Chocolate tasting, for skeptics
(The title of this piece is a riff off of ‘Focusing,’ for skeptics, an essay of mine in which I try to make the practice of Gendlin’s Focusing accessible to an audience that usually bounces off of it.)
I.
I like to taste high-quality dark chocolate, in a manner similar to how many people like to taste wine. I get real fancy with it, with little tasting plates and a gong and everything. Sometimes I wear chocolate-colored robes.
There are a lot of ways to go about Tasting-with-a-capital-T. You could describe the specific flavor profile of a chocolate—whether it’s bitter, sweet, sour, umami, or whether the mouth feel is smooth or grainy, warm or cool. You could talk about the “notes” that are present, and whether it’s more reminiscent of cherries or whiskey or sourdough bread. You could try to describe the experience directly, so that someone else can mentally simulate what it will be like if they try that same chocolate for themselves.
(e.g. “sharp and snappy on the chew, shattering apart almost like glass and filling my mouth with vapor.”)
All of these are valid and interesting! As I like to say when I put on tastings for other people: if you’re doing something that increases your enjoyment of the chocolate, then you’re doing it right. There isn’t some particular right way to do it, in my view.
That being said, the thing that I tend to do myself is a little stranger. Here are some representative snippets:
A warm wet whirlpool black hole glowing red hug. A crackling fire at just the right distance. The body of a just-killed boar, glimpsed by a five-year-old between the legs of his elders; he was not supposed to see. He does not know quite how he feels about it but the food that night is no less delicious.
A bell made out of wood, a canoe hollowed out from a log. Soft, weathered wood with no splinters, feeling almost felted beneath my fingers. Air, cavernous air, breath and wind, a sense of spaciousness. Something sacred. A sacred temple, the hollow tree where Maara and Tamara wintered. A cabin in the high mountains, shaded, near huge smooth gray stones (like around Lake Tahoe). A place of retreat and contemplation. What sand feels like to a sandsnake. Waking up on a sailboat to the gentle flap of the canvas sail above your head, shading you from the sun. Desert oases. I’ve never had a chocolate that tasted like old books before. Daniel Shattuck, teaching me to burn the edges of paper to make it look like an old pirate map. God, I wish I could go back in time and kiss Daniel Shattuck. This chocolate. I will probably buy another bar of it.
Dry. Flat. Gray. Ashen. Bitter. Like depression in chocolate form. This is not a friend chocolate. This is not a happy chocolate. This is a war chocolate. This is a Quirrell chocolate. I do not know if I will finish this bar, but I will have at least one more bite because it has not finished imparting to me its sad wisdom, and I am too genre savvy to dismiss the broken old beggar warning me that he sees a dark cloud surrounding me. Distant lightning and rumbling thunder. Katsumoto, standing on the balcony of his family’s house, pondering the horizon before the last battle. Blood in the water. The sound of knives being sharpened. I don’t think this company wants me to write advertising copy for their chocolate, but then again maybe they do. This is the most dire set of sensations any food has ever given me (though I’ll admit I’m usually not listening as hard as I am listening during a Tasting). Very old-school, the-story-of-Jesus-is-a-tragedy Christmas.
II.
I have multiple friends who look at notes like the above and go
They say things like “That is not—that can not be how the chocolate tastes. Those words are not about taste. Those words are so far from being about taste that, I’m sorry, I’m not trying to be rude, but it’s like you put the chocolate in your mouth and then just … completely made up some random story, or … or started hallucinating, whatever, I don’t know.”
I feel quite a lot of sympathy toward this perspective. I am reminded of similar feelings that I felt, when some of my more synaesthetic friends started discussing the color of various letters (!) and the smells of various school subjects (!!).
There’s a certain kind of objection that a brain could throw up, à la “I don’t want to say that this chocolate is like ribbons on a Christmas present, because it isn’t like ribbons on a Christmas present in any meaningful way, and I don’t want to train my brain to be better at producing nonsense. I don’t want to reward my brain for wild hallucinations and extremely tenuous associations.”
That’s virtuous! I endorse that objection wholeheartedly.
And yet.
