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Media Highlight: Candy competition: Brothers wait 25 years to dig into Halloween haul

Posted by Communications and Marketing on October 30, 2013 in Media Highlights

From CTV Atlantic:

With Halloween just days away, there are sure to be thousands of children out trick-or-treating, collecting all sorts of goodies. That was the case for the Allen brothers 25 years ago.

Trevor and Fraser Allen have always been competitive and on Halloween night in 1988, that competitiveness manifested into a wager.

“We had a bet, who could make their Halloween candy last the longest,” said Trevor. “I wasn’t losing.”

...


Gianfranco Mazzanti is an associate professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax. He says that hard candy is incredibly resilient to aging because it doesn’t usually have contain much water, so it is unlikely to see mould, even after two decades.

From a scientific point of view, Mazzanti says he is quite impressed by the brother’s bet.

“Almost nobody is going to do a 25-year experiment, you know, that should be publishable in something to win an Ig Nobel Prize or something. You know, there is something called an Ig Nobel Prize, rather than the Nobel Prize, for those kind of weird things,” says Mazzanti. “The patience of 25 years, carrying that thing around, I think it is completely admirable.”

Read the rest of this story (and watch the video) at CTV Atlantic's website.