Heart-Shaped Box

For the Love of Chocolate

by Jonathan Dixon and photographs by David Cunningham, December 29, 2011

What happens when you eat a piece of chocolate?

When I ask about chocolate I’m not talking about a Mars bar. I’m referring to real chocolate: the pure stuff, the genuine article. It’s worth drawing a distinction. Real chocolate and a candy bar have a third-cousin, twice-removed degree of kinship with each other, and it’s barely worth asking what happens when you eat a candy bar—a fleeting minute of pure pleasure that becomes one more droning note in your indistinct sense memories.
There’s nothing wrong with candy bars. Even if it’s fleeting, the pleasure is still reliable, and it plugs us right into childhood, when the best pleasures were immediate and unsubtle.

But real chocolate is something else altogether, something refined, something people get fanatical about and devote vocations to.

So, what happens when you eat a piece of chocolate? It’s a complex answer that, depending on who you ask, might include science, the spirit, memory, and some of that good old immediate pleasure, too.
If you ask a scientist, you’ll be made to understand the physiological effects of chocolate. Chemicals called flavonoids, present in chocolate, increase blood flow and may stabilize blood pressure, as well as working a little moisturizing magic on the skin. Theobromine, which is heavily concentrated in chocolate, is a mood enhancer. And there are other compounds present, too: phenethylamine, linked to sexual arousal; anandamide, which produces euphoric feelings by working on the brain much like marijuana does. Chocolate also boosts serotonin levels, which theoretically helps alleviate depression. But that’s all pretty clinical stuff at a good remove from real experience, like trying to get at the magic of a piece of music by understanding how it affects your brain waves.

The Romanticist
If you ask Oliver Kita, owner of Oliver Kita Chocolates in Rhinebeck, you get an answer that straddles hard science and mystery: Chocolate is art, and to eat a piece of chocolate is to have, essentially, an artistic experience.

Kita moved to the Hudson Valley over 20 years ago to attend the Culinary Institute of America, operated the restaurant Heaven in Woodstock for more than a decade, and then became entranced by chocolate. He trained at prestigious schools in both Europe and Canada, under masters of chocolate making, and has operated his company ever since.

Oliver Kita Chocolates occupies a former firehouse in the center of Rhinebeck. The interior is whitewashed and spacious, with cases and shelves full of chocolates and baked goods, giving out to a wide workspace where a few employees pack the confections for display or shipping, and an enclosed kitchen beyond that. Kita himself looks a lot younger than his 54 years, which may lend a little credence to theories about chocolate’s physical benefits.