apparently there's a chemical reason for my love of chocolate.

My current lunch-break book is Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire, which basically demonstrates that Pollan had a lot of practice writing about plants in terms of sexual desire before he churned out that corn-sex chapter in The Omnivore's Dilemma. Here, have a random paragraph from the tulip chapter:

By now the old roses have mostly finished, leaving behind tired shrubs wadded with sad bits of old tissue, but the rugosas and teas are still pumping out color, attracting attention. Tangled up in their petals and seemingly inebriated, the Japanese beetles are dining and humping intently, sometimes three and four of them going at it at once; it's a very Roman scene, and it leaves the blossoms trashed. Further down the garden path the daylilies lean forward expectantly, like dogs; tiny wasps accept the invitation to climb way up into their throats in search of nectar; afterward the bugs come stumbling out like drunks from a bar. Before they hit the open air, though, they jostle the lily's dainty scoop of stamens, chalking themselves with pollen they'll later dust off on the pistils of some other blossom.

Isn't that something? Plant porn aside, the entire point of the book is the domestication of plants by humans, or of humans by plants; it's a mutually rewarding relationship. Humans get what they want (taste and texture in apples, color and shape in tulips, the perfect high from cannabis), and plants get what they want (to be cultivated and spread across the land). I haven't yet gotten to the chapter about the potato, but I'm sure the message is much the same.

Meanwhile, I'm learning a lot about the cannabis plant. Somehow it managed to evolve in such a way that the chemical it produces stimulates pleasure in the human brain. Scientists have found the areas of the brain it activates; it's the same neurotransmitters that signal pleasure in everyday life. But neurotransmitters have a short life and break down eventually. The plant version sticks around for a bit longer.

Pollan then mentions, in a sort of throwaway sentence, that chocolate slows down the process of the neurotransmitter breakdown. This goes a long way towards explaining why people like chocolate. But, if Pollan is correct, chocolate will only make you happy if you're happy in the first place (you need to have active happy neurotransmitters going before you can extend their lifetime).

I really like chocolate, I do. I think I immediately work myself into a happy loop at the prospect: I get to have chocolate, therefore I'm happy, and then I eat chocolate, which just serves to keep me happy... happy about eating chocolate. But if I'm not happy in the first place, then all the chocolate in the world won't turn the tide. I'll have to remember this next time I'm miserable and find myself thinking about chocolate ice cream.