Way back in elementary school I’d often stop in at one of three places in town where you could buy candy and one of my favorite confections back then was a chocolate bar. Back in 1950's Appalachia there wasn’t much of a selection to choose from. You had your Hershey Bar and your Nestle bar and then in the 1960s the chocolate wizards came out with the blocky chocolate bar they called a Chunky. Still, I’d found Nirvana at an early age and it was wrapped in foil and paper and it melted quickly in the sun.
As I grew older and started getting off the school bus, I still had chocolate fever, but I was grooming my taste buds for the more exotic candy bars like Mallo Cup with the vanilla cream center, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, Three Musketeers and Snickers. Then, when I was totally hooked on nuts with my chocolate, I discovered Almond Joy, Fifth Avenue, Mars Bar and Hershey’s With Almonds. I never looked back. Well, almost.
Of course, that’s when I liked a chocolate candy bar with a soda. Now, as a grown man, I wouldn’t even think about washing down a mouthful of masticated chocolate with a bubbly soft drink. Now it’s either cold milk or hot coffee, the latter of which can cause certain unwanted side effects that will make you wish you’d had the milk instead. Or even a caffeine-free soda.
It wasn’t until I reached my forties that I discovered that I hadn’t really been enjoying chocolate all along. I’d been eating “milk chocolate”. The snobby experts on TV food shows told us that milk chocolate wasn’t even chocolate, as far as they were concerned. Real chocolate, they said, was “dark chocolate”, which contained more cocoa and less milk. I had to remind myself that these were the same people who looked down their noses at yellow mustard and who took great pains to hold their wine glass by the stem at all times.
Later, in the 21st Century, more experts explained on TV and in magazines and health pamphlets that cocoa contained “bioflavonoids” that had health benefits and could even prevent cancer. But, still, I thought, dark chocolate was bitter and tasted like a candy bar that someone had forgotten to add the rest of the ingredients to. Like sugar and milk.
By now, at age 56, I have the answer to it all. I’ll just eat two or three times as much milk chocolate and wash it down with twice as much milk. And, once in a great while, I’ll eat a little piece of Hershey’s Dark with a cup of coffee, just to be health conscious. Gain weight? Get fat? Well, yeah, there is that. Still, I’ll be better off than most Appalachian men who mellow out with Jack Daniels and Budweiser. Plus, after I’ve had my chocolate fix, I can still get behind the wheel of a car with a clear conscience.
There you go. Who says you can’t teach and ol’ dawg new tricks?
