Happy Valentine’s Day to all of my readers!
In prep for this holiday, I invested $9 in a 70-gram bar of Mast Brothers “milk chocolate.” I assembled a panel of three tasters, all of whom had grown up in the Soviet Union. The unanimous conclusion was that the Mast Brothers product was greatly inferior to anything produced during the Soviet era (a 100-gram bar sold for about 1 ruble, slightly more than $1 at official exchange rates). A glaring fault of the Mast Brothers chocolate was its tendency to separate in one’s mouth into component pieces, e.g., cocoa butter.
I then tossed some industrial Callebaut out (sadly I did not get the full 11 lb. slab, available for about $5/lb.). This was universally praised as far superior to the Mast Brothers product.
Separately, I’m wondering if this explains our inability to control illegal immigration. Whatever people might say about the Soviets, there seems to be no dispute that they were able to control their borders. Despite the Soviets managing a vastly larger territory than the U.S., few people got in or out without authorization. Perhaps, despite our fancier uniforms, computers, helicopters, etc., we are as bad at border patrol as we are at making chocolate?
Readers: What chocolate-related items have you purchased for Valentine’s Day?
Related:
We don’t control our borders as well as the Soviets because we don’t want to control our borders as well as the Soviets. I think that’s a good thing; we derive a lot of economic benefit from our relatively (compared to the USSR) open borders.
Who would have wanted into the Soviet Union? That seems to be akin to erecting a fence up to protect a swamp full of reptiles.
I’m trying to imagine border crashes of Cold War era Russia…
I’ll bite. Soviets didn’t just control the border, they controlled people before they were able to get anywhere closer to the border. Which was easier in the Solviet Union because they had:
1. People trying to get out, not get in.
2. Control over people’s lives before they try to get out.
3. A mandatory registration system and an ability to detain the people without required documents.
4. A desire to detain or shoot those who break those rules, including ‘just’ breaking the registration rules.
This link in Russian ( https://www.proza.ru/2012/11/06/1685 ), for example, explains how someone was required to wait for two weeks while the application to visit an island close to the border was considered.
So, using Soviet experience here would mean that people couldn’t come within 200 miles of the US-Maxican border neither from the north, nor from the south without passing a two-week background check and then being stopped several times by the police. Those who break one of the rules would be disappeared in the jail or, if fleeing, shot on sight.
– Do you think this would be technically infeasible?
– Does that sound like a program that could win support?
BTW, the black market exchange rate for dollars to rubles in the late Soviet period was 5 or 6 times as much as the official rate (i.e. a ruble was really worth more like 20 cents). Of course now one dollar will get you almost 80 rubles.
In my memory, Soviet chocolate was tooth achingly sweet, I assume because domestic beet sugar was much cheaper than imported cocoa beans.
Most snooty chocolate people don’t consider milk chocolate to be serious chocolate at all, although I am fond of the stuff (not including Hershey’s which tastes like spoiled milk).
Well… Apart from the fact the objective was to keep people in and not out, the answer lies in three words:”Shoot to kill”, which was essentially the rule of engagement for border guards on the iron curtain.
I hope we can agree that is simply not acceptable on the Mexican US border.
Is entirely a matter of a lack of will of the nation, nothing technical or related to resources.
>Neal
Considering how my guess is that most trading that doesn’t go through the official channels is probably of illicit materials such as banned guns and drugs, how do open borders contribute to the general welfare?
The massive legal flow people and goods over our borders benefits the economy through trade, tourism, and labor market flexibility. It would not be possible to achieve soviet level border control without stifling legal trans-border activity.
Our labor markets are currently built around and depend on relatively porous borders enabling people from other countries to help fill our demand for labor (and then going home when the demand dries up).
Americans still expect to be able to go about their lives relatively (compared to the USSR) free from interference from and contact with the government. This means that it is easier for anyone in the country illegally to do the same.
Security in all spheres involves trade-offs. We don’t have Soviet style border security because we choose to make different trade-offs.
I grew up behind the Iron Curtain, in Romania. As a child I traveled to the Soviet Union. Unfortunately I like sweets very much so I remember very well the taste of the chocolate from USSR. It was bad. As in unrefined (like pretty much everything else that was available in the Soviet Union), obviously made using low grade ingredients and recipes. The industrial made chocolate from Romania was also pretty bad, with some exceptions. One Communist chocolate that was actually decent was imported from China. My point of reference at the time were the Swiss and German chocolate bars that were very rarely obtained by my family.
