"A British swimmer sustained by bananas and painkillers has become the first person to circumnavigate Hong Kong’s largest island..."

"... a distance equivalent to swimming across the Channel and back again. Simon Holliday, 46, from Ashford in Kent, completed the 40.3-mile circuit of Lantau Island on Friday in 20 hours 57 minutes. Half an hour later, he was followed by Edie Hu of the United States, the first woman to make the swim. They did not wear wetsuits — marathon swim rules mean they are not allowed in waters above 20C — so the chill was one of their biggest challenges.... The three swimmers were followed by a support team in two boats and two kayaks. They were fed in the water every 45 minutes with snacks such as chocolate, jelly babies and bananas."

From "British man is first to swim round Hong Kong’s biggest island/Simon Holliday won the 40-mile race round Lantau — the equivalent of swimming the Channel and back — as competitors battled tides, hallucinations and cramp" (London Times).

20C = 68° Fahrenheit.

A quote from Hu (the woman): "I started getting a little loopy. I was getting sleepy and actually dozing off [in the water].

"[M]y notes weren’t always as illuminating as I’d expected them to be. 'What does ‘Alt’ mean?' I asked Hugh over dinner one night."

"He looked down at the page. 'It’s not "Alt,"' he said. 'It’s "A.L.T."' Then I remembered. We’d been out early that morning, observing a short parade of ostriches. It was misty, and I pointed to a vague shape on the horizon. 'What’s that?' I asked Dalton. He followed my finger and told me it was likely an A.L.T. 'Animal-looking thing,' he explained."

I'm so glad to see a new David Sedaris essay in The New Yorker, "Notes on a Last-Minute Safari/We saw every animal that was in 'The Lion King' and then some. They were just there, like ants at a picnic, except that they were elephants and giraffes and zebras."

I liked seeing the first syllable of my last name in a new context, but more important was the opportunity to find out David Sedaris's opinion of going on "safari," because I had quite recently asserted, to a complete stranger, that going on safari was really basically the same thing as going to the zoo. These things are packaged. It's not as though you're exploring the authentic natural habitat of elephants, giraffes, and zebras.

"But what is interesting is that a few voices on the Left have spoken up to question the fairness of the proceedings."

"Not to defend Trump — they could never bring themselves to do that — but to ask whether the process being used to go after him is fair. Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus, firmly in the liberal camp and firmly anti-Trump, expressed worries about the precedent the Trump case could set. From her column this week: 'The essence of Trump’s argument on appeal is that the supposed harm he caused was minimal at best — all his lenders were repaid — and that the penalty levied against him was therefore wildly excessive....' Progressive commentator Cenk Uygur, also firmly anti-Trump, had a similar view. 'To me, putting up all the cash upfront before you appeal the case seems draconian for everyone, not just Trump.... But what if he wins the appeal? So you made him sell all of his properties to get the collateral, but then he can’t buy them back....'... Someday, of course, what goes around will come around for Democrats, probably in circumstances that none of them could predict right now...."

Writes Byron York.

Most Trump antagonists seem to be laughing and salivating. I suppose they would enjoy seeing the man tortured. It's bizarrely shortsighted. Do they think Trump is uniquely evil and nothing that happens to him will set a precedent?

I've picked out 8 TikToks for you. Let me know what you like.

1. When you fall asleep at a classical music concert.

2. Are we going to be impressed by this guy's construction out of chocolate?

3. I never cook pork chops, do you? Well, look at this.

4. Dogs at the meeting about all the barking. 

5. Remember that little boy with the corn I showed you on August 5th? Now, here he is, with musical accompaniment.

6. Why do you call when you can text?

7. The snowboarding toddler is just floating.

8. Bear in a bath.

Just 5 TikToks for you today. Let me know what you like.

1. How to take a picture of your potato.

2. Lonely and depressed, he thinks of what Winston Churchill once said.

3. She bought more clothes at the thrift store that turned out to be unwearable.

4. It's not enough to just tell this boy he's not going to like unsweetened cocoa straight from the container.

5. The girl who survives on 3 iced lattes a day.

On having a soft spot for gummy bears and being a soft spot for real bears.

I'm reading "Learning to Love Solitude (and Hate Oatmeal) on a 15,534-Mile Canadian Trek/For six years, the filmmaker Dianne Whelan hiked, biked, paddled, snowshoed and skied from the Atlantic to the Pacific and north to the Arctic. Here’s what she learned along the way" (NYT).

