On Tue, 12 Feb 2008 08:27:56 -0600, Paleogal <[log in to unmask]>  
wrote:
>
> Buyer Beware: Valentine's Candy May Be From 2007

This isn't surprising.  Candy is kinda like twinkies -- the shelf life is  
nearly infinite.

> "It's something that should be glorious. It should have a luster to it.  
> It should crack slightly when you bite it," said Brian Buckley of  
> Manhattan's Institute of Culinary Education.

I've never really thought of chocolate as "glorious".

>> From the finest of truffles to candy bought in bulk, most of these  
>> products were expired and showed signs of improper storage, like  
>> melting and reshaping. Some of the chocolates had white dots or  
>> streaks, called a "bloom," which means the chocolate is stale.

Chocolate bloom looks odd, but does not mean the chocolate is inedible, or  
even stale, and certainly not rotten.  It's just the cocoa butter (or the  
sugar) is separating, from suboptimal storage conditions.  See  
http://www.chocolatefetish.com/chocolate_bloom.php for example.

(The reason I know this is that when I was a kid, my parents owned a small  
store.  When the A/C failed one summer, some of the chocolate "bloomed".   
They took it off the shelves because it didn't look as nice (less likely  
to sell), but they explained what it was, and let us have it.  It tasted  
fine, no different from how it usually tasted.

> Buckley was shocked that store shelves could be stacked with so much bad  
> chocolate just days before the sweetest of holidays.

I would imagine there are a whole lot more shocking things in the average  
grocery store.  ;-)

--
   Robert Kesterson
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