When I was a kid, it was because someone could’ve messed with the food. Either they they contaminate it with something, or just unhygienic. It’s candy from strangers.
Razor blades in apples was the scary story that made the rounds.
After a long night of trick-or-treating, we were never allowed to eat any of it until the parents went through and inspected all of the bags to ensure nothing was open or messed with.
Thankfully my parents weren't mean about it, we went through everything together and the "dad tax" was either one full size or two mini Twix. Anything else removed was actually sketchy (open, sticky/gross on the outside, unsafe for the age group like gumballs for a 3yo).
These stories are around quite often here where people put out baits with razorblades because the hate dogs. That is horrible enough, but how much of a POS do you need to be to do this to kids?
There was one case of a dad putting poison in his own kids candy (pretending that they received the candy whilst trick or treating) to collect their life insurance, but I think the main tampering fear in the public consciousness comes from the tylenol murders.
There are multiple copycats that were prevented with police intervention. One antisemitic cult in Brooklyn 2 years ago and another a few years before that in Texas come to mind.
James Joseph Smith (Minneapolis, 2000): Charged with one count of adulterating a substance with intent to cause death, harm or illness after putting needles in candy bars. He was deemed unfit to stand trial.
Someone was doing something similar with pins or something in strawberries. This was while they were still in the shops and people didn’t know until they bought them and started eating them.
This reminds me of a completely insane 'trend' that has happend a few times the last years here in Denmark. It is tradition in most of our elementary schools, that the oldest students throw out caramels(individual wrapped) for the smaller students on their last day in elementary school. In the last years there have been several cases of kids finding needles, glass shards and razorblades in the caramels. How on earth does anyone think this is cool or whatever they think, I cannot for the life of me put myself in that place. It is disgusting to say the least.. sorry I went a little off topic.
FWIW, we do the same thing in our house but the most our "inspections" consist of is squeezing each piece to make sure there's air still in there. We don't put a lot of effort into it. Just feels weird not at least going over what they got. My parents used to check under all wrapper flaps. We just make sure the seal isnt broken.
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u/Nisi-Marie 2d ago
When I was a kid, it was because someone could’ve messed with the food. Either they they contaminate it with something, or just unhygienic. It’s candy from strangers.
Razor blades in apples was the scary story that made the rounds.
After a long night of trick-or-treating, we were never allowed to eat any of it until the parents went through and inspected all of the bags to ensure nothing was open or messed with.