While it’s true that Belvie’s Thien Tuy chocolate does not literally taste of the fictional character Katsumoto pondering a dark and stormy horizon, it tastes like it, in a way that is (on some level) objective. It is not the case that I’m just making things up.
When I taste the same chocolate on different days, the results are surprisingly reproducible (even when blinded, or when months or years have passed in between). And it’s not just a me thing—both at my large-group chocolate tastings and when Logan and I taste chocolate together in our home, there’s a surprisingly high rate of convergence on strikingly similar metaphors.
(By “surprisingly high,” I mean something like 5-15% of the time, which doesn’t sound all that impressive until one pauses to consider the breathtaking size of the space of possible metaphors; if we were all just plucking randomly from a bucket of ten thousand things stretching from [death by poisoning] to [the Emerald Pointe waterpark in Greensboro, North Carolina] it would be pretty rare for two people to both draw out “a dilapidated, vine-wrapped cabin deep in an old-growth forest populated by faeries.”)
(“No way! I wrote ‘an old abandoned cottage in a fairy tale’!”)
III.
So … what is going on?
First off, I’d be remiss if I didn’t link Logan’s guide to tasting chocolate, as well as their distinction between snacking chocolate and art chocolate. Logan and I don’t do the exact same thing when we taste chocolate but we’re married and we got into this together and stuff, so there’s overlap.
Second, I’m going to need a metaphor, which in this case will be “my mind as the surface of a body of water.”
If we imagine my mind as the surface of a body of water, then a bunch of handy analogies pop up. There could be wind or waves—my thoughts and emotions could be turbulent, choppy, shifting, unpredictable.
There could be flow—I could find myself pulled in certain directions, or spinning around like a whirlpool, or otherwise unable to easily choose where to place my attention.
There could be objects under the surface which change the shape of the water passing over it, like the hump of a stone just before a waterfall.
…etc. Experiences, in this metaphor, would be things falling into the water. Something making contact with the surface of my mind, and sending up splashes and ripples as a result.
Different objects will send up different splashes. A pine needle hits the water differently from a twig, and a twig hits differently from a stick, and a stick hits differently from a branch, and a branch hits differently from a whole tree falling in. A wedge of iron will send water in two symmetric waves like butterfly wings, whereas a cannon ball will send it out more or less equally in all directions.
Speed, shape, density, angle of impact—each of these will change how the water rises and falls, how the ripples fan out, whether there are any secondary disturbances from a bunch of water splashing back down or a buoyant object bobbing back up to the surface, etc. If you had sophisticated-enough recording equipment and a powerful enough computer, you could probably reconstruct a ton of information about the object using only the splash data.
(Obviously, my present state will influence the size and shape of the splashes, too—things will be different if the surface of my experience is already a turbulent, frothing mess. This is part of why chocolate tasting is more interesting (to me) when it can be done in a calm, settled environment and when I myself am not distracted or stressed or fixated or triggered. With fewer things already going on, there’s less noise to wash out or interfere with the experience.)
Into this idyllic calm, we introduce The Chocolate™.
(There isn’t anything particularly special about chocolate. Single-origin dark chocolate happens to be relatively rich and subtle and complex, as objects go, but other people taste wine, or cheese, or tea, or honey. You could taste apples or berries or be a connoisseur of breads. Logan and I have done “tastings” of physical textures, and visual art, and songs, and various other things.)
The key (in my version of tasting, anyway) is that you build up some grounded, visceral sense of where you are, and how you feel, as a baseline, and then you let that state change in response to the stimulus of the chocolate. You watch yourself, as you exist in the moment before the chocolate, and the moments after.
The scent of the chocolate hits your mind, and you observe the splash, watch the ripples as they spread out. Then you drop the first piece into your mouth and let it melt, again just sort of seeing what happens. Then maybe you chew a piece. Then perhaps you throw in a focusing prompt, such as:
If this were a ship, what kind of ship would it be?
What sort of mythical creature feeds on this, as its favorite food?
Which of my friends is most in need of what this chocolate has to teach?
…and you see how the splash from that prompt interacts with the ongoing ripples from the sensations in your mouth and nose and throat.
