Chocolate with white stuff on it

 I got a bar of expensive chocolate for a Christmas gift. (Christmas 2019). It looked fancy and I wanted to save it for a special occasion. However, this year has been so shitty that I gave up waiting for a special occasion.

I just opened up the chocolate and it is covered in a thin white film. Also there are small white spots in some places, almost like spores. The white stuff has no smell that I can perceive but I am not sure if I should eat the fancy chocolate or throw it away.

I hate this year.

I hate this year, too and I admire your coping mechanism of socking away treats in anticipation of darker times ahead. I bet you’ve been saving for retirement since you were eleven.

Anyhow, great thinking to use your nose as a preliminary test: It feels unsophisticated but it works! In fact, the FDA explicitly recommends smelling food as a way to discern whether or not it is edible.

This strategy has a minor flaw, which is that we can’t detect any of the pathogenic (illness-causing) bacteria by smell or taste. But we can detect foul odors emitted by other, non-harmful bacteria, which would indicate that the food is supporting *some* kind of bacterial growth. Could it also be supporting the bad kind, too? Safest to assume yes.

Think of foul food odors like a dead canary in the coal mine. I mean, the canary could have died from natural causes. Or the canary might be playing that old practical joke— “play dead and watch all of the miners trample each other as they flee in terror.” The mine foreman hates that one, but it never gets old!

While a truly dead canary doesn’t prove the mine is full of poison gases, it is a compelling indicator that you should get the fuck out of there. Ditto with stanky food — it’s not guaranteed to be poisonous, but why take the chance?

That said, your chocolate passed the smell test. The white spots are most likely “chocolate bloom.” This is a harmless process where fat and sugar molecules in chocolate rearrange themselves and migrate towards the edge of the confection, producing white patterns. It happens when chocolate is exposed to oscillating temperatures (which probably happened during its tenure in your cupboard).

You may notice a mild difference in texture, but your fancy cacao is safe to consume.

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