The Theology of Chocolate Candy

I’m standing in the candy aisle of Walmart (confession: I’m on a diet and cannot actually eat any candy. I just want to look at it.).  Chocolate candies have changed. At one time, candy was for kids, and milk chocolate was the candy to buy.  Now, adults have gotten into the act. Chocolate, we are told, is good for you. You should eat some every night. Hooray for science! I’m all for it. Unfortunately, accompanying this new trend are chocolate candies aimed at adults with ‘sophisticated’ tastes. They cost 3 times as much as milk chocolate. They boast names like ‘supremely dark’. They are up to 90% cocoa, and they taste awful.

Why would anyone eat something that tastes awful? There might be a few readers who actually like the new, dark chocolates, but I can’t stand them. Even the special dark ones, the ones that are edible, are not really good. These used to be called ‘bittersweet’ or ‘semisweet’. They never did much for me. They are not sweet enough, and they are about 50% cocoa. Cocoa has an intensely bitter flavor; it must be balanced with other ingredients to make a smooth candy that tastes delicious. For chocolate candy, more cocoa is not better.

Why pay more for a lower quality product? It makes no sense. The adults who claim they that this stuff tastes better are fooling themselves. If you ask a kid which tastes better, milk chocolate or dark, bitter chocolate, he will choose, without hesitation, the milk chocolate. He would need training to choose one of the ‘dark’, bitter stuff. Why would you train someone to pick a bad-tasting candy?

The all-purpose excuse is health and the sugar bugaboo. I have given up on taking health advice from pop culture. Too much of it is dangerous. Talk to a hospital worker and he will tell you about admissions to the hospital caused by someone going on an extreme diet and virtually destroying one of their organs. I did not, for example, know that a low carb, high protein diet can make your kidneys grow, to handle all of that protein, until I tried it and watched the urea in my blood work shoot up. Then I found out that it makes your kidneys grow. No thank you. I cut back on the protein.

One of the substances that your body does know how to handle is sugar. The small amount of extra sugar in milk chocolate vs. a dark chocolate will have a miniscule effect on your health. That is not a reason to eat bitter candy.

Many people believe that bad tasting medicine is good for you. To be cured, one must suffer. This is really a variant of pagan beliefs. For most of human history, people have turned to religion for cures. Think of it this way. Suppose you wanted to make a deal with God, and offer him something special, in return for curing a close relative. Would you offer to eat chocolates every day and enjoy life, or would you offer to eat broccoli and liver every night and be miserable?

Most people would opt for broccoli, liver and misery, because most people believe that God loves misery. They think being miserable pleases Him. There is nothing in the Bible to substantiate that. The sacrifice Lord Jesus asks of you, is for you to love your neighbor as yourself. That’s a bigger sacrifice than eating bitter candy.

In Galatians 4:3, Paul talks about being slaves to:

            “.. elemental spirits of the universe ..”

which, according to my Bible’s annotations, might be better translated as “rudimentary notions of religion”. Part of Christianity should be that Christ freed us from these notions, including the one that He wants us to be miserable. What He wants is for us to treat each other with kindness, respect and mercy. That is a difficult task; why make it harder by eating bad candy?

The notion that God loves a hair shirt can be combined with another preoccupation of adults – one-upmanship. This combination animates every killjoy on the planet. The eternal game of ‘I’m better than you’ is played out constantly. These killjoys verbally assault anyone who does not follow their proscriptions. The killjoys say ‘it’s for our own good’, but it’s really for their ego.

On the Walmart candy aisle, the killjoys are winning. The section containing low-calorie, sugar-free candies is shrinking, whereas the section containing bitter chocolate candies is increasing. The sugar-free stuff does not give your blood a sugar jolt like the other candies. For dieters, the quantities in each bag are small, so that a bag only contains candies with 360 or so calories – not enough to destroy your diet. It also has the same health-giving properties as regular (or bitter) chocolate candy. There are probably no truly healthy choices on a candy aisle, but these come closest to being healthy.

As I say, that section of the aisle is dwindling. People cannot resist the appeal of smugness, so that even the simplest pleasure is sullied. The killjoys are winning – and sinning. The primary virtue, the virtue from which all other virtues spring, is humility. True humility does not mean thinking less of yourself; instead it means thinking more of others. It means loving your neighbor as yourself. Enjoy the small, innocent pleasures of life, and do not try to take them from others, pretending to virtue. If you do, you might just roast in Hell.