Chocolate Is The Root of All Evil

One lazy afternoon, when I was a young lad of about 8 years of age, I was in my room, holding a chocolate bar in my hand. To be specific, it was a Coffee Crisp, a dizzyingly luscious treat, made of layers of chocolate, wafer, and other delightful ingredients.

So why, you may ask, was I holding it and not eating it? Good question.

Ours was a Kosher family. On that day, we had had meat for dinner, which meant that I would not be able to eat any dairy products for four hours. (Most traditional Jewish families wait either 1, 3 or 6 hours after eating meat before eating dairy; our family, for some reason unbeknownst to any one of us, had stumbled upon the apparently unprecedented tradition of waiting 4 hours.)

Now my intuition told me that a chocolaty treat like this must be dairy. Still, hope springs eternal, so I began reading the ingredients, hoping against hope that the treat would prove to be "pareve" (containing neither any meat or milk; "neutral" might be an appropriate translation).

When the first few ingredients all proved to be "pareve", I found myself, against all reasonable expectations, actually thinking that maybe, just maybe, the pareve gods would prevail, and that chocolate bar and I would be imminently united. Each non-dairy ingredient was bringing me one step closer to chocolaty bliss.

But it wasn't to be. I can still see those two dreaded words before my eyes. Milk Solids. Argh! Go to jail. Go directly to jail. Do not pass Go. Do not collect two hundred dollars.

If necessity is the mother of invention, then perhaps greed is the father of deception. For my next move, in my unrelenting determination to consume that chocolate bar, was to take pencil in hand, and cross off those two cursed words from the list of ingredients. And my next move after that?

"Mommy, is this chocolate bar milchig (Yiddish for 'dairy')?" I asked, handing the Coffee Crisp to her.

I'd love to tell you what happened next, but I'm afraid that that is the end of the story, as far as my memory goes. (Mom, do you remember?)

But the most interesting part of this tale of desperation is what was going on in my mind when I put pencil to chocolate bar wrapper. Clearly, when I saw those two words that will go down in infamy, I knew that I wasn't supposed to eat the chocolate bar, but rather should wait till the four hours were up.

So the two most obvious choices would be either to reluctantly set the chocolate bar down and begin the countdown to parevedom, or to defy the rules and brazenly give in to temptation. But apparently, both of these two options were so distasteful to me that I sought a way to, if you'll pardon the expression, have my cake and eat it too.

And let's consider the improbable assumptions behind my nefarious plan:

1. That my mother would read the wrapper, and fail to notice the rather glaring fact that two words in the midst of the list of ingredients were covered by messy pencil scratches; and
2. That, even if I knew full well that the chocolate bar really did contain milk, as long as I had fooled my mother into believing that it didn't, and she told me that it was permissible to eat the chocolate bar, then on some moral level, it would then become okay to go ahead and eat it.

Odd, isn't it, that I am able to remember the first half of this story, four decades after the fact, in such loving detail, yet my mind draws an utter blank as to the outcome of my ruse. Perhaps my mind has repressed that part. For it's hard to see a happy denouement to this sordid tale. Either my mother gave me a green light, in which case, I ate the chocolate bar, which my very active capacity for a guilty conscience probably would not have allowed me to enjoy, or my diabolical plan was exposed.

But knowing my mother, I'm sure she handled the situation with wisdom and kindness.