We live in a world where things are ranked as to quality, popularity, looks, durability, efficiency, performance, etc. Some of these rankings are from committees and some are from sales.

Top songs for instance usually get judged by air play and record sales… or CD sales. Sorry, I’m showing my age here. Until just a few months ago I still had an 8-track tape player.

We have the best selling car, the sexiest man or woman, the most powerful vacuum cleaner … you know, the one that will suck dirt up right through the floor boards, but won’t pick up a dust bunny you’ve chased all over the living room.

So now I’m beginning to think that absolutely everything gets ranked. Today as I scrolled through volumes of emails there was a list of the “13 most influential candy bars.”

These 13 candies were determined after interviews with candy experts and historians. By the way, all of these candy bars are chocolate. Either they are covered in chocolate or their ingredients include chocolate. So I’m going to pose here that the chocolate industry may have inspired some bias in this analysis. The list did not rank the 13 like they do in football where there is a top team and then descending teams. Instead they just all made up the group of 13. And there is no playoff.

Now let me make one thing clear, I did not get a vote in this.

Let me give you the list:

There’s the Wonka Bar, the Baby Ruth, Milky Way, Nestle’s Crunch, Cadbury Bar, Grenada Chocolate, Chicken Dinner, Snickers, Nestle’s Milk Chocolate, Toblerone, Hershey’s, Scharffen Berger and Kit Kat.

Some of these I’ve never heard of (Chicken Dinner) and a couple have been discontinued. I would think that if there’s one of these 13 that would be put in a time capsule to epitomize the human sweet-tooth for alien visitors, it would be the Baby Ruth.

I personally don’t care much for Kit Kat. I simply don’t like to mix my cookies and my candy. Give me one or the other. I’m the same way about coffee. I don’t care for those fancy coffees with the foam and all that froo froo stuff. If I drink coffee, I want coffee. If I want a milkshake, I’ll go to Dairy Queen.

In my younger days, I really enjoyed the Butternut candy bar, not to be confused with Butterfinger, which did not make the cut. It’s hard to believe that Butterfinger was not included. I don’t think they make Butternut anymore. It went the way of Nugrape drink, I suppose.

Of course none of this is official. It’s mostly a conversation piece for when you get tired of hearing a bunch of political rhetoric. And it may even have more socially redeeming value. At least you can depend on a Baby Ruth.

When I was a kid we would see who could eat all the chocolate from around that center core of caramel on the Baby Ruth and just have the little caramel stick left. We thought this qualified as a skill set, like being able to hull a boiled peanut inside your mouth just using your tongue and teeth and then spit out the hull.

I uplifted the Baby Ruth because I doubt there’s an American  who hasn’t heard of  this piece of Americana. It was launched in 1921. It’s developers said it was named after President Grover Cleveland’s daughter Ruth who died at the age of 12 some 17 years earlier. But at the time, the more obvious association was with the Yankees star Babe Ruth, making this the first candy bar to profit from the success of a public figure. By the way, the Babe did not get compensated for that association. Our society had not become so litigious in those days.

So in conclusion, I can tell you that I know much more about the Baby Ruth than I do about Grover Cleveland.

(Email: dwain.walden@gaflnews.com)