It’s important to note that there is no invention happening, here. I, the taster, am not really exercising my will, or applying my imagination. I might flex some creative muscles in trying to capture or write down what I’m observing, but I am not doing the thing that people do when they try to come up with something. The chocolate simply is colliding with the surface of my experience, and my brain’s neurons are firing, in response, in a way that is different from the way they would have if the chocolate wasn’t there.
Okay, fine, but then where do the insane metaphorical pseudopoems come from?
Good question.
IV.
Let’s go back to the idea of dropping objects into a body of water.
Imagine a game where one player drops literal actual objects into a literal actual body of water, and the other player’s goal is to identify which object was dropped.
(Let’s say there’s a limited, canonical set of objects, like maybe a sphere, a cube, a disc, a rod, a pyramid, and one of these bad boys:
I claim that humans could probably get pretty good at this game. Like, if there really were a game in which I kept my eyes shut until the moment I heard a splash, and then I opened them and watched how the water moved and fell, without being able to see the actual object, I bet it wouldn’t take long until I was getting the right answer »75% of the time. I think my brain would pretty quickly learn to recognize the various splashes that each shape is capable of creating.
I also suspect that my brain would learn to anticipate and predict the splashes pretty quickly, too. Like, I might not be able to describe, in words, what a given splash is going to look like, but I bet if the other player said “cube,” my brain would have some kind of gestalt, aggregate sense of what a cube-splash tends to look like, and if the other person was lying, or if they then dropped some sabotage cube that had a radically different density or a hole in it or whatever, my brain would immediately pick up on some note of wrongness.
When I taste chocolate, what I’m doing is playing a similar game. It’s a matching game, with my brain reaching back through all of my experiences for something that resonates.
When I taste the 2019 harvest of Dandelion’s 70% chocolate from Wampu, Honduras, it produces a certain shape of splash, a certain set of ripples.
That splash and those ripples are (it turns out) (in some ways) very very similar to the splash and ripples that happen in my brain if I stand within the boundaries of the Hagiwara Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco.
When I expose my brain to the stimuli of the Japanese tea garden, that experience hits me in a way that the Dandelion Wampu (partially) reproduces.
December 1, 2022:
First melt: goat food at a petting zoo, more hamster cages, a sort of breathy back-of-the-throat quality that I associate with green tea. Yeah, a lot like green tea, actually; like being at the Japanese Tea Garden in SF.
March 4, 2023:
What is this hollow reedy property, this sucking woody straw property, it makes me think of horses and rivers but also somehow small and fragile, a butterfly carved from wood by Geppetto. Tea cakes, something Japanese and reserved, sesame seed cookies, I dunno, it’s none of these but I like it a lot. The experience of the Japanese tea garden in SF.
October 16, 2023:
Something wild and lush but not overgrown or tangled; the vision of the hills of Katsumoto’s village feels ironically apropos. Hollow. Open. Clear and blue. Chocolate of soothing calm. Chocolate of wooden temples. This has much of the same experience of drinking tea, and something correspondingly in common with To’ak Pu’er Tea.
…you kind of have to decide whether or not to take my word for it, but I pinky swear that:
I did not reread these notes in between tastings,
I did not consciously store the tag “tea garden” in my mind, associated with this chocolate, and
I did not go looking through my notes for a chocolate that I already knew had reproducible results. I simply went and grabbed my Wampu notes, because I knew it was one of my favorite chocolates and I hadn’t already used any notes from it up above.
(In point of fact, the mental tag I had associated with Wampu is “s’mores Pop Tarts.”)
When I taste chocolate, I allow the splash of the chocolate into the surface of my mind to call up associations. The chocolate makes me feel a certain way, and without any conscious effort, my brain supplies the answer to the question “what else has made me feel this way? If no one specific experience captures it, what sort of thing (or combination of things) do I expect would make me feel this way?”
In other words: what are the ingredients of this phenomenological experience? What things would I combine, in a magical potion designed to put me in this precise mood? What elements from my library of memories and stereotypes could be assembled just so, to produce a splash in this particular shape?
