Chocoholics of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your figure.. your teeth...

Chocolate is good. Milk chocolate is REALLY good. White chocolate isn't chocolate at all and is deserving of our contempt. Dark chocolate is supposed to be good for you; since it doesn't taste anywhere near as wonderful as milk chocolate, that's probably true. I have had just about every kind of chocolate in the world and can say with complete confidence that there is no such thing as bad chocolate.

1. Forget the snobbery of European chocolate. Ditto Whitman's and Stovers. Hershey chocolate is the best in the world. Period. My mom would buy the really huge bar and she and I would surreptitiously break off and share chunks of it late at night when everyone else was asleep. Cherished memory.

2. Another cherished memory involves a hot summer night with Mom and I in our filmiest nighties watching Johnny Carson and trying to stay cool (we were both night owls), and a Good Humor truck, looking spectral as it moved through the muggy weather, a haze highlighted by street lamps surrounding it and the two of us dashing into the night to buy Chocolate Eclair Ice Cream Bars, nibbling on them slowly to make them last. That is the run-on sentence from hell, but memories should have a stream of consciousness quality to them, I think.

3. The most over-rated chocolates in the WORLD are Belgian in general and Dove in specific. Don't get me wrong, I'd eat them in a heartbeat. I mean, c'mon, they're chocolate...but they ain't Hershey chocolate.

4. Purity Dairy makes the world's best chocolate milk. AND the second best chocolate ice cream.

5. The world's best chocolate ice cream was/is? made by the Stroh's Brewing company. Yes, yes, a brewery in Detroit. Here's a link to the Wikipedi article, which is pretty darn interesting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroh%27s_Ice_Cream

I love ice cream. I think it is the most perfect food especially when it is chocolate.

6. The second best chocolate in the world is Ghirardelli. It's so good that San Francisco actually has a "shrine" to it called Ghirardelli Square. You can get the world's greatest hot fudge sundae there. FYI: fudge is a form of chocolate. It is entirely edible.

7. Nestle's makes the best semi-sweet chocolate chips, and their Tollhouse recipe makes the best chocolate chip cookies.

8. The best chocolate in a Whitman Sampler is the milk chocolate caramel.

9. The best chocolate in a Russell Stover candy box is the milk chocolate caramel.

10. All the best candy bars are combinations of milk chocolate and caramel.

Being a diabetic has seriously impeded my chocolate consumption. However, since I am a diabetic, I know the nature of my demise. It will literally be death by chocolate. I shall kill myself with kindness...and as much Hershey's chocolate as it takes.