"I won’t be eating oatmeal ever again in my life. Ever. Throughout the day, I had a snack bag with trail mix and dried fruit and cheese and crackers and nuts. And of course, chocolate, and I have a soft spot for gummy bears. Dinner was instant noodles, pasta, carbs. At the beginning, I was nervous about bears and trying to keep a clean camp. I met many, many, many bears and 98 percent were kind and wonderful to watch. I never carried anything but bear spray for most of the journey. When I went to the high Arctic, I carried a gun and had to use it once because I had a bear come into my camp. My partner was with me. She picked up the gun and fired a couple of warning shots and we quickly packed off into the canoe and realized we didn’t spill our coffee."

That article is from last August. I just ran into it today because — as described here — I was searching the NYT archive for the use of the word "sherpa" to mean something other than a person within the ethnic group called Sherpa. This article — with the line "Very few get up that mountain without a Sherpa" — is not an example of what I was looking for.

"The eldest by a minute, she is the only heterosexual in our family; her twin is a lesbian and so are her two Moms...."

"... Because I grew up in an Irish-Catholic household where sexual feelings were at best contained, at worst annulled, I took particular pleasure in allowing hers to flourish. The boyfriend’s parents... had been raised in other faiths and had converted to Islam. They insisted on strict compliance with religious laws. Meaning: Their boy with the luxurious hair was not allowed to date.... I became complicit in their circumventing his parents’ prohibitions.... [M]y own family’s disapproval of my lesbian desire fueled this indecorous behavior on my part.... Of course, they got caught.... [My daughter's boyfriend's parents] proposed a temporary marriage between my 13-year-old and theirs, although I would not know about this until moments before the ceremony.... The ceremony took place in a local Mexican coffee house.... I thought I was simply coming along to meet the mother. My eldest whispered the relevant details in my ear as they walked through the door.... The boy’s mother was strikingly beautiful and at least a decade younger than me. After we had all gotten our hot chocolates, she took out her Quran and explained that temporary marriage was a way for our children to have some limited physical contact without jeopardizing her son’s soul.... I assented without calling home to consult my partner of 20-something years.... ...I didn’t want my daughter to be prevented from touching the boy she loved. I didn’t want what had been done to me to be done to her. So I assented, and the boy’s parents read the ritual phrases in Arabic, and the children nodded along and, without my understanding a word, they were married.... Their temporary marriage lasted until they broke up a year later...."

From "Why My Daughter Got (Temporarily) Married at 13/Having been shamed about my sexuality when I was young, I was determined, as a mother, to celebrate my child’s romantic wishes" by Stephanie Grant (NYT).

1. The parents — all 3 of them — were actively facilitating sexual intercourse between 13-year-olds. Is this not criminal behavior? 

2. Oh, but the boy and his mother were beautiful! Beauty privilege. Step back naysayers! Beautiful people are moving forward, claiming what they want.

3. Chocolate was had. That makes everything more palatable.

4. The mother does not concede that the 2 teenagers ever had sexual intercourse, and lets us know that her daughter regards your curiosity about this as "disturbingly invasive, and, indeed, exoticizing." That is, you are the creep, not these parents who got their kids "temporarily married."

5. Imagine taking a vow that was read to you in a language that you don't understand. Imagine sitting by sipping hot chocolate while your exuberant daughter nods assent to what sounds like gibberish to her but you know is deadly serious to the person who is reading the vows. 

6. Are the vows deeply meaningful or utterly meaningless? What is "temporary marriage" anyway? Maybe it's a debasement of marriage — if marriage means something deep to you. But it's a step up from the cheap vowless love the mother approved of before the boy's parents caught on to the relationship she was eagerly enabling. 

7. The mother sees herself in her daughter, and she's proud of this merged identity. The mother's grudges against her own mother and against society are reenacted through her daughter, whom she touts in the pages of the New York Times.

8. The author has a whole memoir coming out, so the daughter's story is, apparently, thoroughly appropriated by the mother. Talk about "disturbingly invasive."

"Why is the incidental cliché of describing one student as 'chocolate-coloured' worthy of embarrassed public retraction?"