I have felt this way a couple of times before, I know I have, what was it, where was I, what was going on, I’m certain there have been moments in my past that rhyme with this…
+
Wow, I have never felt this way before. This is uncharted territory. What, uh. What the heck is going on? How did I get here? If I woke up with amnesia feeling exactly like this, what would I think might have happened? What sorts of things does my brain believe could precede and give rise to this mood?
(A few lines up, I said “without any conscious effort,” but I guess I should note that often conscious effort is required—that’s why I keep the prompts discussed earlier on hand, or even simpler questions like “is it cool or hot? High or low? Happy or sad?” Often, it’s not easy to get a big splash out of my brain in the first place, and often I don’t have an easy time capturing and comprehending the shape of the splash. Both of those can take non-negligible amounts of mental oomph. But I’m never using the same conscious effort that I use when e.g. attempting to flesh out a story. To the extent that I am being creative, it’s the creativity of a photographer, not a sculptor.)
V.
Okay, so … why do this?
By far, the majority of the answer is “because it’s enjoyable.” I have fun doing it. It’s entertaining. The chocolate is delicious, and the memory-prompting is neat in the same way that going through an old photo album or a box in the back of your closet can be neat. I like writing, I like thinking, I like the artifact of the tasting notes (and people’s reactions to them), and most of all I like the taste of high-quality dark chocolate.
But I wouldn’t say that the only thing I get out of my tasting practice is fun. It’s not purely an indulgence.
A friend of mine, on reading an earlier draft of this essay, noted:
It's an opportunity to practice seeing, recognizing, and naming patterns in an arena where there is no agreed-upon paradigm. It is ontology-craft, it is a place to practice parceling and portioning a landscape where there are few hard boundaries.
…and I completely agree; before discovering the practice of chocolate tasting, it was rare for me to have a regular, repeated activity that wasn’t overshadowed by a bunch of preconceptions and mental categories and labels and expectations.
(Though I think I was drawn to parkour at least in part due to a similar kind of novelty.)
Each new chocolate has the potential to be wildly different from everything I’ve ever tasted before, and there’s no standard vocabulary for capturing the experience, and this is a feature, not a bug.
(This is part of why I’ve resisted learning the standard “flavor notes” terminology that many chocolatiers use; I suspect it would force my thoughts into a smaller and sadder and less-rich environment.)
You could shrug and say “I dunno, they’re splashes. Every splash is ultimately just a splash; they’re not that different.” And in a practical sense, this is true. But as humans, we spend so much of our time in the simplified, sanitized, rounded-off space of concepts and categories, glossing over the unmanageable complexity of the world around us (because it’s unmanageable!). It’s nice to pause, sometimes, and turn down the filters, and let all the detail in, and chocolate tasting is one reliable and unusually pleasant way to do so.
And it does something useful to my brain, as well (or at least, I believe it does). There are a couple of mental muscles that I think are pretty important, that have the tendency to atrophy, and which chocolate tasting helps me keep in shape.
The first is the skill of remembering and recognizing feelings and fragments—the art of scanning through my mental library and finding matches and near-matches. Retrieval is a difficult task, tip-of-the-tongue syndrome is super frustrating, and things only tend to get worse as our brains wear out and the pile of memories grows larger and harder to sort through.
But you can, in fact, get better at moving things from the periphery of your mind’s eye into focus. You can train your brain to not-crush the gossamer whispers of a maybe-memory, and develop the skill of sidling up to it without startling it into flight. You can learn to let your mental fingers drift over the thousand thousand shapes until you find one that fits, and with practice you can even learn to do this quickly.
Chocolate tasting is an excellent way to flex these muscles. (Gendlin’s Focusing is another.) It’s one of those things where a little bit of practice every week goes a long way, both in terms of staying familiar with the architecture of your existing mental library and in terms of reshelving loose books and lost pages in their proper places.
(I’d be willing to bet that chocolate tasting is genuinely (if mildly) nootropic, and that it prevents some small measure of cognitive decline via giving my mental librarians a regular workout. Like, I suspect this is good anti-dementia practice in the same way that music or crafts or Sudoku can be.)
