There are a few things that routinely keep me up at night: the futility of life, the inevitability of death, and the mystery of why the US’s chocolate is so disgusting.
Readers who have had the misfortune to encounter a Hershey bar will know exactly what I’m talking about. It’s wretched stuff isn’t it? If you are in possession of a sound mind and a few functioning taste buds then I don’t see how you can possibly enjoy US chocolate. It tastes like sawdust that’s been drowned in sugar and soaked with baby vomit.
It tastes like that, by the way, because that’s roughly what it is. American chocolate (I’m talking about the non-fancy stuff) has a lot more sugar and a lot less cocoa than its European counterparts. Some producers also allegedly put their milk through a process called controlled lipolysis which produces butyric acid. What’s that when it’s at home? It’s something that’s found in vomit. God knows what else Americans get up to in their chocolate factories. A lawsuit recently filed in New York alleges that Hershey, which has the licence to produce Cadbury products in the US, “fails to disclose” that some of its chocolate products “contain unsafe levels of lead and cadmium”.
There may be identifiable reasons that explain why US chocolate is so gross but here’s what I have a hard time understanding: why do Americans, who excel at many things, stand for this? Why are they so complacent about their terrible healthcare system and their chlorinated chicken and their rancid chocolate? I’m not being a chocolate snob here (well, I’m only being a little bit of a snob), because there’s a serious side to this: Europe is a lot stricter about many food additives than the US. Americans have basically been poisoned into believing that their chocolate tastes nice, I reckon.
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
