Chocolate a delicious sinsation

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 14/02/2016 (3553 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There’s only one more sleep until Valentine’s Day, and anyone with love in their heart knows what that means.

 

It means you need to drop this newspaper right now, drive to the nearest shopping mall and obtain some lovely gifts to ensure your loved ones continue to be your loved ones.

There are three basic gift items that are mandatory on Feb. 14, namely 1) a thoughtful greeting card, possibly featuring a cute monkey; 2) a bouquet of high-priced flowers of the rose variety; and 3) a huge box of the sweetest gift of all, by which we mean chocolates.

You can be forgiven for forgetting the first two items, but failing to offer the gift of chocolate will —at least in this columnist’s home — land the forgetful villain in the doghouse for an indefinite period.

This is especially true in Japan, where chocoholics are feasting on a uniquely gooey, salty version of this addictive treat. For this month only, customers at McDonald’s restaurants in Japan are being served a new menu item — the $2.75 (330 yen) McChoco Potato, a medium-sized serving of fries covered in not one, but two types of chocolate sauce (milk and white).

“The chocolate starts to melt as it touches the warm fries, creating wonderful sweet-and-salty smells,” gushed Stars and Stripes, the U.S. Armed Forces newspaper. “The salt on the fries doesn’t overwhelm the sweetness of the chocolate.”

With a sense of sweet-and-salty yearning in our love-stuffed heart, we present the Top Five Things You Didn’t Know About Sinfully Delicious Chocolate:

5) It’s the mother of invention

Sure, necessity is important, but when it comes to inventions, nothing makes the process run smoother than a bar of chocolate. You may look on chocolate with renewed respect when we tell you it was the inspiration behind one of mankind’s greatest culinary inventions the microwave oven. In 1945, according to dozens of online reports, a self-taught American engineer named Percy Spencer was working in a lab testing magnetrons, the high-powered vacuum tubes inside radars developed during the Second World War.

Fortunately for the world, on the day in question, Spencer just happened to have a candy bar in his pocket. As luck would have it, he noticed the pocket chocolate began to melt as he worked near the magnetrons that produced microwaves. “My grandfather was watching a microwave testing rig, and he realized that the peanut-cluster bar in his pocket started to melt — it got quite warm,” inventor Rod Spencer, Percy’s grandson, told BusinessInsider.com in 2015. “So he put two and two together and he decided to get some popcorn, so he sent the popcorn in and it started popping all over the place. The next morning, he brought in an egg.

One of the engineers who was a little disbelieving in terms of a microwave’s ability to cook, just as he was looking over, the egg blew up in his face.” Thanks to the chocolate accident, Spencer and his employer, the U.S. defence contractor Raytheon, patented the gadget, which they dubbed the “RadaRange.” Two years later, in 1947, the first commercially available microwave oven was built. It stood just shy of six feet tall, weighed 750 pounds and cost about $5,000, or about $53,000 in today’s dollars. Snickers, anyone?

4) It spawned a legendary Canadian strike

After the end of the Second World War, price controls were lifted, and the cost of everything, including chocolate bars, skyrocketed. On April 25, 1947, when a group of kids in the tiny Vancouver Island town of Ladysmith wandered down to the Wigwam Cafe, they were stunned to discover the price of a candy bar had shot up 60 per cent overnight, to eight cents from five. According to MentalFloss.com, these plucky Canadian kids weren’t about to take it without a fight, so they whipped up some signs and marched on the sidewalk chanting: “We want a five-cent chocolate bar/Eight cents is going too darn far!”

That’s when the local paper snapped a photo of the pint-sized protesters and the Chocolate Bar Strike, also known as the Candy Bar War, began to march across the country. Kids in other cities began picketing their corner stores with signs reading: “Candy is dandy, but eight cents isn’t handy!” In the wake of Ladysmith, a squealing mob of 200 kids barged into the quiet halls of the provincial legislature in Victoria. In Burnaby, traffic was clogged for two hours as angry kids paraded their bicycles along a major thoroughfare. Ten kids blasting bugles reportedly led 60 chocolate-craving classmates in a march on Parliament Hill, with one toting a sign shrieking: “We’ll eat worms before we eat eight-cent chocolate bars.” It even heated up things in Winnipeg, with stores reporting (brace yourselves for a shock) a day of zero sales of chocolate bars. It finally fizzled in Toronto when the Toronto Telegram branded the movement a Communist front and the Financial Post had a front-page headline warning: “Communists run candy bar strike, recruit young children for parade.” With that, support evaporated and parents shut down the young strikers, while the price of a candy bar, tragically, remained at eight cents.

