According to heroin addicts, one of the few addictions I’ve managed to avoid, the first time you ‘use’ gives you such an amazing ‘high’ that the rest of your ‘career’ is spent trying to relive that. And, obviously, failing. Tragically.

Chocolate’s the same. An addiction I know plenty about. When I was 10 months old (guessing, obvs) someone, probably my father, put a bit of chocolate in my mouth. And changed my life/ruined me forever. That would have definitely been Cadburys. Because in nineteen-fifty-whatever, there was simply nothing else. Ok, there was ‘Terry’s’ but no-one liked that.

Then along came the ‘chocolate revolution’ in 1993 (randomly selected, like all the best ‘research’) and people actually started questioning Cadburys and its constitution. “It’s not chocolate!!!!”, they cried, “it’s just SUGAR!!!!” To which I immediately thought: ‘yeah? And your point is??’

There followed ‘the wilderness years’ where no-one ever gave you a bar of fruit-and-nut, when they came round. It all degenerated into ‘Green & Blacks 85% Cocoa!!!’, and horrible, hard, bitter, inedible shit unworthy of the name Cadburys created. That really wasn’t what the Mexicans had in mind when they invented cocoa in 1500BC. They wanted a Flake. Ok, they put cocoa into savoury food, which is understandable because 100% cocoa is not for consumption but to be used more like cinnamon or ginger.

Anyway, the Times, today, this pic. A group of ‘experts’ have rated chocolate options. What they are ‘experts’ in, they don’t say. I’m guessing skiing. Possibly astronomy. They’re certainly not ‘experts’ in chocolate. Not because they disagree with me, (obviously, or we wouldn’t be talking about it) but because I deeply question their paradigm and their criteria. They’re judging these bars by their organic-ness, FFS, their lack of sugar, their disapproval of palm oil, their ingredients, their stuck-up, know-nothing preconceptions whilst missing the real point by a million miles.

ITS ABOUT TASTE!!! ITS ABOUT ‘THE EXPERIENCE’ ON YOUR TONGUE. ITS ABOUT ENJOYMENT!!!!

These are the people who label all really lovely food as ‘ultra-high-processed’ just because it wasn’t plucked from a nearby bush and eaten unwashed. Slugs’n’all. These people are ‘dieticians!’ For whom there really should be ‘registers’ to protect the public. Like paedophiles. They approach everything from a reductionist viewpoint. Forgetting that the ‘whole’ is far greater than the sum of the parts, when food is concerned.

So you can take your measly 2 stars given to the best chocolate that the world will ever know (even when owned by Crafts) and replace it with the confectionary equivalent of lettuce.

Glad I’ve got that off my chest.

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx