Letters to the Editor

Sweet smell of snobbery Like wine, luxury chocolate now has connoisseurs who tout its "mouthfeel" and "terroir." Bring back "melts in your mouth, not in your hand"! By Oliver Broudy [2006-06-23]

• The sweet sickly stench of anti-snobbery

  Ah, yes, snobbery and reverse snobbery, that Scylla and Charybdis of taste, raise their ugly heads once again on Salon and its forums. So you're a red-blooded Philistine and proud of your taste for chocolate-flavored wax, are you? Would you like some kind of award? Here are all the mini-Snickers bars left over from last Halloween. No one else would eat them, but I'm sure you would enjoy them.

  It's kind of sad, because it misses the point of the thing itself. A cell phone is a status symbol, and in a perverse way so is the deliberate lack of one, but the cell phone, if not abused in public, is still an incredibly useful tool. Chocolate, like wine, is meant to be enjoyed, not analyzed, and I have a drawer at home filled with all kinds--Milka and Valhrona, some lovely Belgian stuff I dip strawberries in, and Trinidads--I love Trinidads, does that make me plebian? The thing is, I can taste the difference between different kinds of chocolate, and I like them all at different times. Food corporations have trained the taste right out of us, so that the real stuff--coffee, tomatoes, green leaf lettuce, wild Alaskan salmon--tastes funny. Even local free-range chicken eggs tasted weird to me at first because I was so used to the tastelessness of big factory-farm eggs. If you think 70%-cacao chocolate tastes like wax, that's how I think of Hershey's (and I think it's gone downhill since the days of the Marshall Plan).

  The other thing is, a little bit of the really good stuff goes a long way. I can make dessert out of a single square and some fruit, whereas I'd be three-quarters of the way through the whole Hershey bar before I even noticed it was gone. If people learn to eat really good food, they'll be satisfied with a lot less, and that can only mean less trouble with weight and related problems down the line.

  So I think the snobs and the reverse snobs are doing us a tremendous disservice all around by taking the focus off the food itself and making it all about how refined they are on one hand and how virtuously ignorant they are on the other. And meanwhile, Americans are slowly losing any ability to taste good food as they have to inhale more and more dreck to be satisfied. Tragic.

  -- Marianna Trench
  [Read Marianna Trench's other letters]
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