A little bit of sweet

After the Easter cake, there's still a trace of chocolate in the bakeries. In supermarkets, if you look closely, you can find an egg among the laundry detergents. Or a rabbit near the drinks. There's never too much chocolate. When you meet someone who doesn't like it, you're suspicious. You think it's not normal to miss out on one of life's great pleasures. Even if you later remember that pleasures are personal and non-transferable. Nevertheless, you're suspicious. 

Since the daily dose of violence is unbearable, just thinking about chocolate makes the world taste different. We've just come from days of eating and talking about it, but Trump, cynicism, and company are more sickening than sweets. And it's not the same to steal a truck full of chocolate as a truck loaded with missiles. By the way, the truck that left Italy with 413,793 kitkats from the new range hasn't turned up yet. The company had already warned that the missing chocolate bars have a code and can be tracked. In fact, Nestlé has made an online tracker available to consumers through which you can enter the barcode numbers to verify if it's part of the stolen batch. A bit like when you buy a lottery number and type it into the screen to see if you've been lucky and can buy more than 400,000 kitkats at once. That's if you haven't stolen them. Which, in principle, you shouldn't do. But even the company took it with humor in the statement announcing the truck's disappearance: "While we appreciate the exceptional taste of the criminals, the fact is that cargo theft is a growing problem for companies of all kinds." And of course, theft is a problem, but when they're stealing the world from us, chocolate is there to save us. And even a chocolate truck theft saves our day. The week. The holy one and the unholy one. 

Last year, the price of cocoa rose so much that supermarkets had to apply specific security measures. Chocolate was sold in anti-theft boxes, like spittoons or whisky. It seems that 45% of thefts in the food sector have to do with chocolate. And its aisles are full of security. For chocolate and for ourselves. Because when something assures you immediate pleasure, as is the case, it is too tempting. It's chocolate's fault, not ours. But I don't think this argument can be used in court, even though most judges and juries would side with the person who couldn't help themselves. And much more outlandish things have been heard in court. And on top of that, without chocolate.

During an official live broadcast of the Artemis II mission, a jar of Nutella appeared floating inside the spacecraft. They assure it was not an advertisement. They would also find a jar of Nutella at my house. Without floating, though. And I would also take it to the Moon, in the unlikely event that I intended to go there. The fact is that the floating jar of Nutella has gone viral and has generated more interest than all the relevant scientific explanations. We have always been more amused by knowing what astronauts eat and how they poop than by what they can explain to us about space. I was just reading in this newspaper that science knows the amount of chocolate the body needs to generate endorphins and be happy. Twenty grams of dark chocolate is enough. But what science doesn't say is that we actually need much more. Not our body, us. Because science can talk about endorphins, but we can talk about happiness.