There's something about it that is dark and welcoming. You touch it, picking it up between thumb and forefinger. It feels delicate, yet substantial; its powdery residue settles stickily on your fingers, and its soft flesh gives way to your touch. It smells sweet and bitter and dusty; you can almost feel its roundness on your tongue. Your whole body craves to consume it.

You bring it to your mouth, take a bite, feel your teeth slide down its smooth insides and your lips closing around its bitter coating.

At first all you taste is sweetness. Your world becomes a sensation of sweet, yielding darkness inside the parentheses of its bitter powder finish. You have to take another bite, you have to taste more, you push the rest into your mouth, licking your smeared fingers, and feel its smoothness-inside-graininess hit the back of your throat, sliding down deliciously, sluggishly, and finally lingering on your teeth and tongue.

You must have another.

Another another another. You cannot imagine going on without just one more taste. Nothing this divinely intoxicating can rightly be so soon consumed—so irrevocably, disastrously over. It is an unthinkable cruelty to stop when every cell in your body seems to lurch from your body aching to feel that chocolatey goodness zipping through your veins once again...


Truffles, man. So good.

And then somebody had to remind me about transfats. I mean, honestly. Could you think of a worse time to bring up transfats? Damn Americans and their ungodly expertise in food additives.

Did I tell you I was going on the European diet? I read an article in the New York Times Magazine that pinpointed the differences between American and French attitudes towards food. Americans look at a piece of chocolate cake and think… guilt. Frenchies look at it and think… pleasure. And if you compare the dainty little Parisians with their ponderous American cousins, you can tell that more information about health does not equal more health. What’s the difference? To break it down simply, Europeans don’t snack, they never eat alone, and they enjoy what they eat. Hey, why didn’t we think of that? Maybe because we were too busy busting out a magnifying glass to check out the carb count of a tube of Pringles during the commercial break.

Anyway, I’ve been eating European style for the last month and I feel great! And once I learn not to snack or eat alone, I remain confident that I will be able to bend over and tie my shoelaces once again.