52/365: Green and Black's

52/365: Green and Black's, originally uploaded by Magic Madzik.

February 21st

My cousin is visiting from London and she brought me a box of tiny little Green&Black's chocolate bars. Organic, Fair Trade, delicious.

Following are other pictures of delicious chocolate. I apologise to those of you who gave up sweets for Lent. I haven't- my fourty-day fast comprises only procrastination.
And yet despite this noble goal I haven't given you any interesting stories recently. Project 365 is fantastic, but not without its hurdles, and there are periods of time when you just don't feel like making any extra effort beyond taking the picture and uploading it to the site. I wish this blog was popular enough to make such a casual attitude inappropriate, but I know so far no one really minds if I lapse.  The other problem is that my knee still hurts. I'm getting an x-ray done tomorrow, but until I know what's wrong I'm not going to go running around looking for photo opportunities. Sorry. ;)

Let's have a few random facts about chocolate, since that's the photo subject. The stuff first came to Europe with Christopher Columbus towards the end of the XVth century. In 1737, Linnaeus gave the cocoa plant the name 'Theobroma cacao'. Theobroma is greek for 'beverage of the gods'.

The word 'chocolate', however, comes from the Aztec language called Nahuatl. The word is xocolatl, and means bitter water.

The first chocolate bar was produced in England in 1846 by a certain mr. Joseph Fry. In 1875, milk chocolate was first created in Switzerland by mr Daniel Peter, who cleverly thought to use condensed milk invented by a certain Henri Nestle.

The average Pole eats about 3.6 kilos of chocolate yearly, which is not much compared to the 12 kg/annum consumed by the average citizen of Switzerland.

And that's all for tonight. :)