As if American chocolate wasn't bad enough as it is...

From the CMA's How Chocolate is Made [chocolateusa.org] page:

The main ingredient used to make chocolate is cocoa beans.

Wonder if they're planning on changing that?

Once ethanol production drives up the cost of corn, perhaps we will start to see real sugar used instead of high-fructose corn syrup.

Though I am not a chocolate freak, I have to assume that there are American chocolatiers who make fine products. Just because most people in America are satistfied with non-gourmet products doesn't mean that those products aren't out there.

I am someone who like pizza and beer, and I know there are lots of good pizzas and beers to be found out there. Of course, everyone's definition of a good beer is different, but I've come across a lot of really good stuff in America, from John Harvard's house brews in Boston to Sierra Nevada and Anchor Steam in Frisco.

And apparently there are some good American wines out there, though I don't really give a shit about wine. I believe something called Screaming Eagle has quite a good reputation and is from California.

As for the FDA decision, well, I'm all for stricter standards in food naming, generally speaking, even when it's a luxury food.

The FDA is taking consumer comments until April 25.

After which time they will toss them out and make a re$pon$ible deci$ion.

The surplus sugar will go into making that well known vegetable called ketchup.

Chinese medicine (herbs, acupuncture, etc.) has been around for thousands of years. People have been curing themselves long before Big Pharma pushed all of their drugs on us.

Couple hundred years ago, draining blood was considered a cure for just about anything. Lets bring it back. Next time you have a headache, slit your wrists.

God, you "all natural" medicine freaks are about as bad as those Scientologist.

I noticed the wax. It's called Hershey's.

I absolutely stay away from the Big Corporate chocolate: Hershey's, Cadbery's, etc. It's all shit. High Fructose Corn Syrup and other crap in there. Ever had fine, European chocolate? The taste and texture is so much better.

There is a healthy and damn tasteful alternative to "corporate chocolate": Scharffen Berger [scharffenberger.com] Bittersweet Fine Artisan Dark Chocolate. I buy the 70% and 100% Cacao bars. You can really taste the cacao beans in the 70% but it's not completely bitter. The 100% takes a bit getting used to but once you've enjoyed these high quality chocolates, the "corporate chocolate" tastes like the shit that it is. I buy these bars at Whole Foods Market [wholefoodsmarket.com].

Um, Northern California is one of the world's most-renowned wine regions. And the American microbrew explosion has been producing international-awards-earning beers for well over a decade. And pizza IS American food (as in, it is not the same as the original Italian food from which it is derived). And there is a growing number of excellent cheese companies in America. I'd be the first to admit that American-made chocolate (as in, they MADE the chocolate, from scratch, instead of just buying it from France and repackaging it--cough No-Ka cough) is nothing to write home about (unless the text of the missive was "It sucks."), but seriously, American gourmet has come a very long way in recent decades. Just, you know, to be clear... I know it was a joke and all, but... You know.

not like cochineal hasn't been used for a millenia...its not going to hurt you

This is very important. The Big Pharmaceutical corporations have been trying to get natural medicine banned for years. Instead of taking herbs, vitamins, minerals, and other natural and very inexpensive remedies, Big Pharma wants to drug everyone.

You can mix dandelions and dog spit in a jar and sell it as a cure for baldness and impotence as long as you put a tiny thing on the bottom of the screen that says it's not intended to treat or diagnose anything. 95% of the herbal medicine market is an obvious scam. Thank God they're finally trying to do something about it. It drives me crazy watching those damn commercials. If I want a placebo for my erectile dysfunction, I'll eat a bull penis like anyone sensible would.

It's really a bad quality product change if it is allowed. People that want to make/buy a chocolate substitute, can do that /now/ without calling it chocolate; They can market a chocolate flavored snack without calling it chocolate... People who really want the good stuff, shouldn't end up with 'chocolate flavored' items...

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+1 for low user id

As if American chocolate wasn't bad enough as it is...

Sheesh. You do realize that the USA is a really, really big place, right? There are literally thousands of chocolate makers. I assume this insightful comment is based on sampling each and every one of them, right? (I know this is insightful because, after all, Slashdot moderated it so).

In other news, America makes great beer, wine, cheese, ice cream, meat, etc, etc, etc -- and also awful examples of the latter products, depending on the price you want to pay.

Some of us refuse to go lower than Valrhona, usually in the 60-70% cocoa, with Dark Chocolate Noir Orange 64% Cocoa being our favorite (purchased in 1/2 lb bars.)

