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.

Last week I bought a 5oz. Hershey bar for dessert at the end of my lunch break. I had a few squares, and thought that rather than being a hog, I'd give the rest away. For fun I posted the bar in the 'Free' section of Craigslist, noting the missing squares, etc. Within three minutes I had my first taker. Doesn't that say something about true mass appeal?

she wouldn't keep her nerdy "chocolate chest" on top of the fridge, as this tends to be a rather warm place and will compromise the integrity of bitter overpriced chocolate.

... and there is chololate.

Just because I enjoy Schaffen Berger and other premium dark chocolates doesn't mean that I don't enjoy chowing down on a bag of M&Ms or Snowcaps at the movies. Eating "good" dark chocolate doesn't make me a snob anymore than being able to appreciate a good glass of wine and still enjoy a cold beer at the family BBQ.

Despite what Broudy insists, there IS a difference between premium chocolate and the more mass-produced brands. Not that both don't have their place, but I do fine that I get more real pleasure out of eating a small peice of the really good stuff. I can enjoy the layers of flavors and appreciate that different chocolatiers produce vastly different flavors. I do not love every single variety that I try, but I find that the same with any food that I eat. I enjoy eating the average candy bar, but I have to eat much more of it to get a fraction of the satisfaction that I get from the better quality.

To Brody is may seem silly that someone keep a cooler specifically for chocolate, but is that any sillier than someone maintaining a wine celler? Or putting vegetables in the crisper bin? Different foods need to be treated differently in order to maintain their flavor and freshness. I have a cabinet that I use just to keep my teas in, but does that make me a snob? Or just that I'm smart enough to keep my tins in a cool, dark place so that they retain their flavors as long as possible and that I don't end up with tins all over my kitchen? Keeping a chocolate fridge may not be something that most people would want to have given that most of us don't keep pounds of chocolate on hands at all times. If this person does, then why not? A few years ago, most people would not think twice about how they keep wine and now personal coolers and cellers are pretty common place.

It is not snobbery that causes people to really consider and enjoy what they eat. In most of Europe, eating only what is freshest, of the best quality and in season is the norm for the average person. Quality trumps quantity, the exact opposite of how we do things in America. Perhaps if we paid more attention to just what we eat as opposed to just shoveling things into our mouths as quickly as possible, we might take greater satisfaction in our food.

I approach chocolate the way I was taught to drink wine by a very fine teacher. Taste, appreciate the flavor. Then drink (or in this case, eat) only what you enjoy. In the end, the label, brand, vineyard, etc. means nothing. Just pay attention and really enjoy it.

What most deeply impresses me about all this chocodiscourse is the passion underwriting each response. I mean, is this what it all comes down to? Here we are walking each day through a staggering, complex, beautiful world frought with misunderstanding and our senses are so overloaded that we can afford nuance only in metered doses -- in foil-wrapped, three-dollar chunks produced by, well, by someone else. Is it so difficult to face or acknowledge or embody our creative responses to the world that we rely on consumer choices to define our very selves? A statement about chocolate or its eaters somehow becomes a political razor's edge: "Hey, he said my chocolate tastes like crayons. He's ripping on my chocolate. He's cutting ME down!" And suddenly a what a person picks up in aisle three has become an inextricable part of one's _identity_. More disturbingly, it's become the very shorthand for conveying that identity. Most disturbingly of all, the author of an article that takes note of a buying trend becomes a target of hate (not just the article -- its author!).

I mean, c'mon folks -- I think we're richer than we're allowing ourselves to be here. I've read the responses to this article (Almost forty of them, and it's not even lunch time!) and divided the majority of them into the following three camps:

1. "I'm a chocolate snob with Justification x, and I hate Oliver Broudy."

2. "I'm not a chocolate snob, and Go, Oliver Broudy!"

3. "Can I just make a comment about my fave chocolate?"

Nestle vs. Scharffen Berger is missing the point. I'm craving 400 flavors of response. I'm craving identities expressed and defended through media that can't be bought with a gift card. F#&k rich chocolate -- I want rich _people_.