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Delicious Delight : The 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. Four ) isno surprisea trifle. It liquifies in your mouth, not in your brain. Charmingly undemanding ( if pricey at $17 a pop ), it is the disposable summer hit of museum exhibits, an academic moneymaker aimed at the sweet-toothed babe in us all.
And here I've got to admit that i'm that baby. After following the floor stickers ( "This way to Chocolate!" ) to a Wonka-esque gold-scripted arch, I ended up winding through a maze of history litejust enough info to get the point, nothing too taxingdutifully taking notes but with one thought pulsing inside my tiny lizard brain : At the end of this exhibit, there is a chocolate cafe. A chocolate cafe. A dark chocolate cafe. Round the time Spain was spreading the sweet stuff from the Mayans to Europe, I gave in and cheated.
I scuttled through the exhibit, past the antique candy wrappers, and bought a huge bar of organic dark chocolate. Then I snuck back to the beginning. Now, speaking precisely, this is illegaland damn it, I support following the guidelines. No-one wants tourists smearing Mars bars on the museum's pristine glass cases. But as a critic, I believed it was critical that I'm employed with all my senses.
Loaded up on the sweet stuff, I discovered that the exhibit does indeed cover the basics. You have got your wrinkly cocoa pods, your Mayan pottery, your industrial history of the cocoa trade ( with a pleasant emphasis on social justice ). You've got your alarming pellet of 1,500-year-old chocolate. Better yet , you have your photo of a huge Easter bunny, circa 1890. 5 feet tall, the rabbit has got the chalky grace of an Egyptian sarcophagus, and it stands, golemlike, beside it is its creator, Robert L. Strohecker. The label explains 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 historic sections were a little on the imprecise side. "Almost 100 years passed before other Western european countries caught the chocolate craze," read one display's label. "Were the Spanish trying to keep chocolate to themselves? And how did news of chocolate spread? We are not sure." But there's sufficient setting to keep an intellectual candy-lover occupied. Among stuff I learned without targeting too intently : The ancient Mayans offered the god Quetzalcoatl ritual chocolate that was "a deep blood-red color." By 1930, there were forty thousand different kinds of chocolate bars. Chocolate contains the love-chemical phenylethylamine. ( Though the poster rather primly insisted that there is "no decisive proof it stimulates the libido." ) And don't feed your dog chocolateit can be lethal, and it's a waste of good chocolate.
At one or two junctures, the facts-to-dramatics ratio dipped too low for even phenylethylamine-addled me. In one alcove, visitors find a production screen showing the swirly legend "Chocolate meets sugar in Spain." This silent-movie caption is immediately followed by a video illustration : a big 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 is the whole extent of the display.
More successful is the panoply of defunct candy wrappers, each beaming guarantees of pleasure. "Keep the party perkin '! Woman, take a bow! Serve 'em nuggets, serve 'em chips! Amazing and wow!" reads one. Taken together, the wrappers form a record of cultural trends, from Brach's Swingtime ( named after the dance craze ) to the Mr. Massive Shaq Snaq ( named after the hoops player ). There's also a telephone-shaped chocolate mold, a hand-carved coffin in the form 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 pondering oddball subjects the curators could have covered, like the way chocolate images has been utilized to refer to black skin or the entire Cathy cartoon concept that ladies have some special biological need for chocolate, but some of these tchotchkes are fun to have a look at.
Still, listening to my fellow exhibit-goers was frequently more entertaining than gazing at one more cocoa pod. Of course , this is a subject on which everyone is an expert. "I want to live in a chocolate house!" blurted out one thirtysomething fellow. A pair to my left began earnestly debating the difference between hot cocoa and hot chocolate. And a bescarved French matron, gazing up at a big screen showing a minidocumentary about the modern manufacturing process, began reminiscing in great detail about the famous I adore Lucy chocolate-making scene.
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