Not an expert, but afaik 'volatile chocolate market' is code for cocoa producing countries finally being able to do their own refinement, which was where western corporations used to take a big cut
news
Welcome to c/news! We aim to foster a book-club type environment for discussion and critical analysis of the news. Our policy objectives are:
-
To learn about and discuss meaningful news, analysis and perspectives from around the world, with a focus on news outside the Anglosphere and beyond what is normally seen in corporate media (e.g. anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist, Marxist, Indigenous, LGBTQ, people of colour).
-
To encourage community members to contribute commentary and for others to thoughtfully engage with this material.
-
To support healthy and good faith discussion as comrades, sharpening our analytical skills and helping one another better understand geopolitics.
We ask community members to appreciate the uncertainty inherent in critical analysis of current events, the need to constantly learn, and take part in the community with humility. None of us are the One True Leftist, not even you, the reader.
Newcomm and Newsmega Rules:
The Hexbear Code of Conduct and Terms of Service apply here.
-
Link titles: Please use informative link titles. Overly editorialized titles, particularly if they link to opinion pieces, may get your post removed.
-
Content warnings: Posts on the newscomm and top-level replies on the newsmega should use content warnings appropriately. Please be thoughtful about wording and triggers when describing awful things in post titles.
-
Fake news: No fake news posts ever, including April 1st. Deliberate fake news posting is a bannable offense. If you mistakenly post fake news the mod team may ask you to delete/modify the post or we may delete it ourselves.
-
Link sources: All posts must include a link to their source. Screenshots are fine IF you include the link in the post body. If you are citing a Twitter post as news, please include the Xcancel.com (or another Nitter instance) or at least strip out identifier information from the twitter link. There is also a Firefox extension that can redirect Twitter links to a Nitter instance, such as Libredirect or archive them as you would any other reactionary source.
-
Archive sites: We highly encourage use of non-paywalled archive sites (i.e. archive.is, web.archive.org, ghostarchive.org) so that links are widely accessible to the community and so that reactionary sources don’t derive data/ad revenue from Hexbear users. If you see a link without an archive link, please archive it yourself and add it to the thread, ask the OP to fix it, or report to mods. Including text of articles in threads is welcome.
-
Low effort material: Avoid memes/jokes/shitposts in newscomm posts and top-level replies to the newsmega. This kind of content is OK in post replies and in newsmega sub-threads. We encourage the community to balance their contribution of low effort material with effort posts, links to real news/analysis, and meaningful engagement with material posted in the community.
-
American politics: Discussion and effort posts on the (potential) material impacts of American electoral politics is welcome, but the never-ending circus of American Politics© Brought to You by Mountain Dew™ is not welcome. This refers to polling, pundit reactions, electoral horse races, rumors of who might run, etc.
-
Electoralism: Please try to avoid struggle sessions about the value of voting/taking part in the electoral system in the West. c/electoralism is right over there.
-
AI Slop: Don't post AI generated content. Posts about AI race/chip wars/data centers are fine.
fax
A complex farmed product from a small region on earth maybe shouldn't be nearly universal in western society????
I mean nothing wrong with simple goods distribution but the workers should be in charge and we'll paid, not exploited at every level. And, of course, under those conditions we could address the climate impacts.
Oh for sure, I'm just complaining about this from an envrionmental perspective.
Americans when the treats run out
has put out a pair of statements about Reese’s statements, one from the Reese family about how most of HB Reese’s descendants didn’t share Brad’s criticisms
Who the fuck is "the Reese family" ? lmao that's just another brand that attaches itself to the company surely.
American 'candy' tastes like puke or syrup, there is no in between
Edit: I forgot the secret third thing: chalk
Yeah I've never had it but iirc American 'chocolate' like Hershey's contains butyric acid which also give puke it 'flavour'
I've only ever had it twice (Hershey's Kisses) once when an American classmate gifted them to the rest of class, and once when a coworker returned from the USA with a whole bag of them. Absolutely inedible. I think I may have tried a peanut butter cup once too, it was gritty and oily, but not in the good peanut oily way, more in the 'this is 50% hydrolysed canola oil that's tortured into the form of biscuit and chocolate' kinda way
🤢🤢🤢🤢🤮🤮🤮🤮
Peanut butter cups were good when I was a kid, and the best brands are still okay, but a lot of cheap chocolates with peanut butter inside are just disgusting. The chocolate is fine, I actually like most cheaper chocolate, but the peanut butter tastes fake and oily in a bad way.
ⓘ This user is suspected of being a bear. Please report any suspawcious behaviour.
Some of the "chalk" ones aren't bad. The flavour is inconsequential as long as it's not offensively gross and is somewhat sweet, I just really like the texture. Especially the pressed ones, that don't make too much mess in your hands but do come apart into powder in your mouth.
Kinda agree, there are these ones where I live called musk sticks that are fragrant extruded fondant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musk_stick
(cw animal product because some contain gelatine)
Also I definitely fuck with other 'dry' sweets like polvorones
But, I think I've already argued against myself cos neither of those two 'chalky' sweets are American. The American ones I'm thinking of are like the love heart hard candy, and shaped hard candies.
I probably am doing them a bit of an injustice in that I haven't eaten enough of their sweets to pass a qualified judgement
I know exactly what American candies you're talking about. My country is unfortunately physically close to America, so we have a lot of similar foodstuffs if not just the exact same things. Those were the sweets I was talking about. They don't taste good, but I don't eat them because the taste is anything spectacular or interesting, I just like the texture of most of them. Sensory processing disorder makes me do the strangest things, I'm telling ya. (You don't want to know some of the places I'm driven to by the on and off since I was ten search for a hug vest in adult sizes, which seems to not be a thing that exists.)
ⓘ This user is suspected of being a bear. Please report any suspawcious behaviour.
Good thing syrup is delicious

