MOFB’s “Cut to the Chase”: Beware – chocolate is not logical

I like chocolate. I think most men do, but while men may ‘like’ chocolate, women ‘love’ chocolate. This is not meant to be a sexist remark – while I have no statistics to prove my theory, I have a lifetime of watching women react to chocolate.

I think I first noticed the tendency women have to lose control with regard to chocolate when, as a young child, my Easter basket seemed to empty faster than I emptied it. I always ate the jelly beans first, followed by the chocolate, but while I was still on the jelly beans, my chocolate supply was shrinking.

When I would run to my bedroom for a jelly bean fix, I frequently found my mom was just then leaving my bedroom. Mom spent a lot more time cleaning my room the days immediately following Easter and Christmas when I had chocolate candy in my basket or stocking than she did any other time of the year.

It wasn’t until I was married that I discovered just how important chocolate is to women. Watching my wife with chocolate was a real eye opener – when she filled the kids’ Easter baskets and Christmas stockings, she divided the chocolates into three piles. We only had two kids.

I give my wife a beautiful heart-shaped box of chocolates every Valentine’s Day, and she saves the beautiful boxes years after they’re empty. After 40 years of marriage, I am finally beginning to realize it’s not me she’s being sentimental about – it’s the chocolates that filled each box.

When my wife and I had early marriage disagreements, I dazzled her with my male reasoning and logic. Then to get her to talk to me again, I would buy her something with chocolate in it. Now, I skip the logic and move directly to the chocolate. Chocolate makes a wonderful peace offering.

So why am I writing about chocolates so late after Valentine’s Day? To warn all men about the petitions from several culinary groups before the Food and Drug Administration wanting to change the standards set for chocolate. This is serious business.

I am not adverse to change, but if we think America has high divorce rates now, just wait until they mess with chocolate. These culinary groups want to be allowed to substitute vegetable oils for cacao fat, the butter manufacturers must use to label their products as ‘chocolate.’

I work for farmers, and to my knowledge none of them produce cacao fat. Missouri grain farmers raise soybeans and corn, the main crops used to create vegetable oils that, if substituted for cacao fat, would undoubtedly increase their market share. Still, I must stand or fall with cacao fat.

Perhaps corn oil and soybean oil would make wonderful chocolates, but chocolate made with cacao fat has served with honor and distinction to save my logical backside through the years. Making chocolate with vegetable oils may make perfect sense to men who see it as a way to expand profits.

However, I contend women will know you’ve done something different even if they can’t taste it – they always know when you think you are getting away with something. Do you want to explain to your wife that you chose chocolates with vegetable oil because they cost less – that it was the logical thing to do?

Beware – chocolate is not logical.

(Denny Banister, of Jefferson City, is the assistant director of public affairs for the Missouri Farm Bureau, the state’s largest farm organization.)