Why eat shitty chocolate when you can have good stuff? My SO finds that if we buy crappy chocolate, she just eats more of it and isn't satisfied. Good chocolate like the above satisfies her in an ounce or two (or three) serving size, so she eats less and enjoys more.

For those who haven't read the book, the message is: WHO FUCKING CARES? IS THIS REALLY WHAT YOU IMAGINE YOUR TAX MONEY SHOULD BE PAYING FOR?

Abso-fricking-lutely. When I buy chocolate, I want to know that if someone wraps dog feces in aluminum foil, they can't say, "No, that's what we call chocolate. No refunds, you already ate three-quarters of it." Enforced accurate labeling and definitions is absolutely what I want the government to be doing.

I'd hardly call M&M's "edible". And yeah, now I have the craving for a nice big box of Leonidas. I was actually only esposed to them this last Valentine's Day, when I bought the honey a couple lbs of it. Amazing stuff; I can't stand to eat American "chocolate" anymore.

It's not really the FDA's fault that Americans have an indiscriminating palette. I choose chocolate based on taste, not on labeling. I could really give a flying flip on what the FDA thinks chocolate is. I know what chocolate is. I'd as soon eat shoe leather as a Hershey bar. The problem here is that government thinks that this is a problem that government needs to solve. Your tax dollars at work people, arguing about what a chocolate bar is, while our national debt spirals out of control. Why is it that as a libertarian, I have to argue for the deregulation of the chocolate industry? What a sad, petty state our country has come to.

What crazy ass world do you live in?!

The world before modern medicine was a pretty shitty place if you got sick. Sure, there are local herbs etc that have been used--with HIGHLY varying success--in every part of the world, forever. This is as true of America and Europe than it is of China, though I take your obsession with China means you're "one of those" who think we can look east for all our answers, and believe this with near religious fervor. Do you HONESTLY believe that "Chinese herbs" have a better track record than Western medicine... REALLY?!

Vitamins--PURE NATURAL VITAMNS (that means they're good, right?)--can at most cause a "tummyache" you claim. Let's see... this is all from a VERY quick google.

Overdoses of...
Vitamin A -- "can lead to liver damage, hair loss, blurred vision and headaches."
Vitamin B3 (niacin) -- "Niacin can have life-threatening acute toxic reactions" (wikipedia)
Vitamin D -- "can cause the buildup of calcium deposits that can interfere with the functioning of muscles, including heart tissue"

Ok, so you admitted diarrhea, nausea, upset stomach etc as vitamin sideeffects, from the list above we can add liver damage, and in some cases death. Well dang, what a SHOCK, those are almost the exact possible side effects you listed as coming from BIG SCARY PHARMA!!!

How ludicrous can you get. Really, I would think slashdotters should be able to be a little more questioning of things...

Incidentally... tobacco.. natural, bad DRUG. Marijuana? Natural drug. Alcohol? Natural drug. I think it's safe to say that natural things can have bad side effects, and can be called "drugs," friend..

You do realize that the USA is a really, really big place, right? There are literally thousands of chocolate makers.

Living here, indeed I do, and I realize I wasn't exactly verbose, but I was referring to commodity chocolate, the kind of stuff you might find at a gas station. I know you can find incredible chocolate at specialty stores and the like.

However, if we're just talking about off-the-shelf style candy, I'll take the European stuff any day. For some reason most Americans seem just fine with the brown wax misleadingly known as "chocolate", but anyone who has tried candy from abroad knows what we're missing out on.

Lindt 70% bars aren't that hard to find here, too. But it seems like a pretty common US phenomenon is to brag about how difficult or exclusive a certain product is (it could be costly, or just difficult to acquire). There will always be tradeoffs between brands and price points (in every country not just the US), but here it seems the goal is apparent exclusivity (with less regard to the actual quality of the product).

My personal theory on this and more is, that if you have to mention something you're probably trying too hard to get people to notice it.

The multi-billion dollar "Big Pharmaceutical corporations" are evil, lying and care for nothing but profit, whereas the multi-billion dollar "alternative medicines" industry is love, truth and fluffy bunnies?

How about Matthias Rath? He has convinced many in the South African government that AIDS is not caused by HIV, AIDS should be treated by vitamin supplements (which he just happens to sell) and antiretroviral medicines are a worse than useless, and advocating their use is genocide. [iol.co.za]

AIDS is killing 900 people per day in South Africa. A sizable fraction of those deaths can be laid directly at the door of "alternative medicine" in general, and the South African government and Rath in particular.