VI.
The second mental muscle is one that I think fewer people are likely to care about, but it’s one that I happen to care about a lot.
(What follows is a somewhat lengthy digression, almost its own mini-essay. If you feel your eyes glazing over, ctrl+f “…and we’re back” to skip to the final section.)
Chocolate tasting helps me practice the skill of predicting how various things would impact me, which gives me an opportunity to go one step further and sort of … plan a response?
(“Plan a response” is way too dignified of a description, and makes it sound much more deliberate and skillful. It’s something like the half-second ghost-version of that.)
Sometimes, as noted up above, there is no reference experience buried in my past, no specific memory that resonates with the gestalt of the chocolate. Sometimes I’m feeling something novel, and in response, my brain conjures up things like:
clambering barefoot and bloody over black volcanic rock toward a dragon who holds hostage all that I hold dear
(Solomon Islands Makira Island 75%)
Or:
The snow swirls along the sidewalk and I regret not grabbing my hat. I walk, and walk, and walk, the miles piling up beneath me. I pass people, stores, restaurants. I speak to no one. I am in another world, another plane. I see it all as if through a pane of glass. My thoughts turn on themselves and consume themselves and eventually go silent, and I realize I am captivated by the shape of a pine tree. My fingers itch for my brush, my palette, and my thoughts turn back to you, and my face goes sour. It will take another two miles to make my brain let you go again, and latch on to something else.
(Fruition Bolivia Wild Forest 74%)
What’s happening here is that my brain is encountering a mood it’s never felt before, and (in response) constructing a scenario I’ve never inhabited before. And this provides me with a unique sort of opportunity.
There’s a therapeutic technique called implementation intentions, originally used in contexts like addiction recovery. The core of the technique is simple: you envision a scenario you expect to encounter, and you form an intention regarding how you’d ideally like to respond. For instance, “when I see the elevator in front of me in the morning, I will take the stairs instead,” or “when I notice that I am absolutely certain that my romantic partner is doing this just to piss me off, I will ask them a question.”
There’s more to it than just that one step, but even just that one step turns out to be a pretty powerful tool. Humans spend a lot of time on autopilot, just doing whatever their brains do by default, and pausing to concretely imagine a non-default path makes it way more likely to become A Path Actually Taken.
People usually use implementation intentions in places where they already know they have some kind of problem—they use it to try to nudge themselves back on track, in places where they’re derailed.
But chocolate tasting sends me much further afield than I could go “on purpose.” I would have a hard time sitting down once a week and selecting, from among all of the possible universes, some specific scenario to ponder, and form intentions around.
The chocolate does the work for me. It sends me through the magical portal, and I just … find myself, in some uncharted section of experience-space, and there I get to play out my responses.
Gritty. Sandy. Almost salty—something cuts at the back of my throat. Makes me think of the sea, overcast, gulls shrieking. A dockmaster’s sky. Sand in my toes, the wind whipping—I should have gone home sooner, headed for shelter, but I stayed out as long as I could, maybe later than was wise. I’ll be shivering and drenched by the time I get home, but elated. Alive.
(Cacaoteca “Oscuro Dark” from Dominica, 84%)
Drunk chocolate. Dionysian chocolate. Chocolate for turning mortals into wild beasts. There’s something in this that is a teeny tiny bit like being told that I’ve just been dosed with acid, and a trip is coming whether I’m ready or not.
Gross (but I don’t care). Wet and sticky and sloppy and messy but without any expectation that things should be otherwise, doglike acceptance of the filth and the scum. Reckless sexual abandon, absolutely covered in cum. Chocolate for being reduced to a single squirming grub wriggling in a pile of grubs. Like being in an armpit and being into armpits. Wrap myself up in it, melt into it, ewwwwww, gross, haha, eww. Delirious. Disheveled. Swept away. Impressively wild. Drunken gods and gods of drink. Beating drums with giant sticks, kids on LSD, drunk kids, murderous kids, Lord of the Flies, unmasked, unhinged.
