Chocolate

Valentine's Day is not only associated with St. Valentine, but also with flowers and chocolates. St. Valentine is probably no longer on the radar of most people wh celebrate this day.   It is a time when a man may be able to give a significant other chocolate and they may not care.  Otherwise, it seems that women worry about  their weight.  Women seem to always talk about weight.  I overhear it at work in the break room with women discussing the diet of the day or weight watcher points.  I doubt the husbands of those women will be getting them any chocolate, unless of course they buy it for her, but perhaps really for her to allow them to eat.  Kinda of like buying your wife a drill.  One women at work complained that their family, on way up north, stopped to eat at Culver's.  Her husband's single cheese burger with fries, and a Mountain Dew, was more points than what she is allowed in a day.  It does not then take a master of statistics to realize what chocolate may do to her point total.  I suggested that perhaps her point total was too low.  I wonder what points from a chocolate bar would be?

Cocoa bean growing regions

Has chocolate received a bad rap?  This past weekend, a cooking show was on celebrating cooking with chocolate.  It was not odd that a television cooking show would celebrate chocolate, but the odd thing was it was by a women who cooks purely vegan and will not use standard sugars or even honey as a sweetener.  Christine, a vegan cook on PBS, made chocolate chunk cookies and brownies with dark chocolate, and used some type of rice sugar in place of other types of sugars.  She also had some substitute for butter.  As she commented: for many years if someone had asked if she she would like some chocolate, she would say, I suspect with the smugness of a Prius owner, that "oh, no, I do not eat that any more."  That was until she more recently discovered the benefits of dark chocolate, and the darker the better.  Milk chocolate of course, she went on, is bad, because it contains dairy (milk) and often added sugars.  Those two items would not be allowed in her diet.  She went on to "just say" that 85% of human maladies are diet related, "just saying."  Her favorite two words, I think she used them ten times in her monologue harassment preaching about the negative effects of the normal American diet.

Across the Atlantic perhaps it is no surprise that Europe, with Nestle and Lindt, would eat the most chocolate.  Of course, chocolate does not grow in Europe so the fine European chocolatiers are dependent upon import, think of the spice trade of medieval times. Apparently European guilt over colonization will only go so far.  Perhaps they can justify their purchases of chocolate (made from cocoa beans) as to how it helps the poor farmer.  At Church on Sunday they were selling fair-trade chocolate bars with the proceeds to benefit the churches in Africa.  The Swiss lead current world wide consumption with almost 10kg per person annually, while the US trails back at 5.5 kg/person.  A nutrition web site identifies the following:
100 gram bar of dark chocolate with 70-85% cocoa contains:
11 grams of fiber.
67% of the RDA for Iron.
58% of the RDA for Magnesium.
89% of the RDA for Copper.
98% of the RDA for Manganese.
It also has plenty of potassium, phosphorus, zinc and selenium.
Yet, the web site  it goes on to say that one bar should not be eaten in one day, as it is over 600 calories.  Well, shame on me! I always viewed a normal sized chocolate bar as to eat in one sitting.

The article goes on to explain that dark chocoloate, with its high level of anti-oxidants, may lower blood pressure by improving blood flow.  Blood test related, it may raise HDL, and protect against LDL oxidiation; it is said to lower the risk of heart disease.  Finally, it may protect against sun damage to skin, and best of all, although second best to men, perhaps, it can improve brain activity.  A good number o f"mays".  The article did not say if is male's best friend in improving blood flow, particularly for middle aged and older males.  My wife says that men often let their little head do the thinking for their big head, so improving blood flow may be the greatest benefit of dark chocolate to men. Christine, the vegan, found that after years of denying herself chocolate, dark chocolate may actually have benefits, and found or developed cooking methods to her taste.  She even admitted that the carob and other replacements for chocolate in the 1980's really did not cut it.

Christine would well fit in Madison, particularly in the trendy near-east side.  Once a working class neighborhood, today it is populated by everything politically correct--from persons who wear stocking hats in the summer, to the local food movement.  How chocolate can be a local food in the upper Midwest, I don't know, but this area of hipsters, hippies and hangouts along Atwood Avenue is home to a chocolatier and just two blocks away the Chocolaterian Cafe.  It is not far from the trendy bars and restaurants that will serve your mushrooms to you liking--"Is the mushroom sauteed or fried?" asked the gentlemen at the Alchemy Cafe, with more than an air of pomposity.  Obviously chocolate is in if vegan Christine and the bell-weather of all that is (in their minds, anyway) best and right in Wisconsin has not one, but two chocolate places within a few blocks of each other.  The near-east side being the near-east side, with a smugness and pretentiousness that would even surpass that of a Nissan Leaf driver, an article in the "Wisconsin State Journal" on the relocation of the chocolate place across the street to a larger space, noted it was not a cafe or a restaurant. It was more than a ding to the Chocolaterian Cafe, it was a sign that snobbishness has well settled in among the self-proclaimed elites of Madison.

My giant choclate bar, received as a Christmas present

I do happen to like dark chocolate, and received a Christmas gift of a 4 lb 6.4 oz dark chocolate bar.  I had also received several other of those 70-80% cocoa bars, not to mention over 8.5 lbs of chocolate chips, although most of those are milk chocolate.  I figure I received about 14 pounds of chocolates for Christmas, not including what was in my stocking, or about 6.4 kg.  In the end, I will do more than my share to up the chocolate intake.  By the end of the year, I will  likely be more Swiss in Chocolate usage than American. Now, if I had bought my spouse chocolates for Valentine's day, she would see through to the real purpose--which was to enrich my own stomach.