The “chocolate” exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History (on view until Sept. 4) is no surprise, a trifle. It softens in your mouth, not in your cerebral cortex. Charmingly undemanding (if costly at $17 a pop), it’s the expendable summer smash hit of museum exhibits, a fixed moneymaker directed at the sweet-toothed toddler in us all.
I must admit that I become that infant when it comes to dark chocolate. After following the floor stickers (“This way to Chocolate!”) to a Wonka-esque gold-scripted arch, I finished up winding through a maze of basic history. I made my way through the exhibit dutifully taking notes, but one thought pulsed inside my one track mind : At the end of this exhibit, there’s a chocolate cafe. A chocolate cafeteria. A chocolate cafe. Round the time Spain was spreading the sweet stuff from the Mayans to Europe, I gave in and cheated.
I scuttled through the exhibit, past the antique candy wrappers, and purchased a big bar of organic dark chocolate. Then I snuck back to the beginning. I was careful to cover the candy bar in my coat as I past the curators since this was fully against the guidelines. No-one wants holiday makers smearing Mars bars on the museum’s pristine glass cases. But as a critic, I thought it was vital that I’m employed with all my senses.
Loaded up on the sweet stuff, I realized that the exhibit does indeed cover the fundamentals of chocolate history. You have your wrinkly cocoa pods, your Mayan pottery, your business history of the cocoa trade. You have your antique pellet of 1,500-year-old chocolate. Better yet , you have got your photograph of an immense Easter bunny, circa 1890. 5 feet tall, the rabbit possesses the chalky grace of an Egyptian sarcophagus, and it stands, god-like, beside it is its creator, Robert L. Strohecker. The label reveals that Strohecker is “the pop 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 imprecise side. “Nearly a hundred years passed before other European countries caught the chocolate craze,” read one display’s label. “Were the Spanish attempting to keep chocolate to themselves? And how did news of chocolate spread? We aren’t sure.” But there’s just about enough setting to keep an intellectual candy-lover occupied. Among stuff I learned without targeting 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 contended that there’s “no conclusive proof it stimulates the libido.”) And don’t feed your dog chocolate, it can be lethal, and it’s a waste of good chocolate.
At a few junctures, the facts-to-dramatics proportion 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 giant brown tongue of softened 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’s the whole extent of the display.
More successful is the panoply of defunct candy wrappers, each beaming promises of delight. “Keep the party perkin ‘! Woman, take a bow! Serve ‘em nuggets, serve ‘em chips! Glorious and wow!” reads one. Taken together, the wrappers form a history of cultural trends, from Brach’s Swingtime (named after the dance craze) to the Mr. Gigantic Shaq Snaq (named after the rings player). There’s also a telephone-shaped chocolate mold, 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 isn’t much sociological depth hereI found myself thinking about oddball subjects the curators could have covered, like the way chocolate images has been used to refer to black skin or the whole Cathy cartoon concept that women have some special biological need for chocolate, but a few of these tchotchkes are fun to take a look at.
