Carla Martin

but also because of that sense of well-being, the fact that it is something that we tend to use in a social setting as a gift or as a comfort food, as something related to impulse.

And one thing that I find especially fascinating about it is for 52 weeks out of the year,

we see a general trend where in 51 weeks, women are the primary buyers of chocolate.

Men and women consume chocolate more or less equally.

There is one week per year, however, when men become the primary buyers in the United States, and that is the week leading into Valentine's Day.

There are a few different factors that played a role in that happening.

One was very clever marketing by chocolate companies.

So early on during the Victorian era, so mid to late 1800s, chocolate companies were creating things like heart-shaped boxes into which they would place those delightful chocolate candies and bonbons that many of us associate with Valentine's Day today.

That could be accompanied by very elaborate Valentine's Day cards.

that if you look back at the Victorian era, you see that they contained lace, all different kinds of gilded papers.

They were a gift that you could give to someone that was impressive and surprising.

The National Confectioners Association here in the United States, an organization that brought together some of the biggest chocolate producers, also began to

to do collective marketing efforts around key holidays like Halloween, Valentine's Day, Christmas, Easter, to promote chocolate to U.S.

consumers.

And so over time, we came to indelibly associate chocolate with romance in an American context.

There are certainly physical and psychological reasons that we have come to associate chocolate with romance.

One is the melting point of cocoa butter.

That's the fat that cocoa naturally contains.

When we put chocolate on our tongue, it melts at about 92 degrees Fahrenheit, which is just below the temperature of our own bodies.

And so you have that experience that most of us know is that silky smooth texture, that delightful melting, right?