Big Pharma need someone to stand over them with a big stick to try to keep them honest. So do alternative medicine peddlers. The difference is that, occasionally, the big stick gets used on Big Pharma, but the snake-oil salesmen opperate with impunity in Alternative Medicine, playing Russian Roulette with other people's lives for their own profit.

Don't ban the 'remedies' - but do ban the lies and unsupported wishful-thinking published about them.

And everytime someone puts on lipstick they're smearing themselves with fish scales, and virtually all foods comtain large amounds of naturally processed feces... I get that America has low standards for chocolate, but saying something is bad simply because it comes from an "icky" animal is just childish.

Where I am I have organic fair trade chocolate. ITS REAL CHOCOLATE; not American FAKE modified foods. NO wonder Americans are 1) stupid, 2) fat and 3) stupid.

If you think Ghirardelli or Godiva's is good chocolate...its not.

But I can't really blame most Americans for not knowing any better.

Soooo many problems with your post. 1. Those "natural remedies" did not evolve with us or for us -- they evolved for their own survival. They just happen to have chemicals in them which affect human physiology in some way. 2. Side effects? St. John's Wort + certain cheese + certain red wines = death. All 3 at usual dosing. Enjoy. 3. This freedom you want requires accurate information about efficacy and side effects, but your post advocates sticking our head in the sand and assuming "nature" always has OUR interests in mind. All natural remedies are chemicals, just like drugs. They are drugs, they just have been discovered in nature rather than synthesized. If you believe in science and not voodoo, you'd want them to be tested for efficacy. Herbal remedy producers (corporations, just not as big as Big Pharma) don't want testing because then the vast majority of them will be shown to be ineffective. All drugs, and remedies, have benefits and risk. Some are quite obvious, but most benefit/risk calculations really require a certain level of expertise, which the American public simply does not have. Thus, the snake oil people can sell you unregulated dreck and you feel you're in control. Meanwhile, you waste money.

The Chinese, and others, have been using herbs since recorded history. Their track record is substantially better than today's drugs.

Really? I was under the impression that today's life spans are remarkably longer and medicine substantially more effective than not only anything in recorded history, but definitely more than so-called "natural" medicine you see nowadays.

What are the warnings on herbs and vitamins? None!

That's because the FDA doesn't regulate herbs and vitamins, which is where the requirement for listing adverse side effects comes from. If all of a sudden the FDA stopped regulating pharmaceutical drugs, would you somehow think they were better because of a lack of warnings? Of course not.

Even though you're throwing evolution around in your argument, you obviously don't understand a goddamn thing about science. We are not "f'ing" with mother nature. We are fixing the system. Our evolution is not perfect. There is no such thing as "Mother Nature". You are a complete fucking idiot. Herbal healing is just another long line of ideas that claim that science is going too far and we need to resort to the traditional ways of thinking, be it Christian Science, acupuncture, or any number of other bullshit ideologies.

The only way to know the truth of how drugs affect our bodies is through science. I know that there is scientific evidence for specific herbs' uses in medicine, and that's fine. Herbs certainly have valid uses. But to claim (as you seem to be doing) that traditional herbal medicine is superior to modern medicine simply because of some adverse side effects and lobbying power by pharmaceutical companies is to ignore nearly the entire body of scientific study on medicine! You can't cherry-pick which scientific ideas you want to accept, simply because some conflict with your pre-conceived view of the world.

If you're going to try and be conservative at least extend the effort to remove any and all references to scientific ideas from your post. That's what the "smart" conservatives do. I wish I could find language to explain the contempt I feel for your ideas. No matter how venomous my words may seem they will not project the absolute hatred I have for whoever has convinced you that this bullshit is anything remotely resembling the truth.

It has an ingredient called cochineal extract. Sounds kinda exotic like vanilla extract. FDA proposed labeling standard requiring manufacturers to say "cochineal extract (insect derived)" but food manufacturers argued that would turn off consumers so they deleted the insect derived portion.

Unless and until you argue that "vanilla extract" needs to be changed to "vanilla bean extract (plant derived)", and "chicken" needs to appear on packaging as "chicken (animal derived)", you're out of luck. "Cochineal extract" is a specific term, describing a product that is always insect derived. Adding the stuff in brackets is just redundant.

Just remember the next time you rinse with Listerine Citrus Burst that you're swishing crushed dead pregnant beetles in your mouth.

