I have watched the new chocolate connosiuers with annoyance and amusement, when I'm not ignoring them. Yes, it's good to appreciate quality, and NOBODY can love good chocolate more than I do. But these hapless victims of marketing are only the moneyed counterparts of WalMart shopping reeses pieces eaters, except they have a very apparent desire to make others feel stupid and unworthy. These are the people who will ruin reading and wine drinking and music if you let them, because for them it becomes all about status and cool. Why can't a person like fine wine, chocolate and music and also enjoy a Stephen King novel, a bag of peanut M and M's and a bottle of 3 buck chuck? Does everything a person consumes have to have some sort of "authenticity" to it? I defy anyone to read the excerpts of the chocolate experts's comments in the article and not want to laugh.

Maybe they'll chew on vanilla beans and cinnamon sticks next.

Whole Foods (and Central Market here in Texas) keep their expensive chocolate in the cheese department, unwrapping, cutting, and re-packing it as though it were a cheese that needs to be cut just before purchase. Unfortunately, chocolate easily picks up flavors from other foods (hence the separate storage box referred to in the article) so that expensive chocolate you get cut to order is going to taste like cheese. Butter does the same thing in the refrigerator.

Let's just get something straight - no one food is inherently better than another when it comes to taste. Nutritional value, whether or not it's ethically produced, yes. Taste, no. It's all personal preference, which in turn can be influenced by a whole other host of factors. Mr. Broudy is right to call bullshit, methinks. This new trend for "better" chocolate is partly a desire on the part of some people to distance themselves from the masses, particularly here in the UK where class consciousness is disgustingly strong. One day there will be something new and 'luxury' chocolate will be forgotten.

Now, I've had my savoury (fritos sent to me by my mother in the US - love me some greasy, hydrogenated nasties) and need a sweet...I'm off to deliberate over a 45p snickers or a big £1.99 bar of Green and Blacks Maya Gold. BOTH equally tasty, but in different ways.

And please, don't you think it's a little gross putting one food above another for reasons that aren't bound to practical, quantifiable things (cost, nutritional, how far it will stretch) when a lot of the world goes hungry? Even in the good ole US of A?

I's also like to point out that I'll eat anything once, I love food. And if it's something I like, I pay as much as can afford to obtain it. But I realise that it's just food. You'll never find me over analysing what I put in my mouth (except maybe, as noted above, for practical reasons).

I've be all for letting the chocolate snobs enjoy their chocolate while thinking themselves better than the rest of us, if they were as concerned as to who grows the cocoa beans going into their delicacies, as they are about distinguishing complex flavors and looking at percentages. The use of child slaves in the Ivory Coast, the largest producer of cacao, has not only been amply demonstrated but accepted by the chocolate industry. In 2001 the industry agreed to a protocol that would have them stop using child-slave harvested chocolate by 2005. Instead, almost no progress has been made. If less Ivorian chocolate is used now, it's because the civil war in the country has disruped the cacao industry.

Chocolate beans are sold by middlemen in the world market, where they are all lump together, so that any company who buys from middlemen is likely to be getting beans harvested by slaves.

The alternative is buying "fair trade" chocolate, and while some of the "gourmet" chocolte is fair trade, unless it specifically says so you can't assume it is.

The world is full of pompous douchebags, isn't it? What are you going to do? But to champion "regular" chocolate under the guise of some John Stossel-like "Give Me a Break" column is misguided. Snickers, M&Ms, even Hershey bars don't taste the same as they used to. Ever notice that? Ever notice a slightly sour aftertaste? This is because in the last few years, big candy makers have taken to substituting a chemical version of vanilla, called Vanillin, for the real thing. Why? Because real vanilla is too expensive, so candy makers are forced--forced!!--to make their own, Clark Griswold-style. And yet, prices of brand-name candy bars have steadily risen....

So to be calling for a return to "good old" chocolate like M&Ms, etc., is a little like sticking up for Budweiser, or Wal-Mart, or any of the many other American innovations that have cheapened and diluted and fabricated the basic good out of everything. We did get Fritos right, though, so there's that.

On the other hand, I once heard an interview with Ruth Reichl where she stated that chocolate--this is the gourmet stuff, now--older than 3 days was "no good." If I could have punched her through the radio, I would have.

-M.D.

This Canadian believes that this is one momentous positive contribution that the US has brought to the world. Make Hershey bars............

Well speaking of tasting like crayons, American chocolate is what tastes like crayons.

No doubt due to the addition of wax which was added to reduce the 'melt factor' when

chocolate was included in rations for the GI's.

Eat truly good chocolate for awhile and you will never go back to Hershey's, be it

milk or 'special dark'.

I don't drink wine, yet I can appreciate that there is a vast difference in taste/complexity between

a fine bordeux and a cheap red table wine.

I do however eat chocolate, and I'll take a Green and Black's Organic dark chocolate over the cheap American standards any day.

I whole-heartedly welcome the arrival of rich fine 'complex' chocolates, served and showcased like a fine

wine.

What a treat!