National Chocolate: American Standards, Canadian Standouts

The debate continues to rage about what the official American definition of "chocolate" should be. The New York Times ran a pro-cocoa butter opinion piece by Mort Rosenblum (author of Chocolate: A Bittersweet Saga of Dark and Light) last week, and Reuters recently published an article online called "Lowering the bar on chocolate." The latter even includes a couple of comments on the situation from me.

Interestingly Terri Coles, the Reuters reporter, is based not in this country, but in Canada. Americans and Canadians share the world's longest common border and their national days are less than a week apart (Canada Day is July 1st, Independence Day is the 4th of July), but we Yanks are often ignorant of our good neighbors to the north. I advocate a comprehensive Canadian education for United States citizens, starting with samples from two chocolate shops--Soma in Toronto and Chocoatl in Vancouver.

Go north, my friends!