Vegetable Oil is *not* Chocolate

Ok, if anything can get me out of my blogging slumber, it has to be this. According to a Slashdot article, the FDA is considering redefining chocolate. At the root of the issue seems to be the desire to substitute cocoa butter with vegetable oil, and still call the resulting brown stuff chocolate instead of something else....

The instigators of this seem to be a chocolate hating cabal known paradoxically as the Chocolate Manufacturers Association. On their home page, you can learn interesting facts like this:

Many people think white chocolate isn't really chocolate, but the U.S. FDA now says it can be called chocolate...

Well, let's all be grateful they cleared that up for us.

Just remember kids - it's up to you know to what you're eating. Don't blithely trust your Chocolately Big Brother.

And now, with a prompt about face - if you really must eat American "chocolate", the best you can hope for is something really, really sweet. If that's your thing, you might be interested in the Reese's Crispy Crunchy Bar. It's basically a Butterfinger wrapped inside a Reese's Peanut Butter cup like layer, and if you're into that kind of candy, it's delicious in its own corn syrupy way. But it may not be worthy of the name "chocolate".