In Favour of Cheap Chocolate and Bread.

It took me several decades to build up an adult palate. I still can’t stand red wine (sour, tastes of splinters) or whiskey (bitter, burny), and I won’t drink brandy because I remember feeling envious years ago when after a formal dinner, the women were ushered into one room and given brandy and the men offered cigars and plenished with the much more delicious port. 

 But apart from that, I was, until a couple of weeks ago, proud that, since puppy-plump pubescence, I had spurned Cadbury’s sickly sweet, milky chocolate in favour of dark from more sophisticated brands. Having stuffed my face with cheap chocolate as a child, I felt mature and discerning over the next few decades, developing a taste for chocolate containing far less sugar and milk than the gaudily purple-wrapped nectar of my youth. 

This went hand-in-hand with a sophistication of my taste for bread. Gradually I stopped buying those soft seedy supermarket loaves which tasted suspiciously like cake and which I had crammed down as fast, easy energy as a harassed junior doctor, and chose fresh-baked artisanal loaves from specialist bread shops. The loaves and bars of chocolate became smaller, pricier, less deserving of exuberance and untrammelled animal desire. They were not ripped apart and devoured in bulk in the same way.

It took me a while and a dental disaster to see that the Emperor was naked. The broken crown taught me that the price of hard, artisanal bread went beyond the relatively astronomical cost of the loaf itself. There was also the gradual anhedonia. When eating your daily carbs becomes as leached of joy, as stark and dutiful as reading a copy of The Guardian from cover to cover, you have to stop and assess your life choices. 

There were also repeated thwarted hopes: so many loaves look delicious on the shop shelf, and yet if they only contain flour and water, it’s not uncommon for them to feel and taste like dusty stone by breakfast-time. Plus the density! Had these bakers never heard of yeast? After eating I felt as if I could be used as an anchor to steady a sturdy ship, or perhaps a bag of stones to weigh down a mafia misfit thrown into the ocean.

My chocolate trajectory was similar. Boutique brands inevitably cost five times as much, which made me think they must be better. When they had fillings they were fine, but last Easter, nibbling the joyless dark shell of an 85% cocoa Easter egg, I coveted the rich, milky, sugary delight of Cadbury’s. 

In the end, my chocolate story, with its obsessive self deprivation, was a little like that of a Roald Dahl short story character I was gorily fascinated by as a kid. This boy had been brought up by strict vegan parents who kept him away from every kind of meat, and didn’t even tell him what it was. When he became old enough, they warned him of this evil substance that he had thankfully avoided and told him how much better off he was for never having contaminated himself with it. After they died, he went out into the world looking for a job. He obtained one in a sausage factory, not understanding what sausages were. One day, he pilfered and tasted some of the meaty wares he produced, and was ecstatic. What was this delicious tasting manna from heaven? He clambered into the sausage making machine in order to devour more, and, in grim Roald Dahl style, was made into a string of sausages.

Newly off the wagon of cheap chocolate abstinence, I will fight the urge to climb into a vat of Cadbury’s milk chocolate and be made into a multipack of Picnics. But I can think of worse ways to go.