Between Almond Joys and agriculture lies the toothy truth of Halloween

Halloween without candy is like Christmas without presents or Easter without bunnies and colored eggs.

That said, sticky treats, brightly wrapped trinkets and hard-boiled eggs are nothing more than modern add-ons to age-old celebrations rooted in paganism and co-opted by the rise of Western religion.

Trick-or-treating, possibly the most pointless pursuit of all, is what most if not all American (and Mexicali) children dream about most, next to Christmas morning.

And adults like myself share in the fun as we wait for the monsters to pass out so we can raid their goodie bags.

Inevitably, though, Halloween brings out of the doom and gloom of dental dramatics. Parents will harangue their children about the perils of tooth decay from an evening of self-inflicted Snickers wounds and enamel-damning Laffy Taffy tugs-o’-war, and dentists will be laying in wait, wringing their minty hands, ready to cash in and buff up their own children’s college funds.

(This I know; over the last month I think I helped assure both my dentist and endodontist’s kids would have their choice of Ivy League schools to attend; money is no option!)

But before we blame Halloween and the candy companies about Jimmy’s silver grill and Joanie’s black-toothed grin, taking our frustrations out on the dentists of the world — blame farmers.

Seriously, it’s those damn farmers, and their talents for revolutionizing the way the world learned to feed itself thousands of years ago, creating sustenance out of dirt and seeds and water, that have indirectly allowed modern dentistry to rise from the ashes of bad teeth and diseased gums to clean out a bank account near you.

Rest assured, Halloween or not, our kids are going to have rotten teeth any way you cut it. Modern times have seen to that, as we shifted from a bunch of Neanderthals beating small animals over the heads with rocks and picking up sketchy edibles off the sketchy forest floor.

The rise of an agrarian diet some 10,000 years ago that is rich in carbohydrates and natural sugars has basically doomed us into having a mouth full of Chiclets that at one point in our lives will have at least one decayed little bugger poisoning the whole lot.

So just for tonight, I’m going to chill about the chocolate in my kids’ diet, take a break from scaring them into a fluoride coma with tales of child-eating bacteria the size of baby tarantulas.

Eat up, kids. Brush when you’re done, floss before you go to bed, and rinse and repeat. It’s those fresh fruits and veggies, that granola and pasta that you have to worry about, not gummy worms and Sour Patch Kids.

Thanks to a cool video on Slate.com about the history of Britain’s challenging relationship with its bloody gums, I learned all sorts of cool stuff.

Did you know that the fossil record shows that our earliest ancestors — the hunter/gatherers — had far fewer instances of tooth decay?

It was during the rise of agriculture that the entire biology of our bodies’ bacteria headed north for our pie holes, finding new food sources stuck in our teeth from all the carbohydrates in grains and cereals. After they fed on the sugars, they left behind the acids that are still eating our teeth today.

In 2012, some scientists theorized that at least one mouth-based bacteria — Streptococcus mutans — evolved just to take advantage of this massive change in the human diet.

Of course statistics are like teeth, once they are pulled out they immediately lose their integrity, but these are fun factoids nonetheless:

Zero to 14 percent of early hunter/gatherers typically had cavities, while 48 percent of early farmers did. Today, up to 92 percent of all American adults age 20-64 report having some level of cavities.

Farmers and dentists, I kid. We’d all be living in caves and probably extinct from exploded livers and blocked arteries from the fat and animal proteins clogging our systems without the diet diversification created by modern agriculture.

And dentists, yes, you are living large off the lazy relationship some of us have with oral hygiene, but without you we’d be in a whole world of hurt.

Your professions are appreciated and adored, but tonight, we adore candy more. So, Happy Halloween and bring on the treats, dental drama be damned.

This column initially appeared in the Imperial Valley Press, Oct. 31, 2014.