3) It’s a Winnipeg thing

When it comes to the fine art of chocolate, no one puts Winnipeg in a corner. OK, we stole that line from Dirty Dancing, but you get our subtly delicious drift. In our neck of the woods, no one does chocolate quite like the fine folks at Mordens’ of Winnipeg, the legendary chocolate factory at 674 Sargent Ave. That’s where Fred Morden, the current proprietor of the family-run shop, churns out their globally renowned signature chocolate — Mordens’ Russian Mints.

In Winnipeg, it’s not Christmas without these minty-chocolate meltaways slathered in premium milk chocolate under the tree. In 1984, the Russian Mint sat on top of the chocolate-loving world, beating out 300 other contenders in a competition. “In New Orleans, in 1984 at the World’s Fair, we won the gold medal for best chocolate piece,” Fred Morden, who has been part of the 57-year-old family empire since he was knee high to a caramel, told this columnist during a visit in 2014. “That’s when Russian Mints really took off.”

On a recent visit, we met a female customer who, when she went to Spain for her brother’s wedding, took along several kilograms of Russian Mints to prove her hometown is both classy and delicious. Here’s what Canadian Living magazine gushed about the revered chocolatiers: “Famous for their signature chocolate, the Russian Mint (of which they produce one ton every three days from October to December), Mordens’ is like the Willy Wonka of Winnipeg. The chocolate plant is located behind and above their temptingly delicious storefront on Sargent Avenue. And while chocolate doesn’t run through the pipes, the end results are still melt-in-your-mouth magic.”

2) It’s brain food

Want to win a Nobel Prize? Then start stuffing your face with chocolate. You probably think we’re joking, but we don’t kid around when it comes to chocolate or prizes awarded to people with brains the size of recreational vehicles. The truth is, in 2012, a researcher found a strong correlation between the amount of chocolate a country consumes and the number of Nobel Prize-winners it produces.

In an article in the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Franz H. Messerli, a New York City cardiologist, wrote that cocoa contains flavanols, plant-based compounds linked to slowing or reversing age-related cognitive decline. According to Time magazine, Messerli wondered “whether there would be a correlation between a country’s level of chocolate consumption and its population’s cognitive function.”

So he went to Wikipedia and downloaded a list of countries ranked by Nobel laureates per capita, then compared the data with each country’s chocolate consumption and — BINGO! — there was a powerful correlation.

“The country with the most Nobel laureates per 10 million people and the greatest chocolate consumption per capita: Switzerland,” Time noted.

“Sweden came in a close second, and Denmark landed in third place. The U.S. fell somewhere in the middle of the pack… At the bottom of the list were China, Japan and Brazil.” The dose needed to boost a country’s laureate production: 0.4 kilograms (0.9 pounds) of chocolate per capita per year. Quipped one U.S. Nobel winner: “Personally, I feel that milk chocolate makes you stupid. Now dark chocolate is the way to go.”

1) It’s better than you know what

We wish we were kidding, but we’re not. For starters, the dating website eHarmony.com notes there have been at least five major studies wherein women were asked if they preferred eating chocolate to having sex. In three of these, chocolate was on top (so to speak), with up to 70 per cent of women preferring chocolate. Of the other two, one — not surprisingly sponsored by a condom maker — found women opted for sex, while the last one found women would rather have (wait for it) some toast.

We assume this was really good toast, of course. And when it comes to things melting on your tongue, scientists have shown chocolate is better than a passionate kiss. According to the BBC, in 2007, a British researcher monitored the hearts and brains of couples in their 20s as they melted chocolate in their mouths and then kissed.

“Chocolate caused a more intense and longer lasting ‘buzz’ than kissing, and doubled the volunteers’ heart rates,” the BBC noted. Dr. David Lewis said: “There is no doubt that chocolate beats kissing hands down when it comes to providing a long-lasting body and brain buzz. A buzz that, in many cases, lasted four times as long as the most passionate kiss.” Not to be outdone, an Italian study reported in The Journal of Sexual Medicine showed eating chocolate leads to higher levels of desire, arousal and sexual satisfaction.

“Female participants who consumed at least one cube of chocolate a day experienced more active libidos and better overall sexual function than those who didn’t indulge,” gushed Women’s Health magazine in 2012. It might have something to do with the fact chocolate contains a compound called phenylethylamine that releases the same mood-altering endorphins that flood our bodies during sex.

On the other hand, sometimes a candy bar is nothing more than a candy bar. It’s all in how you unwrap it.

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca