In the week following the Easter break, you'll likely find yourself in line at the supermarket with a basket full of half-priced milk chocolate. You'll ignore the brown stains on your elbow from the past four-day binge and pile in another load of Crème Eggs. You know it's excessive, but this stuff is basically free post-Easter.You'll probably spend the next week melting chocolate eggs into drinks, grating them onto meals, maybe sandwiching a few into a toastie. Inevitably, you'll notice small white streaks on the eggs, at which point you'll whimper quietly and ask god why he had to stop you just as you were making microwave S'mores.It seems unjust for a product loaded with sugars and fats to wig out so soon after being purchased. So why does chocolate go white? And can you still eat it even with the white bits? Here at VICE we pride ourselves on asking life's toughest questions, so we looked to Ian Harding, a professor of chemistry at Swinburne University. As it turns out, those white streaks aren't punishment for skipping church."Usually the white streaks are fat or sugar blooms on the surface of the chocolate," Ian told VICE. "Chocolate is just fat and sugar and both of those can separate and go to the surface. Fat or sugar blooms are usually a result of poorly tempered chocolate." In other words, it's common for cheap Easter chocolates to form white blooms shortly after being purchased. Good quality chocolate won't separate or form blooms for a much longer time."Tempering chocolate is designed to get the chocolate in the phase that we like to eat, but it's not a stable phase," says Ian. "The stable phase is for the fat to separate out onto the surface. If it's been properly formed, like in high quality chocolates, it won't separate for a long time. But even if the chocolate has white streaks, it doesn't mean it's gone off. If it hasn't passed its use-by date, it's safe to eat."There you have it: the white bits are safe to eat. And if you're wondering whether the same phenomenon happens to white chocolate, well, it doesn't, because white chocolate isn't real chocolate ("White chocolate doesn't contain cacao or chocolate fat," says Ian).Just remember to watch out for white blooms on your good quality chocolate. That's a sign it's beginning to age. And like anything that's sat at the back of your cupboard (or under the couch cushions) for a questionable amount of time, there's a high chance it's grown some nasty bacteria. Now that you're armed with that knowledge, you can now go retrieve those eggs you just threw out.Follow Emma on Twitter: @emsydoImage via
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