Natural Jade
2011
Tasty Delight: The American Museum Of Natural History's 'Chocolate' Show Is Full Of Empty Calories.
The "chocolate" exhibition at the North American Museum of Natural History (on view until Sept. Four) is no surprise, a trifle. It melts in your mouth, not in your grey matter. Charmingly undemanding (if dear at $17 a pop), it is the dispensable summer smash hit of museum exhibits, an institutional moneymaker directed at the sweet-toothed toddler in us all.
I must admit that I become that toddler when it comes to dark chocolate. After following the floor stickers ("This way to Chocolate!") to a Wonka-esque gold-scripted arch, I discovered myself winding thru a maze of basic history. I made my way thru the exhibit dutifully taking notes, but one thought beat inside my one track mind : At the end of this exhibit, there is a chocolate cafe. A chocolate cafe. A 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 big bar of organic dark chocolate. Then I snuck back to the start. I was careful to hide the candy bar in my coat as I past the curators since this was totally against the guidelines. No-one wants visitors smearing Mars bars on the museum's pristine glass cases. But as a critic, I thought that it was vital that I'm employed with all my senses.
Loaded up on the sweet stuff, I found out that the exhibit does indeed cover the fundamentals of chocolate history. You have got your wrinkly cocoa pods, your Mayan pottery, your industrial history of the cocoa trade. You've got your antique pellet of 1,500-year-old chocolate. Even better you have your photograph of an enormous Easter bunny, circa 1890. Five feet tall, the rabbit has got the chalky dignity of an Egyptian sarcophagus, and it stands, god-like, beside it is its creator, Robert L. Strohecker. The label reveals that 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 vague side. "Nearly one hundred years passed before other European nations caught the chocolate craze," read one display's label. "Were the Spanish making an attempt to keep chocolate to themselves? And how did news of chocolate spread? We're not sure." But there's sufficient background to keep an intellectual candy-lover occupied. Among stuff I learned without focusing too intently : The ancient Mayans offered the god Quetzalcoatl ritual chocolate that was "a deep blood-red color." By 1930, there were 40,000 different kinds of chocolate bars. Chocolate contains the love-chemical phenylethylamine. (Though the poster rather primly insisted that there is "no conclusive proof it stimulates the libido.") And don't feed your dog chocolate, it can be lethal, and it is a waste of good chocolate.
At a few 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 gigantic brown tongue of melted 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 full extent of the display.
More successful is the panoply of defunct candy wrappers, each beaming guarantees of pleasure. "Keep the party perkin '! Lady, take a bow! Serve 'em nuggets, serve 'em chips! Wonderful and wow!" reads one. Taken together, the wrappers form a record of cultural trends, from Brach's Swingtime (named after the dance craze) to the Mr. Big Shaq Snaq (named after the rings player). There's also a telephone-shaped chocolate mould, 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's not that much sociological depth hereI found myself thinking about oddball subjects the curators could have covered, like the way chocolate imagery has been employed to refer to black skin or the entire Cathy cartoon notion that ladies have some special biological need for chocolate, but some of these tchotchkes are fun to look at.
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