CHOCOLATE - HEALTH FOOD FOR THE NEW MILLENNIUM

HALIFAX - No matter what you read in the dying days of '98, the Newsmaker of
the Year was not Chretien, Clinton, Lewinsky, Starr, or any other fallible
human being. It was chocolate, infallible chocolate, and, like a racehorse
making a thrilling comeback in the final stretch, it waited till the last
days of the year to charge home as the winner of the newsmaking sweepstakes.

Chocolate eaters live longer: Study, roared a front-page headline in the
Halifax Chronicle-Herald, just as tens of thousands of its readers were
scouring shops for cute, scrumptious, gilt-wrapped goodies, chock full 'o
chocolate, to stuff into their loved ones' stockings. Chocoholics may live
longer, Harvard research reveals, chimed a National Post headline the same
morning.

In the Daily Telegraph, out of England, Paul Chapman reported that Murray
Langham, psychotherapist and author of Chocolate Therapy: Dare to Discover
Your Inner Centre, says the shape of the morsel you pluck from a box of
assorted chocolates reveals your dominant traits of character.

You go for a circular chocolate? You're a likeable, friendly, social
butterfly, but perhaps a shade superficial. A square one? You're honest,
reliable, balanced. A rectangle? You're a rock, just a rock, a source of
strength for all who want to lean on you. You like to organize others. But
you probably wouldn't get along with lovers of spiral chocolates. They're
chronically disorganized and their love lives are messy.

Since I have never met any chocolate of any shape that I didn't like -
except possibly a brown cube filled with mucky green jelly that I plucked
from one of the Laura Secord boxes of my boyhood - I don't know how
Langham's theory applies to me. Come Valentine's Day, however, be wary if
your new lover selects a triangular-shaped chocolate above all others. Your
typical triangle-chooser gets things done, but seldom frets over anyone
else's feelings.

The deluge of chocolate news continued right down to New Year's Eve. Move
over Mr. Coffee, said a headline in the National Post. Mr. Cocoa is coming
on as the top bean. Chocolate fanatics were adopting the lingo of wine
snobs. They gabbled on about climate, soil, bean varieties, good and bad
years, and ``hints of fruit in the finish.''

Fran Bigelow of Fran's Chocolates in Seattle gushed about the ``robust'' and
``smoky'' flavour of chocolate made from Venezuelan cocoa beans, making the
stuff sound more like single-malt whisky than candy. While chewing a
Venezuelan goodie, a professional chocolate sampler paid it what was
supposed to be an enormous compliment: ``It tastes like dirt.''

Some day, I'll find what I'm looking for among newspaper job ads: ``Wanted:
Professional taster to assess Venezuelan, Belgian, German, Swiss and
domestic chocolate. Room to grow. Flexible hours. Must be self-starter. No
people skills required. Will pay top dollar to right individual.''

Just as 1998 ended, the Ottawa Citizen paid tribute to The Science of
Chocolate, a sweet little exhibition at the Canadian Museum of Nature.
``Packed with 300 mind-altering chemicals, able to kill our pain and make
our hearts go boom-boom-boom,'' the story exulted, ``chocolate is a natural
pack of wonder drugs.''

It helps fight depression, stimulates your central nervous system, triggers
the body's release of the same natural painkillers that exercise produces,
and contains amandamide, ``which bears a connection to the effects of
plant-derived cannabinoids, such as marijuana.'' Oh, mama, that chocolate
high!

In an otherwise dry and learned discussion of the trinitario beans from
Central America and the criolla beans from Venezuela and Indonesia that go
into the finest dark chocolate, Florence Fabricant of the New York Times
lurched into such passionate prose she betrayed herself as a helpless
addict. She described ``the intense scent drawing you in . . . exotic hints
of clove, coffee, orange peel, even cedar . . .

``You take a bite, and as it softens and melts in your mouth, the complexity
is comparable to a good red wine. The chocolate feels satiny, utterly smooth
and flawless. The flavour lingers, but you must have another taste.''

The British Medical Journal has just revealed that a Harvard University
study of 7,841 men found that the regular consumers of chocolate and other
candies lived at least a year longer than abstainers. Chocolate, like red
wine, contains plenty of the antioxidant phenols that not only reduce the
risk of coronary heart disease, but also make your immune system more
resistant to cancer.

Chocolate, in short, is good for both body and soul. It was trite and
obvious of Time magazine to play up silly Billy Clinton and pompous Kenny
Starr as its Men of the Year. The most important story of 1998, the one
billions of people the world over had been waiting to hear for generations,
was the discovery that chocolate is Health Food.

R. Whidden Ganong, chairman emeritus of the 126-year-old Ganong's chocolates
company in St. Stephen, New Brunswick, was right all along. For decades, he
ate a pound of his own mixed chocolates every day of his life, and even now
he's a formidable chocolate chomper. Ganong is 92.