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Chocolate is, of course, the perfect emergency food.
It has sugar for a rush of fast energy, it has fat for a slow burn of backup energy, it has things like caffiene and theobromide and cannabinoids to serve as painkiller, stimulant, and euphoric, and it has a whole bunch of vitamins and minerals and nutrients to help a person stay healthy and heal.
Hurricane season started - what, earlier this week? and we've already spent the last two days getting drowned by a tropical depression, so I was repacking my emergency bag in the closet. Just in case. And because I spent most of my childhood reading books about kids who were shipwrecked or lost or trapped or abandoned and I still kind of hope something like that happens to me someday. :D
I always stick in a couple bars of dark-dark chocolate, the kind that so dark it's bitter, (mostly because the really dark kind is less likely to melt in summer temperatures.) Because chocolate is the perfect emergency food. I learned that especially the time I spent a whole night as a tornado refugee with no food or shelter - chocolate makes everything better.
The weird thing is, a bunch of those books I read knew that. Our heroes would be wind-whipped, wet, hopeless and hungry, but somebody would have saved their chocolate bar to share, or somebody would have brough chocolate knowing that they would need it, and everyone would huddle up and break off a couple squares and be able to keep going. But those books were all published from, say, the early 20th century to the mid-sixties. The only book since then that I can think of that uses chocolate that way is Harry Potter.
Very weird. It's as if, as the awesome properties of chocolate are more and more acknowledged by science, they are less and less part of the folk knowledge.
Anyway, any heroes *I* write will always have emergency dark chocolate in their bags.
ETA: Chocolate neurochemistry.
It has sugar for a rush of fast energy, it has fat for a slow burn of backup energy, it has things like caffiene and theobromide and cannabinoids to serve as painkiller, stimulant, and euphoric, and it has a whole bunch of vitamins and minerals and nutrients to help a person stay healthy and heal.
Hurricane season started - what, earlier this week? and we've already spent the last two days getting drowned by a tropical depression, so I was repacking my emergency bag in the closet. Just in case. And because I spent most of my childhood reading books about kids who were shipwrecked or lost or trapped or abandoned and I still kind of hope something like that happens to me someday. :D
I always stick in a couple bars of dark-dark chocolate, the kind that so dark it's bitter, (mostly because the really dark kind is less likely to melt in summer temperatures.) Because chocolate is the perfect emergency food. I learned that especially the time I spent a whole night as a tornado refugee with no food or shelter - chocolate makes everything better.
The weird thing is, a bunch of those books I read knew that. Our heroes would be wind-whipped, wet, hopeless and hungry, but somebody would have saved their chocolate bar to share, or somebody would have brough chocolate knowing that they would need it, and everyone would huddle up and break off a couple squares and be able to keep going. But those books were all published from, say, the early 20th century to the mid-sixties. The only book since then that I can think of that uses chocolate that way is Harry Potter.
Very weird. It's as if, as the awesome properties of chocolate are more and more acknowledged by science, they are less and less part of the folk knowledge.
Anyway, any heroes *I* write will always have emergency dark chocolate in their bags.
ETA: Chocolate neurochemistry.
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I think you'd probably still do okay in the stories, though. In one of them (Swallows & Amazons, book four) one of the characters feeds her tiny yappy dog six ounces of chocolate before bed every night. And it *still doesn't die*, alas.
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Oooh, I can be the yappy dog! :D
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And vanilla has chemical benefits of its own, although admittedly I'm not sure what they are. And they aren't as cool as having chemicals that enhance the effects of natural THC-like neurotransmitters. But, still. If you come along while I'm fleeing the collapse of civilization, I'll remember to bring a couple bars of white chocolate too. :D
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