time to set the gorilla onto the Hershbury cads?

George Cadbury, the original creator of Cadbury's chocolate was famously known for his Quaker beliefs and for the well-being of his workforce. He built the Bournville garden village adjacent to the factories, to 'alleviate the evils of modern more cramped living conditions'. It became a blueprint for other similar worker villages and set a high bar for worker care.

Cadbury's was sold off a few years ago and their products diluted. This season's Cadbury's Creme eggs have a recipe change, as well as moving from half a dozen in a pack to that well-known egg quantity of five. That's the effect of Kraft, the processed cheese slice people that manage Cadbury's in Europe.

Now it's the American version of Cadbury's brand that has created further mutants. Hershey's operate the Cadbury manufacturing in America and have been dabbling too.

To my palate Hershey chocolate tastes chemical, as if it has some kind of antiseptic injected. I'm told it's just got a higher percentage of sugar and lower amount of cocoa, but whatever it is, nowadays I won't even accept the English 'dare' to eat it.

Hershey's money-savers have also re-engineered the Cadbury ingredients. Less cocoa, more sugar, less milk, more powder. More like Hershey.

And now I see the Hershey lawyers have prevented British-style Cadbury chocolate even being retailed in the USA. They might as well lose the purple Pantone 2865c packaging on the American variant to avoid confusion.

Far removed from George's principles of improvement?

can I catch a chocolate addiction?

With the chocolate egg season upon us, I thought it would be interesting to investigate the mood enhancing chemicals associated with chocolate.

Strictly in the interests of science, of course.

The biggie that most people have heard about is the caffeine relative called theobromine, which is the one usually shown on "I heart chocolate" tee-shirts, so that's a good place to start, with its trippy endorphins to create a pleasant buzz.

It's said that the brain chemicals that chocolate enhances are relatives of opium. It works because one of the brain's receptors that flips is the same one that responds to marijuana, but instead of responding to THC (the cannabis chemical tetrahydrocannabinol), the brain produces anadamide and is happy to let chocolate slow down its dispersal to create similar but more localised receptor effect to cannabis.

Then there's the love drug component.

That's because chocolate also contains phenylethylamine, which is a chemical related to amphetamines. Like uppers, this chemical raises blood pressure and blood-sugar level creating a state that has been likened to a feeling of being in love.

So if we see plenty of blissed out people this week, the combination of self produced opiates and feelings of love may be partly driven from their levels of chocolate consumption.

Pass the Creme Eggs.

chocolate buttons (or dancing with the moonlit knight)

I was going to write this post about chocolate.

Continuing my occasional obsession with Cadburys.

I wanted to write about the strange economics of leveraged buy-outs. I even started to draw a diagram on a sheet of paper. One with banks gambling with savings.

I wanted to illustrate that if they gained money, then they got a commission. But also that if they lost money they still got a commission.

If they lost lots of money, then the government asked the tax payers to top up the bank again.

I'd even found a roulette wheel graphic.

And then I wanted to show that the same bank could start gambling again. In a no limits way it could lend whatever and wherever it liked.

And get some more commission.

So it could lend to another country. Maybe to an organisation that wanted to buy part of the bank's own country.

Maybe to cheese company to buy, say, a chocolate firm. So the cheese company buying the chocolate company doesn't need to use so much of its own money.

The bank doesn't mind; it gets its commission on its overseas loan and if the deal is risky then the government is a safety net.

My diagram might have got a bit complicated by now. Because if the chocolate company gets bought and rationalised, then there's a few less taxpayers to top things up.

Luckily this won't happen. The politicians have said so.

Mr Brown said yesterday that "We will do everything we can to make sure that jobs and investment are maintained in Britain."

So I've decided to eat some chocolate instead of drawing my diagram.

Nothing to worry about.