To All,
To me chocolates are one of the great luxuries of life, so for Valentines Day I got myself a box of Russell Stover Assorted Creams. After having a few, I took off my gourmet hat, put on my Fruit Explorer hat, and noticed the importance of fruit to this food product. A box of 22 chocolates contained a strawberry cream, lemon cream, orange cream, apricot cream, two raspberry creams, and three coconuts. If one broadens to include maple products, there were four maple nut butters and two maple nut creams. That accounts for 15 of the 22 chocolates. (Of the remaining seven, two were vanilla creams and five were pure chocolate.) The last two pictures below are close-ups of the apricot cream, which served as my introduction to apricot (see the e-mail of 1 Feb 2015).
If some dictator were to decree that fruits were to be banned from boxes of bon bons, our choices would be sadly impoverished. If this ban were interpreted to exclude chocolate, which is another plant product, we would be devastated, and life would lose its luster.
This might provide the best argument yet against dictatorship. Certainly no popular legislature would outlaw chocolate since, if it did, the electorate would doubtless throw out the villains in the next election, which later historians would dub The Great Chocolate Revolt. This, however, assumes that there would be a next election. More likely, passage of a chocolate ban would immediately lead to chocolate riots that toppled the government.
