But there are two separate groups vying for credit in what some might consider the research arm of a chocolate factory war.
The candy maker Mars is expected to announce on Wednesday that a project it financed has essentially completed the raw sequence of the genome of the cacao tree, and that it would make the data freely available to researchers.
The announcement upstages a consortium involving French government laboratories and Pennsylvania State University that is backed in part by a competitor of Mars, Hershey. This group says it has also completed the sequence, but cannot discuss it until its paper analyzing the genome is published in a scientific journal.
Whoa, nelly. The article says that understanding the chocolate genome sequence should help chocolatiers create more chocolate more deliciously, which seems awesome at first but is actually kind of terrifying when you think of it.
The French government is normally considered benign to the point of punchlines, but I’ve read Brave New World, and I’ve got to think that if someone were creating a drug to tranquilize society, it starts with a mass-produced super-chocolate.
Also, who the hell knew that Mars and Hershey were into this type of stuff? Mars has a research arm? I mean I guess that makes sense, but that’s so completely ominous.
And furthermore, I just now considered the implications of a chocolate war. Chocolate war! That’s about the most amazing thing I’ve ever heard of. You can call me naive, but I like to envision a world where all wars are chocolate wars — not like that book, but like replacing gunpowder with pure molten chocolate, and then when soldiers get hit they’re all covered in chocolate, and they say, “OK, you got me,” and they have to stand down, but the upside is free chocolate. Kind of like paintball, I guess, but the guns shoot chocolate truffles. Holy crap why has no one invented that yet?
Finally, you know who’s behind all this research at Mars? The article calls him Howard Yana-Shapiro, but you may know him better as Santa Claus:
Tedquarters 
Chocolate is awesome. I live right near the M&M Mars factory in NJ, the smell is awesome. I’ll pull in my driveway, open my car door some nights, and just get hit in the face with that awesome smell of chocolate. Smells like everyonein the neighborhood is baking brownies or something.
Brit choco > American choco
1) Bhavit, you are perfectly right. People who have never been there have no idea how transcendentally superior a Cadbury Dairy Milk that’s been sitting in the vending machine in the Liverpool Street tube station for three months is to any Hershey or Mars bar obtained by the usual channels in the US. If people only knew, there would be a revolution.
2) Was that “research at Mars,” or “research ON Mars”? I think that’s an important distinction. 8O
Cadbury chocolate is pretty delicious, but is it any different in England than the stuff you can buy by the counter in the standard Midtown corporate food-bar place? Because, for the record, it’s really good when you buy it there, albeit expensive.
It is different– Cadbury UK was a different entity than Cadbury US. I don’t know if the recent Kraft takeover affects that in any way.
I am still worrying about that Mars research.
Ted:
Read this book:
http://www.amazon.com/Emperors-Chocolate-Inside-Secret-Hershey/dp/0767904575/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1284682355&sr=8-1
Everything you’d ever want to know about Mars & Hershey (up to about a decade ago), including their research efforts. (But don’t read it if you’re trying to diet.)