On Chocolate
Dec. 11th, 2006 08:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jookitczChocolate is immediate and undemanding. That is why people like it. It glues them to reality. It trumps all the nice things in this function. Kisses? Inferior to chocolate kisses. The brain does not always participate willingly, the mind has a tendency to wander, it is avoiding, I believe, complications. Complications are wearying and unhealthy, and so a sense of mental self-preservation makes them distasteful. Complications lead to second-guessing, lead to moral decisions with only vague guidelines to steady them. Complications lead to confusion, and confusion is almost always abstract: by nature, confusion detracts from reality. Confusion is looking at reality and saying, "I am not sure what you are." That's abstract. It makes reality hang its head, "Oh. Sorry." And it goes to bother someone else, not you. You are left writhing in uncertainty with no guide at all.
This is why females are notoriously drawn to chocolate. Men don't need it, generally, they don't crave it. I suspect they have a stronger sense of reality, or how does one explain that level-headed, rational stereotype? Even when men are unreasonable, it tends to go to aggression, which is simply a retreat to a simpler schema, a simpler hierarchy of reality--the hierarchy of dominance. It is an attempt to make reality clearer, not the self-doubt and mood-swinging perception changes of their poor female counterparts.
Women seek chocolate because chocolate is a simple substance. Taste, because of its intensity and infrequency, feels closer to the brain than any other sense. Sight and sound are ambient; we do not even realize they are resonanting from our own organs. Smell is weak, and touch is so often uncomfortable that I think we habitually ignore it a little. Taste, however, is surprising and direct. We rarely taste only a little. And chocolate takes full advantage. Chocolate wraps around the tongue unrelentingly, with homogenous texture and flavor. Here is sugar, here is fat, here are mood-enhancing chemicals wrapped in a primally nourishing package. To the human body, which hasn't evolved with its decadent American society, survival is not yet vitamins. Survival is still sugar and fat. And in chocolate, they taste unadulterated.
We appreciate complexity in food. We enjoy the varied textures in a salad, or the varied spices of a pasta sauce, or even the careful chemistry of those unholy expensive gourmet chocolate truffles. We appreciate these, like we appreciate art, but we rarely crave them. They do not come to mind as soothing to a troubled brain, or comforting to a heart immired in complexities of its own abstract derivations. We crave the simplicity, the intensity, and the immediacy of plain chocolate.
Chocolate is the flour that my grandma would add to gravy to thicken it, if we replace gravy with our perception of reality. And that's a rather bad metaphor, crossing taste buds. Chocolate is the mix added to water to create cement. It binds (not gastronomically!). It reminds. It reattaches a person to the physical reality that has been eluding them. I personally can almost never stand eating chocolate without something to distract me, a book or a movie or a friend's conversation. It gives me a headache to do nothing but taste it, like it's too jealous to allow for sharing the senses even so much to allow for breathing.
But does it ever taste good.
This is why females are notoriously drawn to chocolate. Men don't need it, generally, they don't crave it. I suspect they have a stronger sense of reality, or how does one explain that level-headed, rational stereotype? Even when men are unreasonable, it tends to go to aggression, which is simply a retreat to a simpler schema, a simpler hierarchy of reality--the hierarchy of dominance. It is an attempt to make reality clearer, not the self-doubt and mood-swinging perception changes of their poor female counterparts.
Women seek chocolate because chocolate is a simple substance. Taste, because of its intensity and infrequency, feels closer to the brain than any other sense. Sight and sound are ambient; we do not even realize they are resonanting from our own organs. Smell is weak, and touch is so often uncomfortable that I think we habitually ignore it a little. Taste, however, is surprising and direct. We rarely taste only a little. And chocolate takes full advantage. Chocolate wraps around the tongue unrelentingly, with homogenous texture and flavor. Here is sugar, here is fat, here are mood-enhancing chemicals wrapped in a primally nourishing package. To the human body, which hasn't evolved with its decadent American society, survival is not yet vitamins. Survival is still sugar and fat. And in chocolate, they taste unadulterated.
We appreciate complexity in food. We enjoy the varied textures in a salad, or the varied spices of a pasta sauce, or even the careful chemistry of those unholy expensive gourmet chocolate truffles. We appreciate these, like we appreciate art, but we rarely crave them. They do not come to mind as soothing to a troubled brain, or comforting to a heart immired in complexities of its own abstract derivations. We crave the simplicity, the intensity, and the immediacy of plain chocolate.
Chocolate is the flour that my grandma would add to gravy to thicken it, if we replace gravy with our perception of reality. And that's a rather bad metaphor, crossing taste buds. Chocolate is the mix added to water to create cement. It binds (not gastronomically!). It reminds. It reattaches a person to the physical reality that has been eluding them. I personally can almost never stand eating chocolate without something to distract me, a book or a movie or a friend's conversation. It gives me a headache to do nothing but taste it, like it's too jealous to allow for sharing the senses even so much to allow for breathing.
But does it ever taste good.