Chocolate: The Consuming Passion - Softcover

Boynton, Sandra

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0894801996 ISBN 13: 9780894801990

Publisher: Workman Publishing Company, 1982

Synopsis

A New York Times bestseller with over a half-million copies in print, CHOCOLATE continues to delight chocoholics everywhere. Packed with Boynton's famous hippos, bunnies, pigs, and other animals, this gift-perfect book is a whimsical commentary on the individual's relationship to chocolate, its varieties, and its sources.

From the several sorts of chocolate connoisseur-including the gourmoo, who eats only milk chocolate-to the several shapes of chocolate itself (bunny, kiss, glove compartment bar), Boynton's apologia for chocolate misses nothing. Myths are debunked: chocolate is not fattening, she argues, especially when the caloric expenditure of carrying it home from the store and hiding it from company is factored in. Directions are supplied: to remove stains, lick them. Plus, how to grow chocolate at home, a foolproof method for determining if chocolate is in season (does the name of the month contain the letter A, E, or U?), and a recipe for Hippo Pot de Mousse.

"Fourteen out of ten people like chocolate," says the artist. This is the only guide for people who like chocolate the way they like to breathe. Vanilla people, keep out. Selection of the Literary Guild.

About this title

About the Author:

Sandra Boynton is a popular American cartoonist, writer, and songwriter. Since 1974, Boynton has written and illustrated over fifty children’s books and seven general audience books, including five New York Times bestsellers. More than 60 million of her books have been sold—“mostly to friends and family,” she says. She has also written and produced five albums of award-winning children’s music. Three of her albums have been certified Gold, and Philadelphia Chickens, nominated for a Grammy, has gone Platinum. She lives with her family on a farm in New England.
 

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Myth No. 2 "Chocolate is fattening."

A crucial factor has been overlooked in this widespread condemnation of chocolate: Most chocolate eaters tend to supplement their chocolate intake with other foods. By what right, what logic can chocolate be singled out as the cause of plumpness? How can we be certain that, say, carrots are not a catalyst of weight-gain when chocolate is present?

And there is empirical evidence that also raises serious doubts about chocolate's fatteningness: Few chocolate lovers can simply lie back and wait for chocolate to come to them. For most, getting and keeping chocolate often requires strenuous physical work.

Myth No. 5 "Chocolate is nothing more than a substitute for affection."

Much has been made lately of the recent scientific finding that there is a chemical in chocolate-phenylethylamine-that is virtually identical to the substance manufactured by the brain of the infatuated individual. In various studies of the phenomenon,

the conclusion drawn is that chocolate obsession is in fact self-medication for the spurned lover. He or she is trying to synthesize the "high" of being in love.

As is too often the case with these social scientists, they are taking sound, highly suggestive data and drawing empirically absurd conclusions. What reasonable soul prefers romance to truffles?

Clearly it is not the lovelorn sufferer who seeks solace in chocolate, but rather the chocolate-deprived individual who, desperate, seeks in mere love a pale approximation of bittersweet euphoria.

Drs. Donald F. Klein and Michael R. Liebowitz, "Hysteroid Dysphoria," Psychiatric Clinics of North America. Vol. II, No.3. Dec. 1979; Dr. John Money, Love and Love-Sickness: The Science of Sex, Gender Difference, and Pair-Bonding, John Hopkins University Press, 1980.

About this edition

• Publisher: Workman Publishing Company
• Publication date: 1982
• ISBN 10: 0894801996
• ISBN 13: 9780894801990
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 112