Food Question--before I forget again

[doddiemoemoe]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at yahoogroups.com, "Cairie Witter" 
<Cairie.Witter at ...> wrote:
>
> Now here is a question that I've been curious about for years.  We 
don't have these in South Africa, so what are M and MS.  Are they 
some kind of sweets or what?
> 
doddie here:

M&M's are candy coated chocolate balls... they can be plain milk 
chocolate, or contain a chocolate covered peanut (the two most 
popular), but they also have krispie one, white cholate, dark 
chocolate.  the candy shells come in different colors green, red, 
yellow, brown, orange, blue--I think they had tan color at one time 
and often have special promotional colors like black and white.

I believed they were developed sometime around WWII as a way 
of "packaging" the chocolate so that it wouldn't melt during the 
shipping as the hershey's candy bars so often did.

I think the British equivalent may be called smarties...

Here in the U.S. smarties are little, round, disc candys that are 
somewhat tart and come packaged in rolls.

Oh and I'll add one more U.S. vs U.K. candy comparison:  The U.K. 
Mars bar is the equivalent of the U.S. Snickers...the U.S. Mars bar 
is completely different...

Doddie
(who really doesn't like candy much and clearly watches too much of 
Foodnetwork's "Unwrapped".)