedly, though for the record, the main ingredients in conversation hearts are sugar, corn syrup, gelatin and gum; unlike Tums, they do not contain calcium carbonate.
Despite the negativity, the candies do have devoted fans. Sally Carter emailed to say she was distressed, upon moving to Panama with her husband, to find conversation hearts were not available, even on Valentine's Day.
"I looked everywhere, asking: 'Tienes corazones dulces? Hechos solo de azucar? No hechos de chocolate?' and getting confused looks (possibly due to my Spanish) and shown baskets of heart-shaped lollipops," she wrote. Ultimately, she ordered six 1-pound boxes of Sweethearts from Necco's website, which cost about $60 with international shipping. She says they ate them all in "a week or two."
Kevin Davies, a college counselor in Harlem, emailed a photo of the 3-pound box of Sweethearts he keeps at his desk; he orders them online because Duane Reade no longer carries his preferred brand.
The uneven level of consumer interest in conversation hearts shows up in the MyFitnessPal data. While the median conversation heart eater logged 110 calories (that's the number of calories in a 1-ounce, 36-count box of Sweethearts), a few people went to extremes. One user logged 1,280 calories from candy hearts in a single day. That's a lot of "be mine" and "marry me" for one sitting, and it doesn't include users who may have been too embarrassed to admit in their own food diaries that they ate three-quarters of a pound of conversation hearts in one day.
The superfans do try to exhibit self-control. "I'm on Weight Watchers so I ration them out," Davies wrote.
"Now I limit myself to 61 per day."
"Obviously, I'm single," he added.
Image via Thinkstock
© 2015 New York Times News Service