Hershey Bars

Hershey's, to give the company its commonly-used name, is America's largest producer of chocolate. It's also the main supplier of military chocolate to the US armed forces.

I know Hershey's because it's the company that makes my beloved Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. Given my avid consumption of said confectionary, it is rather odd that I have a physiological aversion to the company's signature brand, the Hershey Bar, because to me it smells subtly, but distinctly and gut-wrenchingly of bile. In fact, the slightest whiff sets my gag-reflex going and brings back terrible memories of mornings after nights before in years thankfully long gone.

I presumed I'd be the only one with this bizarre olfactory sensation. I was wrong.

Out of idle curiosity, I Googled the terms "Hershey" and "smell", and immediately came up with - amongst other things - a Yahoo! Answers discussion entitled "Why does Hershey's plain chocolate smell like vomit?", a similar, 154-entry discussion of the matter on CyberCandy and a post in the blog A Limey in America. In all of these, people associated the smell and/or taste of Hershey's chocolate with regurgitation or sour milk, though nobody seemed to know why. Some suggested it was simply the poor quality of the chocolate itself, while several others thought it lay in the wax - wax?! - Hershey's puts in the mix.

Most interesting of all is a post I found in the blog Kill Everything, which describes how the author of a book on the history of chocolate allegedly asked French chocolatiers to give a one-word summary of Hershey chocolate.

One French chef answered: "Vomit".

Toblerone Tiny

My wife has managed to find possibly the only thing that isn't bigger in the States. Ironically, as if to underline the "fact" that everything - from countries to cars - is smaller in the Old World, it's a European product.

Tiny Toblerone is a packet of what would in Europe be termed "bite-size" Toblerones, each barely an inch long, into which one must assume Swiss dwarves have managed to cram no fewer than three of the famous interlinked triangles. It tastes just like the real thing, but even if you wolf down the three triangles at once, it really is no more than an amuse-gueule that has you reaching for the next and the next and the next - or wishing you had a giant, good ol' American Hershey bar instead.