Aside from the fact that many vegetables are the perfect way to transport butter to the mouth...
This is from a neat little book called "Eat the Grapes Downward" by Vernon Pizer (1983, Dodd, Mead & co. out of print, unfortunately):
(in the early seventeenth century)"..a French chef had been excersizing his creative talents in a way that would bring fresh joy to sweets-lovers everywhere. What the chef was seeking to do was to induce young Prince Charles Phillipe de Conde' the king's grandnephiew, to eat a balanced diet instead of only the sweet things the boy insisted upon. The solution the resourceful chef settled on was to take the foods the child obstinately rejected and to disguise them within a concealing and enticing glaze of sugar, egg whites and nuts. With eyes only for the sweet coating the boy was in this way lured into eating the nourishing fillings along with the tasty glazings. Dishes prepared in this manner came to be called "candied" after young de Conde' for whom they had been created. When the public later developed a great fondness for the glazing, simply for its own sake, it became 'candy'." My unabridged dictionary doesn't back this up, but it's a good story.