Hurricane Irma is hurtling into the Caribbean
and on into Florida—as India, Nepal, and Bangladesh sink
under water with 1,200 already dead. Meanwhile,
our friends in southeast Texas are mopping up in the wake
of Hurricane Harvey, so why am I reading
about a new kind of chocolate, red chocolate; as if dark,
milk, and white chocolate weren't enough. Ruby
chocolate we've got now, but all these come from the same
cacao plant the Olmec people used even before
the Mayans. I grew up on Hershey bars, Snickers, M & M's,
Milky Ways, brownies, in my lunch box, after school,
and after supper. Cocoa before bed. Chocolate, like touch,
releases oxytocin, the "love hormone" that reduces
stress. Easter Sundays my sisters and I would hunt down
chocolate eggs, peeking behind bookcases and
the TV. Candy chicks, fluffy bunnies. And all that chocolate,
oxytocin. But how much could a carton of Mars Bars
help folks floating in their front yards? And truckloads of
Baby Ruths couldn't rescue little kids harvesting
cocoa beans in West Africa who, I've now learned, are
routinely—even with "Fair Trade"—kidnapped,
handed machetes to cut bean pods from the trees, often
slicing their own flesh. They couldn’t have
seen the ads for chocolate: "Comfort in every bar." "Get
the sensation." I just finished Sacha Batthyány's
memoir. In 1945, during a party with Gestapo bosses
in a castle near the Austro-Hungarian border,
at the nearby train depot two hundred Jews were digging
a pit. After dinner, the guests were handed
guns. Some drove, some walked to the station. They filled
the pit. There had been wine, followed by
cognac, with chocolate. Now I'm remembering the time
when my sisters and I were visiting our
grandparents, they served us a chocolate cream pie that—
we found—swarmed with black ants.
