IN THE PLUSH homes along Chocolate Avenue, in the stores of Cocoa Street and in the parks on Reese Road, the sweet-smelling air of candy metropolis Hershey is thick with bitter indignation.
The world-famous chocolate factory from which it derives its name and its very existence is on the block and the residents and politicians of the Pennsylvanian town could not be angrier.
The Milton Hershey School Trust Fund, which owns more than 30 per cent of the stock and 80 per cent of voting rights in Hershey Foods, the nation's largest sweets manufacturer, wants to sell its stake.
The announcement has not gone down well. It not only ignited rage in tiny Hershey, where the factory employs almost half the town's 12,000 population, but it also hit a sensitive nerve among the greater population of the United States, countless generations of which grew up or simply grew fat on its treacly products.
And now it has become a political issue. A lobbying campaign resulted last week in Pennsylvania's attorney-general issuing an injunction banning the sale on the grounds that it would not be in the best interests of the town of Hershey. Economists have attacked the injunction as a dangerous precedent for free trade while analysts say financial prudence is being held hostage by sentimentality.
Spiro Stefanou, a professor of agricultural economics at Pennsylvania State University's Smeal College of Business, whose campus is an hour's drive from Hershey, said: 'It's all about tugging at heart strings.'