American Navajo
Tasty Delight: The American Museum Of Natural History's 'Chocolate' Show Is Full Of Empty Calories.
The "chocolate" exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History (on view till Sept. Four) is no surprise, a trifle. It softens in your mouth, not in your brain. Charmingly undemanding (if costly at $17 a pop), it is the expendable summer blockbuster of museum exhibits, a fixed moneymaker aimed at the sweet-toothed baby in us all.
I've got to 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 found myself winding thru a maze of basic history. I made my way thru the exhibit dutifully taking notes, but one thought beat within my one track mind : At the end of this exhibit, there's a chocolate cafeteria. A chocolate cafeteria. A chocolate cafeteria. Round the time Spain was spreading the sweet stuff from the Mayans to Europe, I gave in and cheated.
I scuttled thru the exhibit, past the antique candy wrappers, and bought a giant 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 completely against the guidelines. No-one wants holiday makers smearing Mars bars on the museum's spotless glass cases. But as a critic, I thought it was important that I'm employed with all my senses.
Loaded up on the sweet stuff, I discovered that the exhibit does indeed cover the fundamentals of chocolate history. You have got 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 you've got your photo of an enormous 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 explains 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 historic sections were a little on the imprecise side. "Nearly one hundred years passed before other European states caught the chocolate craze," read one display's label. "Were the Spanish making an attempt to keep chocolate to themselves? And how did news of chocolate spread? We're not sure." But there's just enough backdrop to keep an intellectual candy-lover occupied. Among stuff I learned without focusing too intently : The ancient Mayans offered the god Quetzalcoatl ritual chocolate that was "a deep blood-red color." By 1930, there were forty thousand different types of chocolate bars. Chocolate contains the love-chemical phenylethylamine. (Though the poster rather primly contended that there is "no definitive evidence it excites the libido.") And don't feed your dog chocolate, it can be lethal, and it's a waste of good chocolate.
At 1 or 2 junctures, the facts-to-dramatics ratio dipped too low for even phenylethylamine-addled me. In one alcove, visitors find a film screen displaying the swirly legend "Chocolate meets sugar in Spain." This silent-movie caption is immediately followed by a video illustration : an enormous brown tongue of melted chocolate pours down from the top of the screen, followed by a spinning drift of sugar. Then the solemn words appear again : "Chocolate meets sugar in Spain." That's the maximum extent of the display.
More successful is the panoply of defunct candy wrappers, each beaming guarantees 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. Big Shaq Snaq (named after the rings player). There's also a telephone-shaped chocolate mould, a hand-carved coffin in the form of a cocoa pod, and a snack machine that once dispensed Hershey bars for a penny each. There's not very much sociological depth hereI found myself thinking about oddball subjects the curators might have covered, like the way chocolate imagery has been used to refer to black skin or the entire Cathy cartoon idea that girls have some special biological need for chocolate, but some of these tchotchkes are fun to look at.
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