Corporate America Is Conspiring to Keep Your Chocolate Shitty

Title should be "I like UK Dairy Milk". Nothing wrong with that if you love powdered milk.

By the way, the connection between Hershey's and Cadbury goes way back to the founding days. There's a fascinating book called "Chocolate Wars" by Deborah Cadbury that chronicles that time.

The whole problem is that in the US chocolate goes through a huge transport chain instead of being made and sold by local chocolatiers.

If you have to go through a supply chain, you value stability and not melting more than you value taste.

Not really true. American chocolate is an acquired taste, but it's supposed to taste like that. Companies deliberately add butyric acid to make it taste like Americans expect.

A lot of people don't like it. A lot of people do.

The best milk chocolate I have ever tasted is the one they give you on Swiss Air flights. It is utterly perfect, just the right mix of sweetness and richness, without being cloying. And the snap when you bite it is a thing of singular beauty.

As a French expat in London, who's actually just back from the shop to get some chocolate : let me tell you how I burst into uncontrollable laughter when I clicked through the link, and understood by the end of the first paragraph that the author's point of reference was going to be "superior British chocolate". Followed by a long love letter to Cadbury's.

In distressing disbelief, I glanced at the URL looking for theonion.com, before collecting myself.

This is a photo of the chocolate aisle in an average Parisian supermarket:

https://imgur.com/a/s3I2o7g

It was sent to me the other day as a cheeky taunt, by my brother who lives there and asked if I needed anything. Of course I do.

You can see here at least 7 different varieties of exquisite, melting praline chocolate. Fine, pure darks of varying strength. The usual pistachio, roasted almond, rice, hazelnut, vanilla, mint, and the more creative (and let's face it : less authentic) pear, apricot, citrus, macaron, crème brûlée (!), raspberry, blueberry, even grapefruit !

I'll never forget the shock when I first moved to the UK, browsing through the aisles and naively looking for my standard French/Belgian/Swiss fare of dark chocolate with roasted almonds, hazelnut, or rice.

I found nothing of the sort, instead on offer was potentially very fine chocolate laced with Wasabi, of all things ! Wasabi, I repeated in horror, taking a snapshot to immediately report the outrage back home. And chilli, yes of course chilli : the ubiquitous alibi in British cuisine, akin to gratuitous violence in action movies. The favourite lazy fix of bland meals that otherwise wouldn't stand on their own feet. A smokescreen of burnt tastebuds to hide behind. A pain that I'm aware (but still to this day can't understand why) many people enjoy inflicting unto themselves.

I suppose this sinking feeling of mixed embarrassment, pity and smug sympathy I had reading the article, must be similar to the one British or American expats in France experience the first time they tune into the radio and hear the French try, and fail hard, at rock'n'roll or hip-hop.

To each their strengths. The Swiss and Belgians are the unrivalled masters of chocolate, and the French at least worthy connoisseurs of the art.

Now, I can't even begin to imagine how American chocolate tastes, having just witnessed someone actually put British Cadbury's at the apex of cocoa achievement.

Talk all you want about taste preferences, but just like we have restrictions on what you can call "chicken wings" and "Champagne" (as compared to "chicken wyngz" and "sparkling wine"), so too should there be restrictions on what you can call chocolate.

You can still have your American Hershey bar, it's just not chocolate, it's candy. It's too bad the Swiss or whoever didn't secure "chocolate" like France did for champagne.

The best chocolate I ever had was from a small chocolatier in a tiny one room building in Elm Springs, Arkansas. He had been a Christian missionary in eastern Africa, and ended up helping to build and develop cacao farming there.

He came back to the states and started ordering beans from the farms he helped start and making bean to bar chocolate here.

The point is that big factory Chocolate is a different thing entirely. Cadbury, Hershey's, it is all shit.

Ritter-Sport FTW! I grew up not too far from the factory and luckily now I can buy it in every super market in the US.

Here is often what is found in candies and cookies nowadays.

* High fructose corn syrup glycemic index 100 vs normal sugar glycemic index 70. The higher the glycemic index the sweeter the product tastes. High fructose corn sugar is a biproduct from subsidized corn production. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fructose

* Palm oil(Cancergenic) https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/press/news/160503-0. Palm oil is cheap so manufacturers use it everywhere but it is cancergenic.

The next time you are in the supermaket, twist the label and read the contents. You will be surprised how hard its to find good products. When I surved the local online super market store only about 3 candys out of 100 had ok content ie not High fructose corn syrup or Palm oil.

"Your Oreos are too sweet and your Chips Ahoy are too dry; the offerings at your local CVS are no good. You have been lied to. These candies do not suffice as guilty pleasures, and you did not choose them freely. You chose them under the duress of false consciousness. Perhaps Mondelez realizes that the sweet taste of Proper Cadbury would awaken in American consumers the knowledge that capitalism doesn’t provide everyone those ideals of choice and excellence, but merely a veneer of freedom and indulgence. Hershey’s sued the major importers of British Cadbury not just because it wanted to continue selling substandard chocolate to the masses, but because it wants to maintain the lie that Americans are empowered by individualistic capitalism to choose whatever chocolate they want, when in fact it crushes their taste buds to the point that they cannot even imagine a better, sweeter world."

People might have different tastes.

Hershey's lawsuit against Cadbury was due to intellectual property rights being violated.

Please stop this communist nonsense.

What do choco connoisseurs think of Theo chocolate?

If you like Cadbury chocolate, you'll probably like KitKat bars. Similar taste and texture to the chocolate.

Does this really belong on the front page of HN (or HN at all)? It's a diatribe about how one guy likes UK chocolate more than US chocolate. Super curious how it wound up on the front page too.

Bringing up cadbury as the gold standard tells more about her bad taste in chocolate than any inherent flaws of capitalism.

Even at walmart you can get a ghirardelli dark, or a lindt 90%. Cadbury--even UK cadbury--is a chunk of sugared grease by comparison.

https://www.cadbury.co.uk/products/cadbury-dairy-milk-11294