DailyDirt: No More Pure Chocolate

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Fri, Mar 20th 2015 5:05pm — Michael Ho

Most folks like chocolate, but there are a few weirdos out there who don't. Sometimes, chocolate is used to mask the flavor of stuff that's good for you (like vitamins or minerals), but for the most part, chocolate lovers want to keep their chocolate free of adulterants. The supply of chocolate might have a hard time keeping up with the growing demand for it, so it could be difficult to preserve the exact same recipes for chocolate that we have now -- and there could be "vintage chocolates" on the market, sold like fine wines, someday. Here are just a few chocolate tidbits for the choco-philes/chocoholics out there.

The cacao tree is susceptible to a variety of diseases and environmental threats, but there are different varieties of cacao that are more disease resistant, drought tolerant and productive. However, the flavor of the resulting chocolates could suffer, but consumers might not notice the gradual change in the taste of their favorite chocolates. [url]
Would you eat chocolate with an anti-aging antioxidant ingredient that claimed to make your skin younger? A $54 box of Esthechoc chocolate contains polyphenols and astaxanthin -- ingredients that the chocolatier states have "clinically proven" benefits for your skin. Sounds like a great excuse to eat more chocolate, but it's probably not as effective as the marketing material implies. Who wants "just the skin" of a 30yo, anyway? [url]
Chocolates from the UK are a bit different than some chocolates made in the US -- the first ingredient for many American chocolates is sugar, but it's milk across the pond. Also, due to a settlement between Hersey's and Let's Buy British Imports, certain UK chocolate brands won't make it to the US -- and vice versa. (And someday, we'll have more videos like this of people reacting to trying foreign foods.) [url]

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Filed Under: aging, antioxidants, astaxanthin, cacao, chocolate, esthechoc, flavor, food, gmo, taste
Companies: hershey

14 Comments

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Anonymous Coward, 20 Mar 2015 @ 5:32pm

GMO chocolate FTW!
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Anonymous Coward, 20 Mar 2015 @ 7:53pm

"A bit different"? The standard for what constitutes chocolate in the US is cheap and inedible compared to England's standard, so it's no wonder Hershey's is doing everything it can to keep the good stuff out of the country, including suing companies importing "real" Cadbury's and other chocolates into the US. Anyone American who had a chance to taste decent chocolate would know that crap offered here is more like chocolate-scented candle wax than real chocolate. To qualify as chocolate in the U.K., a product must contain at least 20 percent cocoa solids; in the U.S., the minimum is 10 percent; that's just the tip of the iceberg. The two countries' recipes do not resemble one another in any way.

If you know anyone visiting London, just ask them to buy you a simple, cheap Cadbury bar at a Boots Pharmacy (sort of the equivalent of a CVS or Duane Reade in the US). You'll think you died and went to heaven. You'd have to pay a high price for specialty chocolate to get the same level of deliciousness.

Time to boycott Hershey's, a corporation that really knows how to throw its weight around -- a boycott would be an easy thing to do as Hershey's is inedible. Or, rather than trying to force Hershey's to allow good chocolate to be imported into the US, how about we pass laws adjusting the quality for chocolate upward so that our standards match those of England? If we cut into Hershey's profits by making them invest in quality ingredients, maybe they won't have so much money to blow on lawyers in future.
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Anonymous Coward, 20 Mar 2015 @ 8:49pm

fake "choco-" vs. real "chocolate"
One thing to watch out for is the faux chocolate, often labeled "choco" (unlike "mayo" - which is usually real mayonnaise). The difference is that although it looks and somewhat-tastes like real chocolate, Choco is make of heart-attack-inducing hydrogenated palm oil or hydrogenated palm kernel oil, while chocolate's base ingredient is the much more expensive (and somewhat healthier) cocoa butter.

