Never trust a person who says they don’t like chocolate

Did you do your bit for World Chocolate Day on Friday? I hope so. I did my damnedest, doubling up my efforts to compensate for all the naysayers.

Unfortunately, there is only so much chocolate a girl can eat. I can’t be carrying everyone else forever: if we all just played our role, had a few squares/bars on the designated day, then we’d truly make a difference.

Your country needs you. The cocoa growers need us all. But no, far too many people profess themselves to be on diet, or declare chocolate unhealthy.

To this, I say nonsense, for chocolate is merely a cunning vegetable, a veritable stew or soup of plant matter, if you will: it contains cocoa from beans, sugar from cane and milk from four-stomached cows that helpfully eat grass and turn it to milk, so we can digest it with our single belly.

I’m a little iffy about the recent addition of palm oil in some brands but if folk would just do their homework and search out quality bars, Fairtrade bars, and even bean-to-bar chocolate producers, if they’d just read the labels, then chocolate becomes saintly.

Of course, there are those who say they don’t like chocolate, as if you could switch off the biological impulse, nay, imperative to seek out abundant sugar and fat, all from one convenient source. Never trust a person who says they don’t like chocolate, for they are most certainly lying.

From now on, we all have to pitch in a bit harder on World Chocolate Day – every July 7, diarise it – because, as usual, the United States of America are not coming to the party. It’s the Paris climate change agreement all over again.

Instead, America has its own day, a different day, celebrating chocolate on September 13, although anyone who’s ever been to the USA will know that American chocolate isn’t real chocolate anyway, unless you like gnawing soap.

On July 7, America celebrates Macaroni Day instead. I kid you not. So now, more than ever, the rest of the world must band together and eat chocolate, for has anyone ever gone to war sucking Lindt balls? Maybe there have been fights about which poor schmuck gets the coffee cream, or even punchups over the last Rolo, but these are merely local skirmishes.

Truly, chocolate is the food of love. Please, eat on.

Jennie Ridyard