CHOCOLATE

I once made the mistake, when speaking to a French friend, of calling chocolate “junk food.” You’d have forgiven me at the time, I’m sure, as I was referring to the thick tablets of chocolate pasted on the top of baby teething biscuits I found in the department store in a small town (Aix-les-bains), where I was camped out with my two girls for several months back in the nineties. You’d have forgiven me, but my friend didn’t, and of course I have since seen the light: I’d been poisoned by North American trends to not realize chocolate is actually one of the basic food groups.

So when I learned recently that an old college buddy of mine had just embarked on a “bean-to-bar dark chocolate” operation in Minnesota, I promptly ordered a selection of his product—made from cocoa beans grown in Belize, Dominican Republic, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. The Meadowlands Chocolate bars arrived in my rural mailbox yesterday, and so this morning—before sullying my taste buds with my usual breakfast of oranges and yogurt—I tested them.

Unbelievable! This chocolate is the real stuff. The wrapping on each bar bears a description—like a wine bottle—of the influences and flavors to be found within, using words such as dark, earthy, rich, nutty, hints of rum, spice, mango, subtle wood aroma. Not fancy filled candies for delicate fingers, these bars are something to sink your teeth into. The winner for me (today at least, though I will change my mind as soon as I’ve consumed it and can eat the next) is the Belize bar, described thus: Bright, fruity overtones. Hints of sweet vanilla.

I was thinking of dieting. You know, after-Christmas bulge needing to be shaved down a bit. But now that I’ve ruined it for today anyway, maybe I should just forget about the yogurt and have another piece of heaven.