It’s so filthy even the mudboy in me is shocked. Dangerously alluring. “This is what the Puritans were afraid of.” The promise of savagery, the releasing of all shoulds, all shoulds. Primordial and Bacchanalian.
And in the process, I get to do a sort of tangled-up, recursive, nested combination of
Learning things about myself
Tinkering with myself, if what I learned doesn’t feel quite right, isn’t quite true to my values and the person I’m shaping myself to be.
My brain tells me “here’s where you are, and here’s what’s happening, and here’s how you’re feeling about it,” and then I get to have feelings about that—feelings like surprise, or delight, or horror, or concern.
And then I get to sort of … make resolutions? To form intentions, in the implementation intentions sense.
All of this is fluid and wordless and near-instantaneous, to be clear. It’s not conscious in the way that writing down a new year’s resolution is conscious. The hand that sculpts is itself being pushed and shaped by the thing it’s trying to sculpt, and the line between prophets and kings can become quite blurry.
But still, it’s neat. It’s sort of 0.1% of what I would learn from actually being teleported into some crazy Rick & Morty alternate universe, or waking up as a different person. It helps me to know myself, and to shape myself—helps me draw myself together into a tight little self-consistent ball of this is how Duncan responds to various situations. Helps me consider policy questions that have never before arisen, spot-check the algorithm—to put myself in the shoes of a Hispanic nun sweeping the floors of a cathedral in 1807, or a venomous jungle snake whose nest you just disturbed, or an aged Imperial admiral who was once a young idealist, and who has become grave and reserved but not entirely lost his faith in the ideals of the Empire; a man who sees the pitfalls that others are about to stumble into but cannot seem find the words to sway them from their convictions, and is resigned to the oncoming disaster.
For me, all of that is a neat little bonus, on top of a practice that was already straightforwardly worthwhile.
VII.
…and we’re back.
To recap: no, the chocolate doesn’t actually taste like dripping yellow madness, because I don’t even know how I would know what dripping yellow madness tastes like; dripping yellow madness is not the sort of thing I can physically put into my mouth.
But the impact that the chocolate is having on my experience is something that I recognize, from previous experiences that were impacted in the same way. It’s a feeling I’ve felt before, at least in part, and one of the times I felt it was associated with the phrase “dripping yellow madness,” and thus do those words appear on the page in my tasting notes.
This process is not random, and it’s not magical. It’s a mundane mental motion, a brainskill. And it’s one that I suspect most people could successfully pull off, if they felt like it, even if there are various other barriers in the way.
(e.g. one of my friends is sort of the opposite of a supertaster, which has the unfortunate downside of blurring away most of the interesting complexity of dark chocolate. But I think there’s probably still something that it’s like to be that person two seconds before the chocolate hits, and there’s probably something that it’s like to be that person two seconds after, and while the delta may itself be pretty small and subtle, I think one can nevertheless develop the skill of ZOOM AND ENHANCE, over time. I suspect that this friend has struggled with chocolate tasting because they were attending to the chocolate (which they have a hard time tasting!) and I never quite managed to convey that the interesting stuff is happening in response to the chocolate, and that they would benefit from putting their attention on themselves.)
(If they feel like it, which they very well may not! Opportunity costs.)
But anyway, if you had been a little bit lost, reading my chocolate tasting notes, and unable to see where the words were coming from, and thinking that something … alchemical … was happening, hopefully now you have a slightly better roadmap to how you could get your brain to do something similar. If you’re looking to try this sort of thing with dark chocolate in particular, check out the bars and makers listed below and see if anything catches your eye.
Happy hunting!
Amano (Ocumare Village, Dos Rios, Guayas River Basin)
Amedei (Toscano Black, Blanco de Criollo, “9”)
Cacaosuyo (Chuncho-Cuzco, Cuzco)
Dandelion (Wampu, Zorzal Comunitario)
Goodnow Farms (Putnam Rye Whiskey, Lawley’s Rum, Demon Seed Whiskey)
Mission Chocolate (Puerto Rico, Wild Brasil, Wild Bolivia)
Ritual (Camino Verde, Maya Mountain)
To’ak (Rain Harvest, Pu’er Tea, Tequila Cask Aged)