Meh. Substitute FD&C Red #40 and you'll be telling me that you're appalled because I'm swishing with an artificial chemical. Whatever. At least in the Listerine I know it's sterile.

proposed labeling standard requiring manufacturers to say "cochineal extract (insect derived)" but food manufacturers argued that would turn off consumers so they deleted the insect derived portion.

We eat shrimp, lobsters, and crabs all the time. Insects belong to the same family of animals (arthropods). Thus I don't quite get the insectaphobia. I think it is perhaps the association of insects with dung and scavengry that turns us off.
     

I think the point was that you wouldn't be able to get your glorious bull penis if they had their way.. why should they be able to regulate your recommended daily allowance of bull penis? =)

Yes, cochineal comes from beetles, the same place it has come from and been safely consumed by humans for centuries. Would you prefer to drink some synthetic petrochemical dye with possibly some unknown properties than something that has come from a harmless animal? People are always going to dye food and Cochineal extract is non-toxic, non-carcinogenic and causes extremely few allergies, why not use the stuff?

A little vegetable oil is not going to make a big difference. Over the last decade or two they have snuck palm oil in, and sometimes even wax, and most consumers didn't notice. Most of you won't notice the vegtable oil either, and those of us who do already read the labels.

I'm Belgian. Belgium has great chocolate. When I visited NYC this was something that I noticed a lot. The chocolate sold in stores there was awful. Even the absolute best tasting brand (according to the US friend I was staying with) tasted worse than average belgian chocolate.

I guess the US chocolate manufacturers went for profit at the expense of quality.

There have been lots of double-blind studies of herbals; you need to expand your reading.

The reason they aren't regulated as drugs is historical and political. Many were "grandfathered" in as GRAS when early laws such as the Pure Food and Drug Act were passed. When the FDA attempts to regulate them, the manufacturers can point to the law and scream to their congressmen that the FDA is breaking the law -- which it is.

Of course, not all herbals work as claimed. There is no shortage of crooks pushing bogus cures or impure formulae, and they're going to congregate where legal oversight is the weakest.

Some examples of herbs that work are too obvious to be successfully denied. Willow bark contains salicylates, providing the same mechanism for pain relief that the chemically related aspirin provides. Peppermint relieves indigestion. Foxglove provides digitalis, a heart medicine.

Ummm... you did not just say Anchor Steam. If I were trying to convince someone that American Breweries can compete with Europe, Anchor Steam and Anchor Liberty would be my last choices. As in I wouldn't bother. Sierra Nevada, while not nearly as bad, is another "micro-brew" that is all rep and no delivery. Unfortunately, most American breweries try to solve the "lack of flavor" problem by saying, "Hey, lets just throw a bunch more hops in it!". Which makes everything taste like a poorly brewed IPA. Now, if you want to buy American, there are choices. Ommegang makes a nice Belgian style "Abbey-Ale". Speaking of chocolate, Brooklyn makes a "Black Chocolate Stout" which is rich and tasty. Those are truly good beers.

Reading over what I just wrote I realize that I come off a bit harsh. But Anchor Steam Ale. Argh. Still gets me.

It can't be compared to such heavy hitters from across the sea as Aventinus Weizenbock, Thames Welsh Bitter, Coniston's Bluebird Bitter, Fuller's Porter, Paulaner Salvator Dopplebock, Spaten Optimator, Affligem Tripel, Caffrey's (sadly gone?), Tetley's, Duvel, Corsendonk, Franziskaner Hefe Weiss, Beamish, etc., etc..

We're getting better, though. I hear Saranac now has a Double Bock.

> What you don't seem to realize is you can only have food invented once...and then built on.
>
> Anything I listed there might have been of influence from elsewhere, but it has a different spin.
> If that makes it "bad" in your mind, then fine. Pizza, as we know it, is based on an italian dish,
> it's still American. You can say we didn't invent the concept of dough baked with toppings, but neither did the
> italians.

Indeed, as my (Chinese) wife keeps reminding me :)

I'm not sure of the validity of your claim though - how far back do you go? Can you really 'invent' something like food? Like I said, how different does it need to be before it becomes original?

I haven't noticed any difference between American Apple Pie and that I know from England. Predictably, it's somewhat more sugary, and a little different 'style' on the top, but it's too simple to be very different. Similarly with pizza - how different can it be?

"Would you prefer to drink some synthetic petrochemical dye with possibly some unknown properties than something that has come from a harmless animal?"

