Why Does Everyone Love Chocolate So Much?

For the last few weeks I’ve been In A Complicated Relationship with chocolate. Prior to filming THE FIRST EPISODE IN THE NEW SERIES OF GIRL EATS FOOD, I’d always preferred to deal with break-ups with sustained campaigns of passive aggression, rather than Cadbury and rom-coms with my gurlfrends. I'd never "got" chocolate. So it was a bit of an SMH-at-humanity moment when I learned that we've taken the billion-pound behemoth of an industry one step further in the form of chocolate tours, chocolate fashion shows and cocoa shamans.

To give you an idea of the scale of chocolate obsessives, here are some of the cocoa #lads we discovered along the way that were too busy/suspicious of VICE to make it into the film.

First up, we paid a fleeting visit to Paul A Young's flagship shop in Soho… but no Paul. Luckily, I’d already had the pleasure of attending one of Young’s after hours chocolate showcases back when I was a “London lifestyle journalist” (unemployed). He taught us how to eat chocolate "correctly" and ranted about how shit like Lindt was for nouveau riche thickos. We chortled into his speciality Marmite truffles.

So I was kinda bummed out not to meet him this time round, what with Young's staff talking about him in hushed tones like some kind of chocolate deity. And judging by the tone of his not at all self-written Wiki page, maybe he is.

Similarly, Belgian “Shock-o-latier” (stay with me, guys) Dominique Persoone has been making a name for himself masterminding chocolate recipes that incorporate everything from chicken skin to cola, because FUCK YOU, tradition (delicious, comforting tradition). Persoone is also the LOL-merchant who designed a “chocolate shooter” to transform that age-old hobby of snorting bumps of cocoa powder into a sensory experience rather than a shit party trick. The idea was dreamt up at the request of the wives of Ronnie Wood and Charlie Watts, a naughty lil' nod to the boys' sustained cocaine abuse now that they have to sleep in oxygen chambers :(

Young and Persoone, while undoubtedly talented chocolatiers, weren't unique in my chocolate journey, rather they were just tiny pieces in the boilerplate foodie fixation with sloshing "zany' flavours together and calling it "gourmet". Which isn't to say I didn't "get" the gist of the luxury chocolate peddlers; it's difficult to knock expensively packaged, lovingly made products you could buy your mum for her birthday instead of something thoughtful.

What was interesting was the proliferation of "real" chocolate products that promoted spiritual enlightenment and physical wellbeing. Typically, these earnest products weren't there to taste nice but to enrich your life. And it's true that chocolate's joined the ranks of goji berries and spirulina in super supplements that everyone seems to have an inexplicably large knowledge of these days, with nibbling a bit of Green & Black's 70 percent bars snowballing into wolfing down cocoa nibs, convinced their modest antioxidant properties will absolve all the fingering and cirrhosis and chlamydia swapping of the weekend. One trip to Whole Foods with these guys and it's pretty easy to get into the swing of talking about cocoa's myriad forms like it was a new strain of smack.

Dr Robert Cassar, ex-body builder, false flag fan and man behind the all natural everything "earth'er movement" is one such staunch advocate of real chocolate we stumbled upon. Cassar, as well as selling his own brand of quinoa and hemp meal replacements, promotes raw cacao as an ”elixir of the mind” believing that “a woman doesn’t need a man, all she needs is real chocolate”. Tell that to my daddy issues, mate. Nevertheless, there doesn't seem to be any harm in investing in a $99 bag of his Ecuadorian cacao paste, amirite?

Lastly, there was my guy, Keith, otherwise known as The Chocolate Shaman. Keith, ever since relocating to Guatemala and being visited by The Chocolate Goddess, has been touting pure cacao drinking ceremonies, which he refers to as the “Holy Bean”, as a kind of key stage one dip into natural remedies. Non-hallucinogenic, raw cacao is, apparently, potent enough that the Mayans were into nailing industrial amounts of the stuff on a big weekend. Anything the Mayans fucked with must be great, in the sense that when they were making calendars and developing painkillers the rest of the world was making huts out of faeces. So the shamanic cocoa experience sits somewhere between collecting healing crystals and tearfully walking out of your recruitment consultancy job to slam ayahuasca in the jungle.

Though we ended up in the very capable hands of his former pupil, Rebekah Shaman, I'd been looking forward to having my heart chakras opened up by the cacao OG, having read glowing reports like "I was pure feeling, and that feeling was love", but it wasn't meant to be.

In the end, my own experience was more like backing 15 Pret lattes, complete with a couple of traumatic trips to the toilet. But, y'know, I know I'm only a flight to South America, a moderately priced session with Keith and some unleashing of my inner cocoa diva away from understanding the true power of chocolate.

Follow Jo on Twitter: @fuertesknight

Watch the new episode from the new series of Girl Eats Food here.