Chocolatte...

Chocolate: Sweet Science and Dark Secrets of the World’s Favorite Treat by Kay Frydenborg

This book contains everything you wanted to know (and possibly more) about chocolate, its origins, its chemical makeup, the politics of chocolate and even how to eat it.  It turns out that the chocolate we like best is the chocolate we ate as a child.  So, if you ate smoother milk chocolate as a youngster that’s the chocolate flavor you will gravitate toward as an adult.

Chocolate moves along pretty quickly. It’s written at a fairly low level, and there’s a lot of white space on the page. For the reading level, the chapters seem a bit long.  The illustrations are not high quality, so they don’t add much to the telling.  Interspersed are pages with special “additional” information, kind of “fun facts”.  The background for these pages is gray with a busy pattern and thin font, making reading difficult. By the end I was skipping over them because they were too hard to read.  I wouldn’t be surprised if students do the same thing.  

This is the unabridged version of a trip to Hershey Park’s Chocolate World. If you can’t get there, this is a great introduction to the world of chocolate.  As for me, I’d rather go to Hershey and get some chocolate at the end of the tour.