The government has spent the last six years stomping all over the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, but now they've crossed a line. They want to mess with chocolate.
With all of his women surrounding him, Bush should know by now: you don't mess with a woman who is PMSing, and you don't get between her and her chocolate. Laura might be meek and mild even when hormones are going haywire, but I would not want to see a premenstrual Condi or Karen Hughes. Condi scares me even without PMS.
The short version of the story: The FDA's planning to allow the brown waxy shit used in the cheapest "chocolate" Easter Bunnies to call itself chocolate.
In 2005, I visited a chocolate museum in Cologne, Germany. The moment of total nirvana was right after you watched (and read about) the entire chocolate-making process, you arrived at an enormous chocolate fountain that looked like a cacao tree. A museum employee stood there dipping cookies in chocolate and distributing them to tourists.
Among other things I learned there, I saw that Germany has standards of identity for chocolate. If you want to call your product chocolate, milk chocolate, "Alpenmilch" chocolate, white chocolate, etc, you must follow a basic formula of cacao solids, cocoa butter, sugar, milk, etc. Deviate too much and your product isn't chocolate.
Here in the U.S., consumers are rapidly figuring out (with the encouragement of the upscale end of the chocolate industry) that the percent of cacao solids in your chocolate makes a difference. I recently noticed an upscale brand advertising a milk chocolate bar with 34% cacao and dark chocolates with as much as 70% cacao. I guess it shows that the good stuff IS "the good stuff" because they don't cheapen their chocolate by skimping on the cacao.
Years before now, even cheaper, more mainstream brands of chocolate helped consumers catch onto another important property of real chocolate - "melts in your mouth, not in your hand" (thanks M&Ms). Cocoa butter has the wonderful and delicious property of staying solid at room temperature but melting at 98.6 F.
What needs defending then? The FDA has proposed deregulating the very definition of "chocolate" to allow for substitution of cheaper ingredients. Just like Germany, we've got a standard of identity for chocolate. Right now, what's at stake is the required use of cocoa butter in chocolate... if the FDA keeps going the way it's headed, vegetable fats and oils will become acceptable substitutes for cocoa butter and advertisers can still call the resulting product "chocolate."
Why this and why now? There was a "citizen's petition" from several average American "citizens" - the Chocolate Manufacturers Assn., the Grocery Manufacturers Assn., the Snack Food Assn. and the National Cattlemen's Beef Assn, and seven other food producing associations.
Their argument?
Consumer expectations still define the basic nature of a food. There are, however, no generally held consumer expectations today concerning the precise technical elements by which commonly recognized, standardized foods are produced. Consumers, therefore, are not likely to have formed expectations as to production methods, aging time or specific ingredients used for technical improvements, including manufacturing efficiencies.
Translation?
Consumers won't know the difference.
said by Cybele May
In an LA Times article (linked above), Cybele goes on to say:
I can tell you right now — we will notice the difference. How do I know? Because the product they're trying to rename "chocolate" already exists. It's called "chocolate flavored" or "chocolaty" or "cocoalicious." You can find it on the shelves right now at your local stores in the 75% Easter sale bin, those waxy/greasy mock-chocolate bunnies and foil-wrapped eggs that sit even in the most sugar-obsessed child's Easter basket well into July.
It may be cocoa powder that gives chocolate its taste, but it is the cocoa butter that gives it that inimitable texture. It is one of the rare, naturally occurring vegetable fats that is solid at room temperature and melts as it hits body temperature — that is to say, it melts in your mouth. Cocoa butter also protects the antioxidant properties of the cocoa solids and gives well-made chocolate its excellent shelf life.
Because it's already perfectly legal to sell choco-products made with cheaper oils and fats, what the groups are asking the FDA for is permission to call these waxy impostors "chocolate." Because we "haven't formed any expectations."
I'd say we've already demonstrated our preference for true chocolate. That's why real chocolate outsells fake chocolate. Nine of the 10 bestselling U.S. chocolate candies are made with the real stuff. M&Ms, Hershey Bars, Reese's Peanut Butter Cups — all real chocolate. Butterfinger is the outlier.
Another website I looked at brought up another issue at stake - the requirement to use real milk instead of milk substitutes. I don't have the details here, but I can guess.
Pick up any cheapo package of "cheese" at your local grocery (a good brand to do this with is Kraft) and look for "Milk Protein Concentrate" among the ingredients. What's that? It's not milk, and it's not made in this country. It's imported for dirt cheap because it's what I've heard described as "everything that's left after you take all of the good stuff out of milk." It undercuts our dairy farmers and it sure as hell doesn't help anyone's nutrition (or their taste buds).
Is that the direction chocolate is going in? I don't know, but we've got one way to guarantee that it's not. Take action!! The FDA has to hear from all of us... men and women who aren't PMSing included.
Take Action
Cybele's article gives the following instructions to take action:
But as long as they're asking, the FDA does have a way for other citizens to voice their expectations. It's buried deep in its website. Until April 25, the agency is accepting comments — by fax, mail or online — on a docket with the benign-sounding name of "2007P-0085: Adopt Regulations of General Applicability to All Food Standards that Would Permit, Within Stated Boundaries, Deviations from the Requirements of the Individual Food Standards of Identity."
If you'd prefer even more concrete instructions, click here. We've got until April 25 to raise some hell about this, so do your part TODAY!!