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Flavorsome Pleasure : The american Museum Of Natural History's 'Chocolate' Show Is Full Of Empty Calories
The "Chocolate" exhibition at the american Museum of Natural History ( on view until Sept. 4 ) isno surprisea trifle. It liquifies in your mouth, not in your grey matter. Charmingly undemanding ( if dear at $17 a pop ), it is the disposable summer smash hit of museum exhibits, an academic moneymaker directed at the sweet-toothed toddler in us all.
And here I must admit that i'm that toddler. After following the floor stickers ( "This way to Chocolate!" ) to a Wonka-esque gold-scripted arch, I ended up winding thru a maze of history litejust enough info to get it, nothing too taxingdutifully taking notes but with one thought pulsing inside my miniscule 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 thru the exhibit, past the antique candy wrappers, and got a gigantic bar of organic dark chocolate. Then I snuck back to the start. Now, technically speaking, this is illegaland damn it, I support following the rules. No-one wants visitors smearing Mars bars on the museum's spotless glass cases. But as a critic, I felt it was imperative 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 your wrinkly cocoa pods, your Mayan pottery, your commercial history of the cocoa trade ( with a nice accent on social justice ). You have your shocking pellet of 1,500-year-old chocolate. Better you have your photo of a gigantic Easter bunny, circa 1890. 5 feet tall, the rabbit possesses 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 historical sections were a little on the imprecise side. "Nearly a hundred years passed before other Western european states 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 just about enough backdrop 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 sorts of chocolate bars. Chocolate contains the love-chemical phenylethylamine. ( Though the placard rather primly demanded that there is "no conclusive proof it stimulates the libido." ) And don't feed your dog chocolateit can be deadly, 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 instantly followed by a video illustration : a big brown tongue of liquified chocolate pours down from the pinnacle of the screen, followed by a spinning drift of sugar. Then the solemn words appear again : "Chocolate meets sugar in Spain." That is the maximum extent of the display.
More successful is the panoply of defunct candy wrappers, each beaming promises of pleasure. "Keep the party perkin '! Woman, take a bow! Serve 'em nuggets, serve 'em chips! Wonderful and wow!" reads one. Taken together, the wrappers form a history of cultural trends, from Brach's Swingtime ( named after the dance craze ) to the Mr. Giant Shaq Snaq ( named after the rings player ). There's also a telephone-shaped chocolate mildew, 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 thinking about oddball subjects the curators might 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 take a look at.
Still, listening to my fellow exhibit-goers was frequently more entertaining than gazing at one more cocoa pod. After all , this is a subject on which everyone is an expert. "I'd like to live in a chocolate house!" bursted out one thirtysomething fellow. A couple to my left started earnestly debating the difference between hot cocoa and hot chocolate. And a bescarved French matron, gazing up at a massive screen showing a minidocumentary about the modern producing process, started reminiscing in serious detail about the famous I like Lucy chocolate-making scene.
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