Woot for white chocolate! I finally found some that isn't cut with palm kernel oil, to which I am allergic. It makes me happy. Thanks for the links!

Well, that makes it slightly better; thanks for clarifying. But it still sounds like the smug gets kind of chokingly thick in places. I'm fascinated by the concept of terroir, and my relationship with nature makes me want to take that into account, but that doesn't mean I need to become an everything-snob. For example, I will probably never again have pasteis de nata like I did in Lisbon, _and I'm okay with that_. It was a unique experience and a very good one, but I'm not going to spend extravagant resources on having it over and over again.

And he'll get my milk chocolate when he pries it out of my cold, dead hands.

"If you feel that your metaphor needs defense so badly, perhaps you need to find a different metaphor." Exactly.

As far as the "it's better because I say so," I'm reminded of one of my stock phrases: De gustibus non est disputandem, meaning roughly, "there's no accounting for taste." I much prefer evaluations that explain their context: this wine is better than that one _with this food_ because (pairing characteristics). These apples are better for applesauce, those are better for pies, and these are for making applejack.

To steal the author's own bad metaphor, different people have different sexual desires, and the same people have different desires at different times. There's no one right way. (Although this author sounds like the kind of guy who would go around telling people that there is one right way to have sex, too.) I'm reminded of a piece I ran across somewhere about how food has become the new sex - how moral attitudes to food and sex have almost swapped places in the course of the 20th century.