I forgot the secret third thing: chalk
The candy cigaratte thing I tried as a kid might as well have been chalk
You're not supposed to light them up.
The treat factory is closed 😔
how long till the cockroach bars from snowpiercer?
Soon, i hope 😋
Haven't they been doing this for decades? I started making my own chocolate from beans over ten years ago because I couldn't find any real chocolate.
What do you need to get started? And where do you get your beans from?
I get the beans already posted from my local seed seller. You can probably order them from the internet.
The most annoying and time consuming step is to remove the hulls, I have to do this by hand, because the methods suggested I. The internet don't work.
I have previously purchased already dehulled cocoa beans, so they do sell them, even if not we're I currently live. If you can, you should get those.
After that I just blend them into a powder with a regular kitchen blender,
Dissolve the powder in butter or cream. This has to be done at low temperature, so fill a pot with water and then put a smaller pot over the water, and mix it there, be careful it doesn't get wet.
Then add powder milk or something similar, and sugar if you are into that. Then put it in a mold and cool it. Since I leave it in the freezer anyway I don't pay too much attention to how much powder I should add to solidify them.
But mostly I use the chocolate butter or cream to make flan or to rub on bread, since unlike Nutella it's orangutan free.
Thanks for the info! I will have to see if I can find a local source so I can give it a shot.
But mostly I use the chocolate butter or cream [...] to rub on bread
That sounds amazing!
Do you just like chocolate that much, or are you pretty skilled at DIY things?
It's the same process used to make mariguana edibles, so it's basically just cooking for an hour. And chocolate is much more fun than marihuana.
It's the same process used to make mariguana edibles, so it's basically just cooking for an hour.
Oh, I have plenty of experience with that!
And chocolate is much more fun than marihuana.

They were substituting nuts for cocoa during the Napoleanic wars.
Fruit snack enjoyers stay winning

da knight of da wind
I like both though?
Its carob's time to shine 
I love to eat carobs but it genuinely is not a good substitute for cocoa for chocolate even though it feels like it should be. It's a good substitute to just eat a whole carob when you want a chocolate bar though.
I've always been kind of a chocolate (
cacao) snob ever since discovering dark chocolate as a kid. I could tolerate milk chocolate, but that was already a step down from the "real" stuff. I've mostly kicked the habit over the years, only occasionally getting some good chocolate to savor.
Guess I'm going to have to start making my own stuff. 
Hershey use chocolate in their bars? Always tasted like I was eating wax
Yeah I couldda swore they stopped using real chocolate decades ago
Cool, gonna be eating cardboard nutritional bars soon
Yim yum
Worse chocolate!
Worse ~~chocolate~~ chocolatey coating!
My partner got me one of these 
It's a chilling portent of things to come
The fourth stage is pure simulacrum, in which the simulacrum has no relationship to any reality whatsoever. Here, signs merely reflect other signs and any claim to reality on the part of images or signs is only of the order of other such claims. This is a regime of total equivalency, where cultural products need no longer even pretend to be real in a naïve sense, because the experiences of consumers' lives are so predominantly artificial that even claims to reality are expected to be phrased in artificial, "hyperreal" terms. Any naïve pretension to reality as such is perceived as bereft of critical self-awareness, and thus as oversentimental.
If it's milk chocolate flavored, does that at least mean it's vegan? 
Oh no.
Oh yes
It's imitation imitation chocolate
Sort of like in Judge Dredd when they outlawed synthi-caff and replaced it with synthi-synthi-caff
as a dark chocolate hater this is good news to me give me the delicious milk chocolate
It's not going to be any kind of chocolate without the cocoa, or delicious in any way
Noticed this in Reese's peanut butter cups and I wanna say kit kat? It's worse, missing the complexity from the cocoa bitterness and overall sweeter