Many of us remember the first time we got a large chocolate rabbit in our Easter baskets and were disappointed to find it was only a hollow shell of chocolate. Are candy companies trying to teach us a lesson in disillusionment and distrust?
Well, that answers that, but you'll find the complete history of the chocolate Easter bunny, no matter how hollow, at Smithsonian's Food & Think blog. Link
(Image credit: Flickr user Kerstin Wellekötter)
Of course not. The answer is simple, according to one chocolate maker: hollow bunnies are easier to eat.
“If you had a larger-size bunny and it was solid chocolate, it would be like a brick; you’d be breaking teeth,” says Mark Schlott, vice-president of operations at R.M. Palmer in Reading, Pennsylvania, one of the first and largest manufacturers of hollow chocolate bunnies.
And, of course, hollow is usually cheaper to make, though Schlott phrases it more delicately: “Hollow has a greater perceived value. It creates a much greater chocolate footprint than solid.”
Well, that answers that, but you'll find the complete history of the chocolate Easter bunny, no matter how hollow, at Smithsonian's Food & Think blog. Link
(Image credit: Flickr user Kerstin Wellekötter)
Comments (19)
never eaten a chocolate bar mark?
what BS, just say "cause its cheaper to manufacture/ship" and be honest.
Haha, "greater perceived value"; perceived value, not actual value.
On another note, women cannot be color-blind and men cannot have super-color vision like some women. Whereas men will be color blind because they lack a third cone responding to the red range, women can have a fourth cone that bisects the red range and gives a richer spectrum of colors. Then there is achromatopsia which is the inability to see color and a really bad name for a baby girl.
Perhaps some of the difference is in the color-opponency cells in the occipital cortex and perhaps the associating of different colors. A part of me suspects women are trained by the culture to recognize a greater range of color names and men are basically not expected to. Wine-tasters also have a wider range of names for flavors, using terms like "earthy" that non-wine-tasters by and large don't use. I doubt the wide range of color names employed by women are innate. But like the wine-tasters, they learn to discriminate.
Even given all that, which is done to be fair, I think there might actually be some innate predilection, but devising a conclusive experiment for that is problematic.
@ Ryan S, women can also have colour blindness but it is quite uncommon. Colour blindness is carried on the X chromosome. If males inherit an X chromosome with the mutation it will be displayed in the phenotype. If women inherit 1, she will be a carrier, however if she inherits the mutation from both X chromosomes, it will be displayed in the phenotype.
Also, you have a point about gender differences in the vocabulary of colour:
"Stecklers' study in 1990 concluded that women's ability of naming colors is far more precise than men's and also they have a broader vocabulary for color names such as ecru, aquamarine, lavender, and mauve."
http://www.colormatters.com/news_spring_07/focus.html
You are right, my mistake, color-blindness is a recessive allele on the X chromosome