Just Desserts

By TAD BARTIMUS

And now, for some GOOD news: chocolate is a vegetable!

Like me, millions of you recently got spammed with an e-mail proclaiming "chocolate is a vegetable." Given the number of chocoholics in the world, this letter surely has circumnavigated the globe countless times. As if the subject matter wasnât titillating enough, the ending was a real grabber: "Send this to four women and you will lose two pounds. Send this to all the women you know (or ever knew) and you will lose 10 pounds. IF YOU DELETE THIS MESSAGE, YOU WILL GAIN 10 POUNDS IMMEDIATELY." (Which is why I am sending it to all of you, dear readers!)

I have no idea who sits around and thinks these things up, but their chocolate-as-veggie reasoning goes like this: chocolate comes from cocoa beans, a bean is a vegetable, sugar comes from cane or beets, which are plants, which places them in the vegetable category, therefore, chocolate is a vegetable.

Huh?

Stick with me: since chocolate candy bars contain milk, and thatâs a dairy product, candy bars can be considered a health food. Further, if you chocolate-coat raisins, cherries, strawberries and blueberries, which are fruits·

OK, we get the idea. We may not believe it, but we get it.

Americans eat a lot of chocolate; the annual per capita consumption in this country is about 11.3 pounds (surely mine is more), which makes for a lot of hot cocoa, Easter bunnies, Valentine truffles, picnic brownies, cookies mousse and morsels. My 915-page Joy of Cooking lists 37 entries under "chocolate," while Silver Palate Cookbook, at just a third of the size, has 17 recipes.

A pound of sweet milk chocolate contains nearly 2,500 calories ö nearly twice as many as a pound of beef or a dozen eggs, but it also tastes better than a cow haunch or a skillet-sized omelet.

Iâve always thought that instead of eating chocolate, I should just smear it on my hips and be done with it. Then, in the Feb. 12^th Family Circle magazine, Shara Aaron, M.S., B.D., wrote that chocolate "is the ultimate mood-booster" and isnât so bad for us after all.

Quoting David Benton, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at the University of Wales in Swansea, we discover that "consuming chocolate hits a physiological button in texture to cause a very effective release of mood-elevating endorphins" in the brain, thus increasing serotonin, which makes us feel happier.

The bad news is that too much chocolate will still make me fat and could give me insomnia and/or tremors. The good news is that recent studies indicate it doesnât cause acne or migraines, has some of the same heart-disease and cancer-fighting antioxidants found in fruits and vegetables (!) and doesnât raise cholesterol levels. Iâm convinced that if we wait long enough, weâll also find out that the moon really is made of green cheese!

My friend Mort Rosenblum is writing a book about chocolate which will be released next year by the publisher Farrar, Strauss, Giroux. He says the Aztecs, who gave chocolate to the world, used cocoa beans as money and worshipped the stuff.

"Reputation has it that Montezuma, the great Aztec emperor, drank 50 cups of chile-laced chocolate before visiting his harem," says Rosenblum. "When the conquistadors brought chocolate back to Spain in about 1519, nobles and royalty managed to keep it a national secret for nearly a hundred years, until a Spanish princess married a French king and refused to leave home without her chocolate.

"Once the French got hold of it, they converted it from a frothy drink to a very pleasant edible regarded as something between ambrosia and Viagra. It also didnât hurt that in 1753, the botanist Carolus Linnaeus gave the cacao tree the botanical name Theobroma, which means Îfood of the gods.â"

Chocolate migrated to England in 1657, and crossed the Atlantic to the first American factory in Dorchester, Mass., in 1765.

The globe-circling e-mail which set me off about "chocolate is a vegetable" had a few other good tips, including "put Îeat chocolateâ at the top of your list of things to do today; that way, youâll get at least one thing done."

And how about this for a bumper sticker?

STRESSED spelled backward is DESSERTS

© 2002 The Women Syndicate

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