prompt: might, title: you get used to it in misc. flash fiction

If you’ve ever seen someone who isn’t American try our chocolate for the first time, you might be surprised to find they say it tastes like puke and truth is that they’re right. The standard formulation of American grocery-store impulse-grab right next to the tabloid with the headline about Megan Markle’s secret love child with the Moth Man milk-chocolate bars do taste a little bit like vom. Hint of vom, touch of vom, barest whiff of aged regurgitation. And while it didn’t start out that way on purpose, it is no longer accidental.

Though there’s now a theme park in his name and a legend about how often he went tits up in bankruptcy before Horatio Alger millions, the fact is, even when Milton Hershey finally made good, he still screwed up. Milton didn’t train in chocolate, after all, he started out in caramel, so when he got into bars, he had no idea how to make it shelf-stable for hot American summer. The solution he came up with worked, eventually, but the chemicals in the stabilized milk developed traces of butyric acid in their journeys. Butyric’s what makes rancid butter smell so foul and the manure outside veal farms so singularly like some sickly-sweet form of thirty-years decomposed flesh. Still, it was the cheapest chocolate available even for working people so Americans being Americans, we just got used to it. Became so inured we no longer even noticed, eventually even missing that acridity when absent.

Dairy processing’s far better understood these days, of course, and chocolate can hang out next to Gramma’s National Enquirer without tasting faintly of expectorated parmesan if desired but we now expect that part of the flavor profile so now they add it back. Dump it into the factories of southern Pennsylvania where all the tourists go to see how those treats are made after getting bored with Gettysburg. Europeans have no idea how the hell we can eat chocolate that tastes like retch but that’s just it, it was a mistake but a mistake we could afford, so we all just went with it. We adapted until we mistook that rot for normal, then wore it as some point of jingoistic pride in every ration, right next to the unfiltered cigarettes and the crude sketch of Minnie Mouse’s breasts.

This is our American curse. Subject us to any horror, we get used to it. We’ll survive. But worse we’ll sublimate it until we think it’s actually the best. Celebrate our lack of universal health care as if it’s somehow freedom. Remove our masks at Christmas mass and cough congratulations for rugged individualism that two weeks later kill off a whole bridge club’s worth of grammas. Dole out little fun-sized bars kissed with the slightest whisper of vomit Halloween because we cannot imagine somewhere else might’ve figured better. Milton’s still a hero anyway, for having gotten rich. In America, it makes me sick to my stomach to admit, that’s all that seems to matter.

Last updated January 06, 2021