Why Every Bite Of A Tootsie Roll Is Potentially Over A Hundred Years Old

In a world where YouTubers like Ryan Trahan launch successful candy lines, and even old reliables like Sour Patch Kids have flavor combinations that would, if not kill, then at least seriously trouble a medieval peasant, it's a good idea to remember the oldhead candies. Butterscotch and Good and Plenty (which you might not know is owned by Hershey) may not be thrilling finds for a kid going trick-or-treating, but they're an interesting taste of the past. In the case of Tootsie Rolls, however, that taste may be quite literal: Some say that there are remnants of the original batch from 1896 in each new Tootsie Roll.

If you've eaten a Tootsie Roll recently, you can probably guess what's in it even if you didn't look at the list of ingredients: sugar, corn syrup, cocoa powder, all that good stuff. (Yes, that's what flavor Tootsie Rolls are supposed to be.) But in an act of Tootsie Roll-ception, each batch also includes a decent portion of the previous day's batch. If we assume this practice began at the start of the company, that means there are traces of the very first batch of Tootsie Rolls in each individual roll — in theory, anyway. (There's no word on what this means for Tootsie Pops, or how many licks it takes to get into the center of them.)

So what does this mean for you? When you last ate a Tootsie Roll, did you eat a tiny piece of candy that was made during the second presidency of Grover Cleveland? Well, here's where we enter the realm of philosophy. You may have heard of the Ship of Theseus problem, which questions whether a ship that has had every single part of itself replaced over the years can be called the same ship. Something similar is at play with the eternal Tootsie Roll batch: Are the oldest and newest batches of Tootsie Rolls connected in any concrete way?

Practically speaking, the answer is "probably not." There is a concept called "serial dilution" which holds that the more times you dilute a certain substance (like the original batch) with another (like the next day's batch), the closer the original concentration comes to zero. The original batch has been diluted over hundreds of years, with each new batch being formed into millions of individual Tootsie Rolls; the odds that any bit of the original batch managed to survive are astronomically slim, and the odds that said bit managed to find its way into your specific Tootsie Roll are even slimmer. But that doesn't mean there's no continuity at all. Just as a pot of perpetual stew is part of the same process even if it's not meaningfully the same stew it once was, the first and last batches of Tootsie Rolls are similarly connected.