With Easter coming up soon, we need to be sure to closely read the labels on the chocolate/choco bunnies to separate the real from the fake, and especially avoid the "Palmer" brand ... which is made of ... you guessed it!
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Anonymous Coward, 21 Mar 2015 @ 12:07am

Response to: Anonymous Coward on Mar 20th, 2015 @ 7:53pm
You can find plenty of chocolate in the US with 20% (or more). What the article is actually talking about is called 'milk' chocolate as opposed to 'dark' chocolate. In other words, this is more about branding and names than anything.
And IMHO the 'milk' stuff in the US would be more aptly named 'wax'.
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Robert Twigg (profile), 21 Mar 2015 @ 5:00am

Hershey Foods
Ever since Hershey Foods exported many hundreds of jobs from Hershey Pennsylvania my wife and I boycott all Hershey Foods and HERCO products and services. No exceptions!
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Anonymous Coward, 21 Mar 2015 @ 8:02am

Some Dark Trivia
Famous mass murderer, human body butcher, and caucasian cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer worked the night shift as a chocolate mixer at the Ambrosia Chocolate Factory in Milwaukee. It's not known if he ever might have tossed in some extra ingredients (acquired through his infamous hobby) into the giant cooking vats.

Ironically, Dahmer's huge refrigerator in his home was kept stocked with another kind of "chocolate" that he regularly dined on.
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Jake, 21 Mar 2015 @ 8:22am

Re:
And just to put this in perspective, Cadbury's chocolate is the cheap low-end stuff that the Swiss and Belgians refuse to import. In fact I heard that the EU made them take the word "chocolate" off the packaging because it contained too many artificial additives to meet the legal definition.
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Anonymous Coward, 21 Mar 2015 @ 8:58am

Hershey's milk chocolate tastes like vomit
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Anonymous Coward, 21 Mar 2015 @ 10:00am

Re: fake "choco-" vs. real "chocolate"
"Chocolatey" means "not chocolate".
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Coyoty (profile), 21 Mar 2015 @ 8:36pm

Chocolate Serial
A serial killer would want "just the skin" of a 30yo. It's easier to store than the whole body of a 30yo.
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Anonymous Coward, 22 Mar 2015 @ 3:32am

Re: Chocolate Serial
Skinning a human body is not an easy task like skinning a dog, cat, deer, or other animal that the skin can easily be peeled off the body. It's a bit more like trying to skin a pig, which has its skin firmly glued on.

O.J. Simpson wrote a book supposedly describing how he did what he became most famous for (a book/torrent which ended up in copyright dispute). Dahmer apparently never had anything to say about either his time working in a chocolate factory, or his time off work, such as how he overcame many of the day-to-day challenges that psychopathic mass-murdering cannibals typically encounter. His "workshop" was apparently so tooled-up and well stocked that police made the rare move of destroying it all rather than auctioning it off, as the law required.

It's been well documented that occupational exposure to certain substances can lead to brain abnormalities -- but is chocolate one of them?
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Coyoty (profile), 22 Mar 2015 @ 4:17am

Re: Re: Chocolate Serial
I said it was easier to store, not easier to make. But if you're a serial killer, it might be something you'd still like to do.
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Anonymous Coward, 22 Mar 2015 @ 6:51am

Re: Re: Re: Chocolate Serial
The Nazis were alleged to have made leather lampshades out of Jewish concentration camp victims. However, Negro skin (which Dahmer must have collected an abundance of) might be a poorer choice for a lampshade.

American soldiers who served in the Pacific theater in WWII might know more about this topic, as many became quite expert in butchering, cooking, curing, and collecting body parts from slain Japanese soldiers:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:LIFE_May_1944_Jap_Skull.jpg
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Anonymous Coward, 22 Mar 2015 @ 12:48pm

Fun stuff to know about US chocolate. For the most part all US chocolate contains butyric acid used to help stabilize milk proteins. If you have ever eaten a cheap piece of chocolate and though it tasted wrong well that is because this acid is the same that makes human vomit stink.

So the bit of bitterness or off taste in chocolate is just the equivalent to a small amount of human vomit so keep eating, yum....
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