Delicious Pleasure : The North American Museum Of Natural History’s ‘Chocolate’ Show Is chock-full of Empty Calories

The “Chocolate” exhibition at the North American Museum of Natural History ( on view until Sept. 4 ) isno surprisea trifle. It melts in your mouth, not in your grey matter. Charmingly undemanding ( if pricey at $17 a pop ), it is the throwaway summer smash hit of museum exhibits, an institutional moneymaker aimed at the sweet-toothed toddler in us all.

And here I’ve got to admit that i am that babe. After following the floor stickers ( “This way to Chocolate!” ) to a Wonka-esque gold-scripted arch, I ended up winding thru a maze of history litejust enough information to get the idea, nothing too taxingdutifully taking notes but with one thought pulsing inside my tiny lizard brain : At the end of this exhibit, there’s a chocolate cafeteria. A chocolate cafeteria. A dark chocolate cafeteria. Round the time Spain was spreading the sweet stuff from the Mayans to Europe, I gave in and cheated.

I scuttled thru the exhibit, past the antique candy wrappers, and purchased a big bar of organic dark chocolate. Then I snuck back to the start. Now, technically speaking, this is illegaland damn it, I support following the guidelines. Nobody wants visitors smearing Mars bars on the museum’s pristine glass cases. But as a critic, I felt that it was vital that I work with all my senses.

Loaded up on the sweet stuff, I discovered that the exhibit does indeed cover the basics. You have your wrinkly cocoa pods, your Mayan pottery, your commercial history of the cocoa trade ( with a nice emphasis on social justice ). You have got your shocking pellet of 1,500-year-old chocolate. Better you have got your photograph of a gigantic Easter bunny, circa 1890. 5 feet tall, the rabbit has got the chalky dignity of an Egyptian sarcophagus, and it stands, golemlike, beside it is its creator, Robert L. Strohecker. The label exposes Strohecker is “the ‘father ‘ of the chocolate Easter bunny”pretty much the best epithet one could hope for in this life.

Some of the exhibit’s historical sections were a little on the vague side. “Just about 100 years passed before other EU states caught the chocolate craze,” read one display’s label. “Were the Spanish making an attempt to keep chocolate to themselves? And how did news of chocolate spread? We’re not sure.” But there’s sufficient background to keep an intellectual candy-lover occupied. Among stuff I learned without targeting too intently : The traditional Mayans offered the god Quetzalcoatl ritual chocolate that was “a deep blood-red color.” By 1930, there were 40,000 different sorts of chocolate bars. Chocolate contains the love-chemical phenylethylamine. ( Though the placard rather primly insisted that there’s “no decisive proof it excites the libido.” ) And do not feed your dog chocolateit can be lethal, and it is a waste of good chocolate.

At one or two junctures, the facts-to-dramatics proportion dipped too low for even phenylethylamine-addled me. In one alcove, visitors find a film screen displaying the swirly legend “Chocolate meets sugar in Spain.” This silent-movie caption is instantly followed by a video illustration : a gigantic brown tongue of melted chocolate pours down from the head of the screen, followed by a spinning drift of sugar. Then the solemn words appear again : “Chocolate meets sugar in Spain.” That’s the whole extent of the display.

More successful is the panoply of defunct candy wrappers, each beaming guarantees of delight. “Keep the party perkin ‘! Lady, take a bow! Serve ‘em nuggets, serve ‘em chips! Glorious and wow!” reads one. Taken together, the wrappers form a history of cultural trends, from Brach’s Swingtime ( named after the dance craze ) to the Mr. Massive Shaq Snaq ( named after the rings player ). There’s also a telephone-shaped chocolate mildew, a hand-carved coffin in the shape of a cocoa pod, and a dispensing machine that once dispensed Hershey bars for a penny each. There isn’t much sociological depth hereI found myself brooding about oddball subjects the curators might have covered, like the way chocolate images has been used to refer to black skin or the whole Cathy cartoon concept that girls have some special biological need for chocolate, but a few of these tchotchkes are fun to take a look at.

Still, listening to my fellow exhibit-goers was sometimes more entertaining than gazing at one more cocoa pod. After all , this is a subject on which everybody is an expert. “I’d like to live in a chocolate house!” shouted out one thirtysomething fellow. A pair to my left started earnestly discussing the difference between hot cocoa and hot chocolate. And a bescarved French matron, gazing up at an enormous screen displaying a minidocumentary about the modern producing process, started reminiscing in serious detail about the famous I like Lucy chocolate-making scene.

north carolina dmv driving records online

north carolina dmv driving records online