The Emperors of Chocolate

Joël Glenn Brenner’s The Emperors of Chocolate: Inside the Secret World of Hershey and Mars is a Willie Wonka’s Chocolate history for adults. She begins with a look at international marketing and selling chocolate in the Middle East and then presents a history starting in the 19th Century when Milton S. Hershey and Frank Mars began making candy. As the story by Roald Dahl suggested, the candy industry is highly secretive. Spies were known to be sent to work in competitors’ factories. Some companies foiled these efforts by only allowing the most trusted employees into the inner sancta of their factories. 

Brenner continues through the 19th and 20th centuries as Mar’s descendants and Hershey’s appointees* passed the baton to later generations. I learned a lot about the chemical make up of chocolate and how tricky it was to invent milk chocolate. There are about 1200 chemicals in cocoa so it’s especially hard to create a fake chocolate that actually tastes like real chocolate. Also, some of those chemicals are poisonous. Arsenic and the like are in small quantities, but a food company can’t use them as ingredients. 

Reading The Emperors of Chocolate I learned a lot about the management style of Forest Mars, Sr, and his children who took over after after him. All were difficult to work with, but did pay their employees extremely well so many employees did stick around and were loyal as they saw that the company was successful. I’m amazed they would put up with getting dressed down in front of all their peers for every mistake. I did appreciate how Mars is a very egalitarian company. Employees got bonuses for coming to work on time. Even the CEO has to punch a clock and fly coach. There’s no difference in treatment between the factory workers and the executives.

Milton Hershey’s tinkering with recipes and self-taught techniques are described in detail. He seemed like such a kind man and a bit of a absent-minded professor. That dreaminess did hold the company back because in the 1960s and 70s they had a lot of catching up to do as they had no marketing plan at all. They were comfortable with their chocolate pretty much selling itself. I knew a little about the Milton Hershey School, but the book goes deeper into it. Since the Hershey’s didn’t have children, they built and funded a school for orphans. With a mission to see that The school not only educates the students, but provides job training, sports and an array of extra curricular activities. When he was alive Hershey would eat with the kids and aimed to be a genuine part of their lives. 

The two companies were rivals and the competition was often fierce. There are stories about how Mars turned down the opportunity to place M&Ms in the film E.T. Hershey’s Reece’s Pieces took the risk and their investment really paid off, much to Mars’ chagrin. 

The book is filled with fascinating stories of the history of America’s biggest candy makers. I recommend it for anyone who’s likes history.

*Milton Hershey had no children.

 

Out of the Silent Planet

In fact, I’ve I’m not a big science-fi fan. I rarely read the genre, but I loved C.S. Lewis’ Out of the Silent Planet. I’ve already ordered book two in this tragedy.

In Out of the Silent Planet, average Joe, Dr. Ransom, happens upon and old schoolmate Devine and Devine’s new evil scientist buddy Weston. Ransom had been tramping around the countryside and, as a favor to a woman he met, went to this house to see why her son, a servant there was late and her mother was apprehensive. It turns out that she had good cause. When Ransom arrived, the two men were fighting, physically, with the boy. In the end Weston and Devine were in the process of abducting the boy. In the end the boy is freed and Ransom, when he comes to after being knocked unconscious. Ransom realizes he’s hurtling through space kidnapped by Weston and Devine.

Ransom overhears Weston and Devine. They’ve been to Malacandria, the planet they’re heading to, before and were returning to offer up Ransom to the aliens there. They’re hoping to load up on valuable resources and hand over Ransom to the sorns, a species of aliens on Malacandria.

Ransom’s forewarned and planned to escape. He manages to run off though a bizarre environment with pink sticky earth, odd food, three homo sapien species that can see angels and that get along with each other. As a philologist, Ransom is quickly able to learn the aliens’ language. (Well, one of them, as it turns out each species has its own language and one shared language.)

As Ransom evades and eventually is captured by the aliens, he learns to look at life in a completely different and wise way.

This is a book I relished. Lewis has such a gift for language and made me want to improve the book I’m working on currently. The themes are related to Christianity, but even if that’s not your faith, it makes you think about human life and our foibles.

I read that C.S. Lewis once criticized sci-fi because in most stories the writer takes you to the end of the universe, but everything is basically the same with the substitutions being basically the same as what we now have. For example, here we have guns while in outer space in most stories they just use lasers and use them in the same instances we  would. In Out of the Silent Planet, the aliens’ philosophy and approach to life is just about completely different from humans. They’re quite impressive on the whole.

Good Quotations

“And how could we endure to live and let time pass if we were always crying for one day or one year to come back–if we did not know that every day in a life fills the whole life with expectation and memory and that these are that day?”

“A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered. You are speaking, Hmán, as if pleasure were one thing and the memory another. It is all one thing.”

“But Ransom, as time wore on, became aware of another and more spiritual cause for his progressive lightening and exultation of heart. A nightmare, long engendered in the modern mind by the mythology that follows in the wake of science, was falling off him. He had read of ‘Space’: at the back of his thinking for years had lurked the dismal fancy of the black, cold vacuity, the utter deadness, which was supposed to separate the worlds. He had not known how much it affected him till now-now that the very name ‘Space’ seemed a blasphemous libel for this empyrean ocean of radiance in which they swam. He could not call it ‘dead’; he felt life pouring into him from it every moment. How indeed should it be otherwise, since out of this ocean all the worlds and all their life had come? He had thought it barren: he now saw that it was the womb of worlds, whose blazing and innumerable offspring looked down nightly even upon the earth with so many eyes-and here, with how many more! No: Space was the wrong name.”