PS: In case anybody’s curious, a few other details re. the sweets from that time and place:
– hard candy imported from Cuba – fairly decent
– chewing gum imported from North Korea – pretty bad
– dipped peanuts imported from Vietnam – bad tasting and so hard they were dangerous for the teeth
Something that most Americans don’t know is that there was no free travel even INSIDE the East Bloc (especially between the Soviet Union and the rest of the bloc) and that living standards generally increased as you went west, with the result that the Soviet consumer goods were usually worse quality/availability than those available in Bloc members (with some exceptions – for example the Soviets carted off the E. German steel industry to Russia after the war so E. German cars were made of compressed sawdust (Trabant)).
The stuff that was closest to Western norms was usually made in factories that the Soviets would buy from Western capitalists on a turnkey basis, e.g. the Lada (AvtoVAZ) factory that the Russians bought from Fiat. Or if they didn’t feel like paying the license fees, they would just steal the IP of a Western product, especially if it was defense related. Whatever the factory produced would be more or less equivalent to a Western product when they built the factory but the Soviets would then keep making the same product long after the Western market had moved on. So the 1970 Lada was a license built copy of a 1966 Fiat 124 and was more or less up to date for its time, but by 2005, when they finally stopped making it, it was pretty far behind Western cars.
Sometimes being old fashioned had its advantages – the Russians kept making vacuum tubes long after the West switched to silicon, so Western hifi enthusiasts switched to Russian tubes. The Chinese kept making mechanical watches after the West switched to quartz and even bought some of the “obsolete” production lines from the Swiss, and now these are back in fashion again.
Phil, I’m surprised that you’d conduct such a visual-/ origin-bias-inviting (if not downright “-corrupting”) taste test of chocolate, and then ask us to opine on what could but be highly suspect results.
It goes without saying that, were such a test to provide any valid guidance as to perceived quality etc of the compared products, the like-for-like bars would have to be unwrapped, pressed into like shapes, anonymized as to their origin, and served in several consecutive helpings in random order. The results then tallied and compared for consistency… you know the drill. Otherwise what you’re testing is your panel’s ability to withstand confirmation bias. In this case: if they were brought up on, and survived bad Russian chocolate, their taste buds have been primed to recognize its particular mix of viscosity, smell, sweetness and additives etc as “golden moments of youth.”
During my sole visit to Odessa in the Soviet Union, I must’ve eaten chocolate aplenty, but (unlike other things) have no adverse recollections of that. But then I bought stuff mainly in hotel etc shops for foreigners; I was under the impression that their processed export sweet foodstuffs were more or less of European choco (though possibly not Swiss) quality, much due to the imported fine sugar cane from Cuba and delicate cocoa from Soviet-friendly Angola etc., both freighted all the way to ports in the Black Sea (it’s not like these countries had much other stuff to repay the Russians for their foreign aid). Where Soviet products really sucked was in their shoddy packaging and beneath contempt baksheesh-dependent delivery methods, but that’s another story.
Angola is not a significant producer of cacao. I don’t know where the Soviets got their cacao but Angola could not have been a major source. The Russians did take a large amount of Cuban sugar but they didn’t really need it – they produced plenty of beet sugar of their own.
Just No. I haven’t tried Mast as far as I know, but I hear it’s too artisanal for it’s own good (and Callebaut is plenty good).
But I also grew up in Soviet Union, in Moscow – no less which was better supplied with food than other parts of the country. There was some time when some chocolate was pretty good – not excellent but fine. Dairy/Ice cream was excellent and I loved chocolate covered ice cream, but for years in 80’s and early 90’s before I left, the chocolate changed into some sort of dark soy paste that had very little resemblance to chocolate. Currently when I shop in russian stores in NY, there are plenty of chocolate treats that are good including chocolate covered ice cream, chocolate bars and candy, but a lot of those are made in Brooklyn, Canada or Ukraine or Baltic countries. The Russian “bars” now are mostly good (try aerated chocolate bars): http://www.russiantable.com/store/depts.asp?dept_id=14
But lots of boxed chocolate sets made in Russia are still made with “natural-identical” ingredients and flavors, as you might imagine it tastes like processed cardboard.