"Thou shalt not employ foodstuffs when describing non-white people. As the logic of this 'rule' is hardly self-evident, I did some online digging. Any mention of the edible in reference to the oppressed is apparently 'dehumanising,' 'objectifying' and 'commodifying' (like slavery) — as if, one contributor on Reddit explains, 'characters exist to be consumed or are otherwise disposable.' ... European complexions are often 'olive,' 'honeyed' or, less flatteringly, 'doughy'; their tastes can be 'white-bread,' meaning uninteresting, or vanilla,' meaning plain. We reach for comestibles to capture colour because common foods provide a shared visual vocabulary. Thus we often name colours after what we eat. Aubergine, mulberry, raspberry, peach, orange, sage, saffron, chestnut, pecan: they itemise not only our pantry but our paint samples. Seriously, if we depict something as a food-derived hue, do we imply that what we’ve described is consumable?"

From "Authors must stand up to the language police/The cancelling of writers who use phrases like ‘chocolate-coloured skin’ will only spiral if we appease the purity zealots" by Lionel Shriver (London Times). 

Shriver is commenting on the abject apology made by teacher/memoirist Kate Clanchy after she was criticized for using the phrases "chocolate-coloured skin" and "almond-shaped eyes." 

“I am not a good person,” she grovelled. “Not a pure person, not a patient person, no one’s saviour.”

Is that groveling or is it a rejection of the notion that a writer ought to pose as virtuous? Presenting oneself as good/pure/patient/redemptive will ruin a memoir. But here's something else that ruins a memoir: trite descriptions. And that's the real crime of "chocolate-coloured skin" and "almond-shaped eyes." 

If you're a decent writer, and you see words like that coming out of your fingertips, you need to jerk your hands off the keyboard and scream or laugh at yourself. The problem isn't maybe you're not a good person. It's you're a shitty writer. You'd better see the problem yourself and edit. 

And this is a teacher, describing her students. If you're going to make your reputation by talking about them, you'd damned well better acknowledge their individuality and use fresh and specific words if you're going to tell us how they look and require us to categorize them by race.

How would you like it if your child's teacher published a memoir in which your child was described with clichés — racial clichés?

The Supreme Court turns away 6 plaintiffs who seek relief after they were used, they say, as child slaves producing cocoa in the Côte d’Ivoire.

The opinion — in Nestlé v. Doe — is written by Justice Thomas, announcing the judgment of the Supreme Court and rejecting "a judicially created cause of action to recover damages from American corporations that allegedly aided and abetted slavery abroad."

In Parts I and II of the case, where Thomas has a majority — Roberts, Breyer, Sotomayor, Kagan, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett (all but Alito) — he writes: 

Respondents seek a judicially created cause of action to sue petitioners for aiding and abetting forced labor overseas. Arguing that aiding and abetting is not even a tort, but merely secondary liability for a tort, petitioners and the United States contend that “the conduct relevant to the [Alien Tort Statute’s] focus” is the conduct that directly caused the injury. See id., at 346 (a plaintiff who “does not overcome the presumption against extraterritoriality . . . therefore must allege and prove a domestic injury”). All of that alleged conduct occurred overseas in this suit.... 

To plead facts sufficient to support a domestic application of the ATS, plaintiffs must allege more domestic conduct than general corporate activity.

The Alito dissent is very short. Key insight: "Corporate status does not justify special immunity."

... I would hold that if a particular claim may be brought under the ATS against a natural person who is a United States citizen, a similar claim may be brought against a domestic corporation.

"Kids are encouraged to express their own opinions. Everyone in the family, including the youngest, has a say."

"By the time Julius turned three, he had already developed adequate language skills to express what’s important to him. After that, it was all about teaching him how to formulate rational solutions. Negotiation-based parenting isn’t for the faint of heart. It can be exhausting, and your patience will be tested. But by allowing our toddler to negotiate, we were teaching him how to set his own boundaries. The notion was that each time Julius questioned our authority, he was simply trying to express what he was and wasn’t comfortable with. It’s a skill that will be useful when he’s older, whether it’s to resist succumbing to peer pressure, to cope when he finds himself in a possibly dangerous situation or to assert himself at work. Of course, there are rules. As parents, it’s important that we explain our position clearly and let him know, for example, why he needs to sleep early: 'So you can get plenty of rest and grow up strong and tall like everyone else.'"

#4 on the list in "I spent 7 years studying Dutch parenting—here are 6 secrets to raising the happiest kids in the world" (CNBC).