Possibly some unknown properties???? Name me something that doesn't 'possibly' have unknown properties!!! Including lying in bed with the windows closed!!

Of course, if they're unknown, they're just as likely to be beneficial as damaging. So perhaps this synthetic petrochemical dye will double the size of your dick, or give you undreamed-of super crime-fighting powers? You never know with "possibly unknown properties (TM)"!!

Long live the precautionary principle!

Unfortunatly, that peanut butter has been changed too. Peanut oil is expensive, so it is removed from peanut butter and replaced with soy/corn/canola/motor oil (oops motor oil is too expensive.)

so try and replace peanut butter with Peanut-Vegetable Margarine and then try to stomach it..double points if both use olestra.

Storm

I have never been a chocolate fan, even as a child. This all changed when I moved to Belgium. The situation here is... weird to say the least. The chocolate makers are millionnaires, they're young, they're VIPs, you see them in glossy people mags. Oh, and they make chocolate that is beyond description. Quality is so high that discussing it is meaningless. The big chocolate makers are waging a fierce war that is being fought via packaging, service, and creativity (yes the consumer wins here).

I've had american cadbureys before, and hersheys, and lindt, and UK cadbureys and rowntree products, and their AUS counterparts, hell I've even had a wide selection of swiss chocolates (highly recommended); but NEVER have I seen the kind of product that is sold in the high-class chocolate boutiques here in Belgium.

For those of you who are interested and live in the NYC area, I'd recommend looking for a Pierre Marcolini boutique that recently opened there.

You misunderstand the modern production and marketing chain. If it can sit on a shelf, it can sit on a ship. If it can sit on a ship, it can be made in a foreign country with a much poorer standard off living at a greatly reduced cost. If it can sit on a shelf, it can be batch processed at the time when the main ingredients are at there cheapest, and the line can either be shut down or used for higher profit goods when the commodity prices are not in its favor. See the issue with food, is we can only consume so much of it. The same amount of food is going to be eaten within a certian margin of error daily by a person. You can replace in a short amount of time with quickly perishalbe products like meat and milk, no non perishables like canned goods. In the end, the same amount of food will be consumed, and the non-perishables are less risky to the seller.

If that was true, do you really think the industry would be lobbying to loosen the rules? If the name is not chocolate then it is perceived as a different product, with consequentially fewer buyers. Language has meaning, measurable in dollars.

It IS a different product. It should be labeled as such. As other posters have mentioned, would you buy something labeled as beef if you knew it was actually mostly soy? Businesses need to be kept in check to, god forbid, PROTECT THE CONSUMER'S INTERESTS.

They might not be able to get away with calling Sunny Delight itself "fruit juice" in the UK (nor, I suspect from your phrasing, in the US either), but that didn't stop countless stupid parents buying it in the deluded belief that it was anyway, probably because it was sold in the chilled section.

There was a huge "scandal" about it when Sunny Delight was popular here in the late 1990s and all of a sudden it was all over the papers when someone realised "OMG!!!! IT'S NOT REAL JUICE, IT'S JUST SQUASH!!!!11111". Like, you don't say.

(Then there was even more scandal when there were reports of kids turning yellow through drinking the stuff. I know it's crap, but how much of the damn stuff were these parents feeding their kids?)

I hate all those crappy "juice drinks" that come in fruit-juice like packaging, but contain (at best) 25-50% fruit juice, with the rest made up from citric acid, sugar and God-knows-what. For what it is, it's fine, but I'm willing to bet that they're designed to fool countless morons into thinking they're fruit juice (and that they succeed).

Punitive fines for misrepresentation and false selling are a pretty effective remedy against commercial enterprises that peddle lies and unsupported wishful thinking.

Here in the US, Minute Maid Light Lemonade, Mango Tropical and Raspberry Passion "juices" all contain 3% fruit juice. In some other countries, you're not allowed to call it juice unless it's 100% juice, and not allowed to put the name of the fruit first unless it's the main ingredient.
One thing the US totally lacks is consumer protection.

Chocolate here is waxy and a far cry from what Europeans think of as chocolate to begin with. Even the horrible Cadbury chocolates are miles from the wax tablets that Hershey and other US companies foist on US consumers. And even if you try to buy a European brand, it's most likely remade to an American recipe, presumably to save money because Americans can't tell the difference anyhow. US produced Godiva, for example, is (like almost all US chocolate) mostly made with corn syrup instead of sugar.
It's quite telling that Americans consider "Lindt" a gourmet brand, when it's one of the worst commercial produced chocolates in Europe.

