Eating Jujubes to Keep Alive

After Baby Houseman and Johnny Castle have performed at the Sheldrake Hotel and then after her father has come to Penny Johnson's cabin to treat her abortion consequences, Baby comes to Johnny's cabin and apologizes because her father treated Johnny rudely. During that conversation, Johnny compares himself to Baby's father.

Johnny Castle
No. The way he saved her -- I could never do anything like that. That was something. The reason people treat me like I'm nothing because I’m nothing.

Baby Houseman
That's not true! You, you're everything!

Johnny Castle
You don't understand the way it is for somebody like me. Last month I'm eating Jujubes to keep alive. This month, women are stuffing diamonds in my pockets. I'm balancing on shit and, quick as that, I can be down there again.

The above dialogue begins at about 1:10 in the following video.

This conversation takes place on the night of August 29-30, so "last month" would be about the end of July. Maybe you could argue that "last month" was any time during July. However, Johnny and Penny have been working at Kellerman's Mountain Home since June. Penny became pregnant there in June.

If Johnny was employed at Kellerman's during the entire month of July, then why did he have to eat Jujubes to keep alive during that month?

Maybe Johnny's chronology was simply rather loose. He meant to say that in May -- before his summer job at Kellerman's began -- he had to eat Jujubes to keep alive, and then in June -- when his summer job began -- women were stuffing diamonds in his pockets.

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The Wikipedia article about Jujubes includes the following illustrations and passages.

Jujubes Box Cover

Jujube Pieces

American jujubes are a type of starch, gum and corn syrup based candy drops originally produced by the Heide Candy Company. They are much stiffer than their relatives (e.g. Jujyfruits). ...

The candy came to prominence in the mid-20th century. As with most candies of this era, although jujubes are sweet in taste and generally colorful, they do not have the strong and distinctive flavor of modern candies due to the expense of chemical flavorants at the time.

The manufacturer's website states, "Jujubes, known for their hard, break-glass quality texture, began production in 1920. ... The current flavor lineup is lemon (yellow), lilac (orange), lime (green), cherry (red), and violet (purple)."

Due to their hard, dense, resinous nature, Jujubes are often eaten as a hard candy — "tenderized" rather than chewed. Individual Jujubes can be allowed to gradually rehydrate in the mouth with gentle chewing. When chewed hard, they could glue the upper and lower teeth together. When frozen, they become brittle and break when chewed.

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Jujubes are commonly sold in movie theaters. According to an Old Time Candy webpage, the current price for a 5.5 oz. box is about $2.00. A case of 12 such boxes costs about $21.

On that webpage, a reader shares the following memories:

I was raised in Hollywood, Calfornia. My mom was a movie reviewer on radio KMPC and used to take me to movie premiers on the Boulevard two or three times a week from 1953 until 1959. Although I enjoyed Charms candy drops and the occasional Big Hunk, 9 times out of 10 I got a box of Jujubes.

Mom liked them because they would keep me occupied for most of the feature (we usually had two features, a cartoon and newsreel most of the time) and also it was not messy to eat. The flavors of Jujubes were also very neat. The grape and the lime were my very favorites because they tasted so rich in flavor.

If I was very good, and took out the trash or something else particularly good, mom would come home with a box of Jujubes as a treat. I kept them in my "secret cigar box" with my picture postcard collection, cowboy sheriff badge, and toy cars. ~ Christian from California

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Let's think about his in 2018 prices. If Johnny pays $21 for a case of 12 boxes of Jujubes, then pays about $1.75 a box. Since each box weighs 5.5 ounces, he pays about $5 for a pound of Jujubes.

The current per-pound prices for meats include $3.79 for ground beef, $3.99 for ground pork, and $4.49 for pork chops. So, Johnny is paying significantly more per pound for Jujubes than he would pay for meat. (Click on the below images to enlarge them.)

Current Meat Prices

Here are some other per-pound prices for food from just six years ago.

Johnny pays a lot more per pound for Jujubes than he would pay for bread, fruit, milk, eggs or chicken.

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A  Saving Money in Real Life webpage calculates that if you buy bread, peanut butter and jelly in a grocery store and make peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches at home, then the cost per sandwich is about 40 cents.

So, for the $5 that Johnny spends for a pound of Jujubes, he could make about a dozen peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches.

A peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich costs about 40 cents to make.

One box of Jujubes costs about $2 -- about the same cost for making five PBJ sandwiches.

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Although Johnny pays $5 per pound for Jujubes, a Fooducate webpage gives Jujubes a D+ grade for nutrition. (Click on the below images to enlarge them.)

Fooducate gives Jujubes a nutritional grade of D+

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A lot of people -- even if they have lived their entire lives in the USA -- are not familiar with the word Jujubes. Putting this word into this dialogue was a bad decision.

Especially since the movie Dirty Dancing has a Jewish subtext, some people watching the movie might have guessed mistakenly that Jujubes are a Jewish food. After all, the name sounds like Jew-Jew-Bees.