#5 is "Kids eat 'hagelslag' (chocolate sprinkles) for breakfast" — and here, you can order hagelslag at Amazon. I don't know how crucial each of the 6 things are in the achievement of happiness, but sprinkling chocolate bits on buttered toast is certainly easy to do and no worse of a bad habit that jam on your toast or a jelly with your peanut butter.

As for the #4 secret... I felt encouraged (retrospectively) by that, since it's what I did (except not with the idea of "negotiation"!).

"Yo, proletariat: If the Democratic Party is going to be against chocolate, high heels, parties and fun, you’ve lost me. And I’ve got some bad news for you about 2020."

"The progressives are the modern Puritans. The Massachusetts Bay Colony is alive and well on the Potomac and Twitter. They eviscerate their natural allies for not being pure enough.... The politics of purism makes people stupid. And nasty.... The progressives’ cry that they don’t care about the political consequences because they have a higher cause is just a purity racket. Their mantra is like that of Ferdinand I, the Holy Roman Emperor: 'Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.' 'Let justice be done, though the world perish.' The rest of us more imperfect beings don’t want the world to perish. And maybe justice can be done, without losing the White House, the House, chocolate, high heels, parties and fun."

From "Spare Me the Purity Racket" by Maureen Dowd (NYT).

The top-rated comment over there begins "No" and includes: "why do you care if your high heels, parties and chocolates are criticized?... Democrats shouldn't back down on anything. This just says nothing matters anymore, not the law, not morality, not norms, not decency.... Democrats must fight, fight, fight to save our country."

Dowd is fighting back after she was criticized for eating chocolate with Nancy Pelosi and saying something nice about Pelosi's shoes as if they were "decadent aristocrats reveling like Marie Antoinette."

Charles Sanna "developed a way to produce millions of individual packets of powdered coffee creamer for American troops."

"Military contracts stipulated, though, that his family’s company, Sanna Dairy Engineers, would be penalized if the orders were underfilled. So, to be safe, the company produced extra packets. But that meant that it was routinely stuck with excess supply, since the Army had also insisted that none of the overstock be used to fill future orders. The surplus powder was savory, potentially valuable and perishable. With necessity being the mother’s milk of invention, Mr. Sanna had another idea. 'I believed that it would make an excellent ingredient for a hot cup of cocoa,' he recalled. He experimented over the stove in the family kitchen in Menomonie, Wis.... 'I consulted the family cookbook and determined the best proportions of creamer, sugar, cocoa and vanilla,' Mr. Sanna said... Which was how, in the late 1950s, the future Swiss Miss brand — and the whole instant hot cocoa mix market — were born."

From the NYT obituary for Charles Sanna, who died here in Madison, Wisconsin last month at the age of 101. The company was founded in Madison. The brand, Swiss Miss, was sold to Beatrice Foods half a century ago.

The Ash Wednesday on Valentine's Day problem.

Today is not Ash Wednesday. Ash Wednesday is next week, on February 14th, Valentine's Day. Both days on the same day hasn't happened since 1945. Does this have any significance to you? Let me do a quick poll to see where we are in the discussion I want to begin:

Where are you vis a vis the Ash Wednesday on Valentine's Day problem:

I have a real problem figuring out how to deal with the conflict between 2 important days.

I don't do anything special for either day, so it's no problem.

Ash Wednesday will eclipse an otherwise important Valentine's Day.

Valentine's Day will eclipse an otherwise important Ash Wednesday for me.

Both are important, but I see how to celebrate both and will do so.

I only care about Ash Wednesday, not Valentine's Day, so no problem.

I only care about Valentine's Day, so no problem.

 

pollcode.com free polls

Reading a few news articles, I see that practicing Catholics are supposed to fast on Ash Wednesday. I believe going out to dinner is the traditional way to observe Valentine's Day, so those 2 traditions are in stark conflict. One could easily move the restaurant dinner to another day, fast, and do something else romantic for Valentine's Day. In fact, you'd probably be better off generally on Valentine's Day by doing something other than going out to a restaurant, and the challenge to be a little creative romantically might do you some good.

