Un-Chocolate

Perhaps by now you've read about my South Beach Diet experience. I have, at this point, made it a whopping 3.5 weeks into SBD with a weight loss of 16 pounds (hold for applause). Sometime last week at the grocery store, I spotted some of the "South Beach Living" products in the cereal aisle, with the granola bars and other not-so-healthy stuff disguised as healthy stuff. I picked up a box or two of the High Protein Cereal Bars and read their ingredient labels. The S'mores variety contained sucralose (a.k.a. Splenda), and you know how I feel about artificial sweeteners, so I put that one back. I picked up the Chocolate ones. I didn't spot any evil sugar subbies on that list, so I thought I'd give them a try. OK, so I just didn't look hard enough, and when I got home I realized their ingredient list also sports some sucralose, only hidden in the middle among all the other words I can't pronounce. This should have been my first clue that these things are not ideal for human consumption.

I still decided that maybe I'm a little too rigid in my abstinence from noncaloric sweeteners, so I packed one along when I went to pick up my daughter one day. I desperately needed a snack and didn't have time to put almonds in a baggie, so off I went with this "Chocolate" cereal bar. Mind you, the box housing the bars bears the words artificial flavor in wee tiny print immediately following "Chocolate." This should been my second clue.

I'll spare you all the drama of the unwrapping and eating and get straight to the description: chunky sawdust covered with a brown nearly sweetlike substance that comes about as close to chocolate as mustard does. Yeah, I ate the whole thing because I didn't want to faint while driving, but I ate it with the same enthusiasm I normally reserve for something like tearing a paper towel from its roll. Sadly, I have come to accept that most snack foods of this ilk taste somewhat like sawdust (I think it must be the "protein nuggets" or some such ingredient), so I think I was most offended by this cereal bar's sad attempt at tasting like chocolate. Yes, offended. Not that I gagged or anything - it's by far not celery or anything evil like that - but still, I couldn't help but feel like I'd been had. This bar sullies the good name of Chocolate, and should therefore not get to bear it anywhere on its packaging. Chocolate is sacred and should be held in higher esteem than that.

I may have gotten spoiled or I may just not have gotten desperate enough before I tried this "Chocolate Artificial Flavor" bar, but I learned something. Chocolate is definitely chocolate, and this concoction definitely is NOT (duh, right?). Can you imagine if a person (say from a distant land or Venus or Tatooine or somewhere) picked up one of these bars and thought that's what chocolate is supposed to taste like? Boo, foul impostor! From now on, I believe I'll go with one of the flavors of High Protein Sawdust Bar that doesn't even try or pretend to be chocolate.