Chocolate: Sweet Science &
Dark Secrets of the World’s Favorite Treat. By Kay Frydenborg. Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt. $18.99.
This is a picture book, a
recipe book, a history book, a sociopolitical tract, an advocacy book, a
celebratory book and a science book – or at least it wants to be.
Unfortunately, Kay Frydenborg’s attempt to make Chocolate: Sweet Science & Dark Secrets of the World’s Favorite
Treat into all those books means it is not very satisfying as any one of
them – certainly not as satisfying as chocolate itself, a topic that invites
delectation both intellectual and sensual. From time to time, Frydenborg shows
herself aware of chocolate’s attractions, and this tends to cause her to lapse
into hyperbole: “For most people on earth, eating chocolate feels like a
necessity, almost like breathing air and drinking water. …Chocolate is a glue
that binds people, cultures, history, and the health of the planet. It’s a
bridge to understanding.” But quickly enough – in the case of the above
excerpt, beginning with the very next sentence – Frydenborg moves away from the
positive (even if overstated) elements of chocolate to what seems to be her
real focus, which is that people should not enjoy it too much, because it
conceals what her book’s subtitle calls “dark secrets.” Specifically, after
introducing her “bridge” metaphor, Frydenborg continues, “Crossing that bridge
present many barricades built on centuries of oppression, exploitation, and
misunderstanding, and it has been a long road to try to reach this
understanding, and we’re not all the way there yet.”
Leaving aside the odd notion
of a bridge crossing that presents barricades, this passage shows that
Frydenborg sees chocolate as yet another thing for which “exploiters” (usually
Europeans of centuries past) ought to be held to account by having their modern
descendants (spiritual if not literal) feel guilty, especially as regards what
lighter-skinned “conquerors” of chocolate-producing regions did to
darker-skinned indigenous people and, by extension, to those people’s modern
counterparts.
Those not interested in
being guilt-tripped where chocolate is concerned can skip many of the passages
that do so, but likely not all of them, since this element of Frydenborg’s book
is pervasive. Nevertheless, there are many other aspects to chocolate explored
here, to at least some degree, and they contain most of the fascination to be
found in the book. The many photos of cacao trees and pods are quite
interesting, as are some of the historical discussions – of the days when cacao
beans were used as money, for example, and of the relationship between
chocolate as food and chocolate as medicine. There are passing discussions of
“the science of taste,” of specific types of cacao beans, of the reasons
chocolate is poisonous to dogs and cats, and of other topics. There are recipes
for Mexican and Ecuadorian hot chocolate, Toll House chocolate crunch cookies,
and “My Grandma Crowell’s Fudge Pie.” There is even a list of the Web sites of
small, specialty chocolate companies, albeit one introduced with Frydenborg’s
usual preoccupation – she says these firms are “doing some incredible, exciting
things today, in so many ways: flavor, innovation, sustainability, and social
justice.”
Although Frydenborg
generally gets the history and science of chocolate right, her presentation
contains some elements that are confusing or just plain wrong, for reasons that
are impossible to decipher. In explaining about taste, for instance, she
includes a diagram of the human tongue, marked for sections associated with
specific tastes, and then says in the caption, “This tongue mapping has been discredited
by more recent science, but was once believed to be true. Many people still
believe it is!” But if it is discredited, then why make it the sole
illustration of an important scientific point? Elsewhere, she writes that
Western medicine, in the time of the Spanish conquistadors, “was based almost
entirely on classical Grefi [sic] theories that dated back to Hippocrates…and
Galen.” She presumably means “Greek” theories, but never explains why she
refers to them this way.
There is also an irritating
typographical oddity in the book. The letters “eh” are replaced by a sideways
caret, so, for example, the word “households” is spelled “hous>olds” and the
word “comprehensive” appears as “compr>ensive.” This makes reading more
difficult, and there is no reason given for it. Something similar was done in Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt’s recent edition of Terry Pratchett’s The Carpet People, but there it seemed to be part and parcel of
telling a fictional tale set in a strange place, while in this book of nonfiction,
it comes across only as a bizarre element or an outright mistake.
There is some genuinely
fascinating material in Chocolate: Sweet
Science & Dark Secrets of the World’s Favorite Treat. Indeed, it would
be hard not to find some matters of
high interest in a substance that so many people have enjoyed for so long, for
so many reasons. Frydenborg does a good job of explaining the difference
between “cacao” and “cocoa,” for example, and manages an occasional strikingly
wry comment when doing so is in line with her sociopolitical agenda: “[F]or the
rest of that century [the 18th] chocolate was widely prescribed for
the prevention and treatment of many ailments, even for the deadly smallpox
virus. This was ironic indeed, considering that it was smallpox – brought by
the Europeans – that had all but wiped out the Native Americans who had
introduced them to chocolate in the first place.” But the book as a whole is
too unfocused, too scattered and too argumentative about “social justice”
concerns to serve as a fully satisfactory introduction to the lore and love of a
substance whose popularity seems to know almost no bounds.
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