Sometimes chocolate is on sale, and sometimes I buy it. You shouldn’t do this lightly, because bad chocolate is bad. Bad chocolate is like brown chalk with sugar. Bad white chocolate is like white chalk with sugar. And if you’re eating it, it’s bad.
But sometimes bad chocolate isn’t just bad, it’s worse. Sometimes it’s like bad milk, where they tried to cover up the badness with sweetness. But not good sweetness. With bad sweetness.
And so it was when I got a bar of Western Family white chocolate. It was on sale, and it was terrible. BAD. It was too terrible to actually eat by itself, it made my mouth and stomach feel yucky.
But I hate wasting food. I hate it. So I tried to mix it into things – if it was melted down or baked into stuff then maybe it’s badness would be undone, and all the components of the badness could recombine with other things to become goodness.
Or maybe all the other stuff would mask the bad flavour and those calories wouldn’t go to waste.
The chocolate sat in my fridge for months, which probably made it worse, but one day I decided that I was going to deal with it, and I brought the last few squares of that terrible chocolate bar with me to work, and I bought a hot coffee at the cafe across the street and dropped a square into it.
It melted and I couldn’t really taste it, so I put more chocolate into it. And then the coffee tasted terrible and I ruined my coffee. I ended up actually throwing the rest of the chocolate in the compost. It was hard for me to do, but at least it became compost.
But it wasn’t a total loss. Not only did I get to congratulate myself on throwing poison in the garbage, but there was something at the bottom of my coffee cup when all of the (bad) coffee was gone. The white chocolate had melted in the coffee and fallen on the bottom of the cup, and solidified as the coffee cooled. And now it looked like a little seascape or mountain range. It was beautiful. That’s how lava makes things look like stuff. It was like chocolate lava.
Yes it was beautiful, but it was also gross. Because looking at the solidified residue in my coffee cup, I remembered what it tasted like and what it felt like, and now I could see what it looked like in not-block form.
In truth, it seemed more like plastic. And so maybe it’s not fair to call it chalk or bad milk. Maybe it was actually plastic. Sweet plastic.
So maybe I shouldn’t have put it into the compost.