Chocolate in Books, in Movies, and Just About Everywhere Else!
The love of chocolate is a pervasive and sometimes consuming passion, and you can see its reaches in all aspects of culture. We read fiction like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl and Chocolat by Joanne Harris; historical biographies like The Emperors of Chocolate: Inside the Secret World of Hershey and Mars by Joël Glen Brenner; and memoirs like Candyfreak by Steve Almond. Our malls brim with confectionary shops, both of the gourmet variety as well as the kind that sells M&Ms of every color in bulk (including grey and lavender). And it seems that every month there is a new, improved, bigger, better, candy bar on the shelves.
Since there is so much chocolate out there, we want to help you find the products that you will most enjoy. For this reason, the Cocopedia staff has pledged to try as many kinds of chocolate as possible and report back to you about what we learn (this is the part of the job we hate--really). We will try products from all of the major chocolate companies like Hershey, Mars, Cadbury, and Godiva, as well as artisanal chocolates that can be purchased on the internet. But we don't want to stop with the edible products. Nowadays you can find chocolate scented soap, candles, lotion, and massage oil, and we want to try those out too (especially the massage oil)! We will let you know which ones might be worth buying and which ones might not be worth the money.
And then there's reading material--there are hundreds of chocolate-themed books out there (not just cookbooks either), and it is our goal to read every single one of them and tell you what we think. But unlike a the pedestrian non-chocolate-y book review, ours won't talk merely about the plot, the writing, and the characterization, it will also tell you how hungry the book made us and whether or not we felt a pressing need to consume chocolate while reading.
It's going to take us a while to amass all of this information, but don't worry, we're reading, eating, and burning candles as fast as we can (at both ends sometimes), so please be patient with us!