Oh, but wait. I'm not Catholic. It's just sinking in for me that "fast" means don't eat meat (and eat only one "full meal"). I think! So you can do the usual restaurant meal. Just be careful what you order. But there are so many days when we skip meat. The challenging conflict here is the contrasting tone of the 2 days. Here, one woman is quoted:

"Ash Wednesday reminds us of what we're born out of. We were born out of dust and we will return to dust when we go back to our heavenly father.... I think it's difficult for some people, but for me, I think all the Lord's sufferings that He did for us, that it's just a minor sacrifice that we could do for Him to fast for that day.... I told my husband we're going to do Valentine's Day on the 13th and have our chocolate then because I love chocolate."

Some Catholics are looking at whether there will be "a dispensation.":

Bishop Robert Baker of Birmingham, Alabama, told Catholics in his diocese... “A dispensation will not be given,” he wrote, stressing that this decision was “out of respect for the importance of Ash Wednesday in the lives of so many – including our non-Catholic brethren – and the way this custom underlines the importance of the Lenten season at its outset.”...

The Archdiocese of Chicago... suggested celebrating Valentine’s Day on Mardi Gras: “A traditionally festive time before beginning our Lenten observance.”

“Catholics throughout the world recognize Ash Wednesday as the solemn beginning of a period of prayerful reflection and penance, as is evident by the large number of churchgoers on this day,” the archdiocese said, stressing that the day’s “obligation of fast and abstinence must naturally be the priority in the Catholic community.”

Aside from fasting and the solemn mood of Ash Wednesday, there is the ritual of receiving ashes. It's hard for me to picture someone taking Ash Wednesday seriously enough to receive ashes and then attempting to make something of Valentine's Day, but maybe I'm misunderstanding how people think and feel about the ashes. Perhaps you think you've done that ritual and you're good to go, as long as you don't violate any of the other rules (like eating meat). But I would think you're supposed to get into the mood symbolized by the ashes and carry it through the day and, to a lesser degree, through the entire season of Lent.

This post was inspired by the thought, on waking up this morning: I need to stay away from Facebook. Does Lent begin today? I could give up Facebook for Lent. 

"A wry disgruntlement will forever unite those of us who were children during the height of the nineteen-seventies natural-foods movement."

"It was a time that we recall not for its principles—yes to organics, no to preservatives—but for its endless assaults on our tender young palates. There was brown rice that scoured our molars as we chewed, shedding gritty flecks of bran. There was watery homemade yogurt that resisted all attempts to mitigate its tartness. And, at the pinnacle of our dietary suffering, worse even than sprout sandwiches or fruit leather or whole-wheat scones, there was carob, the chocolate substitute that never could.In the nineteen-seventies, carob infiltrated food co-ops and baking books as if it had been sent on a COINTELPRO mission to alienate the left’s next generation...."

So begins "How Carob Traumatized a Generation" by Jonathan Kauffman (The New Yorker).

At the Chocolate Café...

... drink up.

Write what you want, shop through The Althouse Amazon Portal.

The chocolate set — photographed by me at The Indianapolis Museum of Art — is from 1896, designed by Konrad Hentschel for the Meissen Porcelain Manufactory.

Here's "A Brief History of the Chocolate Pot" (Smithsonian).

"Liberal Democrat prudes really are special. Here's a photo of [a] bumper sticker that nicely *celebrates* the special prudery of our own beloved Madtown."

That's Meade in the comments to the post where I said that a snortable product — in this case, cocoa — "brings out the prudes, anything that suggests that a drug-related mentality will accompany the use of the product. It's really a desire to regulate thoughts. Don't even think of getting high."

"There’s really no negative publicity, so I felt we’re good to go."

Said the founder of the company that makes Coco Loko — snortable powdered cocoa infused with ginkgo biloba, taurine, and guarana — which Chuck Schumer just went on a rampage against.

You can buy Coko Loko at Amazon. It's only $24.99 for 1.25 ounces, where the comments are already infused with Schumerosity.

What Schumer said is: "I can’t think of a single parent who thinks it is a good idea for their children to be snorting over-the-counter stimulants up their noses. This suspect product has no clear health value." He wants the FDA to get involved because it's marketed as a drug. But it's just cocoa powder with caffeine (guarana), amino acid (taurine), and the extract of ginkgo leaves that has never been shown to do anything.

But I guess it's the fact that they're telling you to take it in through the nose that stimulates the anti-drug sensibilities. If finely ground coffee were sold as snortable, I guess it would be the same problem. It brings out the prudes, anything that suggests that a drug-related mentality will accompany the use of the product. It's really a desire to regulate thoughts. Don't even think of getting high.