Hey one reasonable response out of 3. Not bad by /. standards.

"And some of them, very few, do not add sulfites after fermentation to preserve their wines. They are hoping that very careful vinification will protect their wine from bacterial contamination, and the proper preservative balance of alcohol, acidity and tannin will allow their wine to last a few years without oxidizing; they believe the lack of sulfites gives their wines a freshness and purity that is missing from other wines. (Note that this approach is pretty much only possible with dry red wines--dry so that ambient yeasts would not cause refermentation, and red because tannin is needed to stave off oxidation.)....."

was exactly what I was talking about. A friend of mine was fired from a vineyard for exposing exactly this practice. Sulfites are primarily added to lesser wines. So, though you are far more informed than I am on this topic, my original point seems to be corroborated by the facts, even as you present them. A truly good wine would not add them because it would be made in a clean environment avoiding bacteria.

As for white wine: Who actually drinks that noxious crap?

Heart disease, cancer, and obesity are on the rise, or already at all time highs. Last I checked those were three of the main killers in this country.

For those other critics who wanted some numbers:

American Heart Association estimates for the year 2004 that 79,400,000 Americans have one or more forms of cardiovascular disease (CVD). So 80 million of 300 million of us have heart disease. That's about a quarter of us, or one in four.

From a Harvard study: Obesity is one of the leading causes of morbidity and mortality, causing some 2.6 million deaths worldwide each year.....In 2002, the corrected prevalence of obesity in the U.S. population was 28.7% for adult men and 34.5% for adult women, more than 50% higher than previously estimated. So one in three of us is obese and will die sooner (probably) as a result of that.

From the Cancer cure foundation: Over much of the 1990s, deaths from cancer declined slightly in the US, but the number of Americans diagnosed with certain cancers--including breast, skin and liver cancer--inched up. So less people are DYING of cancer, but more people are being diagnosed with it, and probably living shorter life spans.

From a report issued by the Center for Disease Control: Cancer is the second leading cause of death among Americans. One of every four deaths in the US is due to cancer. In 2006, about 1.4 million Americans will receive a new diagnosis of invasive cancer, and 564,830 Americans will die of this disease. These estimates do not include the more than 1 million cases of .... skin cancers expected to be diagnosed this year.

So, yeah, I think public health has diminished and PEOPLE ARE DYING because the FDA is not protecting them from carcinogens in the food, and other toxins that lead to heart disease.

And if you see it any other way, I'm sorry, but you are STILL a complete and utter moron with no knowledge about the topic.

It's funny, because in the US even chocolate that SHOULD be good (ie: made in Belgium) tastes like crap. I'm pretty sure that all manufacturers cut corners if the product is destined for the good ol' US of A.

When it comes to chocolate it really does suck to be an American :(

The biggest problem is that it has been a problem for so long that the majority of us don't know any better.

Well, a) this is all relative, and b) there is certainly chocolate in America that will measure up to any standard in the world. Here [mrchocolate.com] is one example.

I've been to Europe, and quite frankly, the stuff you get in grocery stores there is no better than Hershey's. If you want to compare high end chocolate, then you've gotta compare apples to apples - you can't compare boutique chocolate in Europe to mass produced chocolate in the US. We've got boutique chocolate just as good as Europe, and they've got mass produced chocolate just as bad as us.

And a lot of countries have it worse, even in mass produced chocolate. Japan has awful chocolate, for one example. It's waxy and nearly tasteless - it's like that really cheap stuff they put in chocolate easter bunnies here. This is almost universal there; it's not a particular brand. It's just what people are used to. My wife (who is Japanese) never liked chocolate before she moved to the United States - now she can't get enough of it, even if it's just Hershey's, but especially if it's something like Jacques Torres.

So you don't know how good we've got it.

Here in the US, Minute Maid Light Lemonade, Mango Tropical and Raspberry Passion "juices" all contain 3% fruit juice. In some other countries, you're not allowed to call it juice unless it's 100% juice

Er.. not in the US either. That's why they're called "drinks" on the label. If they're not, they're breaking the law.

One thing the US totally lacks is consumer protection.

Yes... it's a shame there's not some Federal department called, let's say, the Food and Drug Administration. Or maybe a few non-profit consumer orgs, like maybe a Consumer Reports of some kind. RTFA