This relates to the way marijuana is wedging its way to legality. The medical/"medical" use was forefronted to numb the prudes' censoriousness. God FDA forbid anyone should actually have fun.

By the way, you can still buy candy cigarettes. How we enjoyed all the nicotine we only imagined... back in the old days, before the Baby Boomers matured beyond the 1960s "If it feels good, do it" to the sick fun of restricting the pleasure of others.

Do people even remember the 60s slogan "If it feels good, do it"? It's talked about in this 1996 NYT review of the book "The Pleasure Police/How Bluenose Busybodies and Lily-Livered Alarmists Are Taking All the Fun Out of Life."

"If it feels good, do it!" was the moral imperative at Woodstock, but since the advent of Jimmy Carter, the nation has been swept by a counterrevolution. Now the rule is: "If it feels good, it must be risky and bad, immoral and dangerous to your health."...

A new complicity has grown up between the religious Ayatollahs on the right and the sanctimonious alarmists on the left, united in their common determination to make everything we touch or ingest illegal, immoral or fattening. In chapters devoted to eating and drinking, smoking and making love, Mr. Shaw documents the excessive prudery and exaggerated warnings that have come to surround our every indulgence. In American culture, all universal sources of pleasure are eventually medicalized, then politicized and finally policed (if not prohibited): witness alcohol, tobacco, cannabis, fat, pornography, masturbation, perfume. Mr. Shaw aptly quotes H. L. Mencken's eternal definition of puritanism as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." All our most intimate spheres of solace and release are exposed to the prurient curiosity of those who cannot themselves enjoy, because of the envy they feel. We Americans, with our Puritan ancestors, are different from, say, the French, who are too busy passionately pursuing their own pleasure to worry much about other people's....

Speaking of puritanism and the special problem of snorting, I'm thinking of this Prince lyric, from "Pop Life":

What you putting in your nose?
Is that where all your money goes (is that where your money goes)
The river of addiction flows
You think it's hot, but there won't be no water
When the fire blows

I don't know where Prince is now, but he's starting at long last to put his videos on YouTube. I wish "Pop Life" were one of the first few to go up but it's not. This might do in a pinch.

Hey, that reminds me: Can you still get Pop Rocks candy? Yes! But — stand down, Schumer — the FDA did get involved:

Rumors persisted that eating Pop Rocks and drinking soda would cause a person's stomach to boil and explode.... One of these myths involved a character named Mikey from the Life cereal commercials.... The Food and Drug Administration set up a hotline [in Seattle] to assure anxious parents that the fizzing candy would not cause their children to choke.... On the very first episode of MythBusters, Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman put the Mikey rumor to the test...

By the way, Mikey (John Gilchrist) is still alive as is the myth that he died from Pop Rocks:

In Shrek The Musical (2008–2010), one of the main characters, Donkey, sings a song "Don't Let Me Go". In the song, he is begging Shrek not to leave him and starts naming things that go together. He sings, "like Cupid and Psyche, like Pop Rocks and Mikey!"

Quote by a woman who is 26, marked by me when I was 36, randomly noticed today....

... as I — almost 66 — clear books off my office shelves:



The book is "Women and Love: A Cultural Revolution in Progress (The Hite Report on Love, Passion, and Emotional Violence)," which I bought when it came out in 1987 and kept all these years. How strange to open up to that statement by a young woman imagining herself old and to know that I marked it when I was young and am now the very age that young woman was talking about.

The first Hite Report book "The Hite Report on Female Sexuality," came out in 1976, and I was one of the women surveyed. They were handing those surveys out in New York City, and I got one, filled it out, and sent it in. The survey invited long narrative responses, and I thought I'd written some great stuff. I read the book carefully — it's full of the quotes women wrote — but found none of mine.

Questions I wasn't asking.

"Why Are People Snorting Raw Chocolate at European Clubs?"

"People who like milk chocolate have slightly different microbes in their intestines than those who prefer their chocolate dark

"... although researchers do not know why. Significant differences in the so-called microbiome are also found in individuals based on whether or not they eat a lot of fiber or take certain medications—such as the diabetes drug metformin, female hormones or antihistamines."

From "Findings from the Gut—New Insights into the Human Microbiome/A preference for dark versus milk chocolate, among other things, shows up in the kinds of healthy germs found in the gut" (in Scientific American).