With respect to the NoKA Chocolate Article I pinged my friend Rob The Foodie with the URL of the former, and he responded in a manner too cute for words:

Wow. Great article… and it appears you’ve drawn in the actual perps to your comments 🙂

The whole “snakeoil” / “security by obscurity” thing comes to mind: Find something that most people don’t know a whole lot about (single-origin chocolate, security), build up a marketing mythology system, hide your sources, attempt to sell at huge profit.

Incidentally, apparently Abby will be immune to this sort of thing (See attached photo – that’s a tablet of single-origin dark chocolate in her right hand) 🙂

This afternoon I asked him permission to post the picture, and we were chatting about chocolate on IM, and he continued:-

BTW, we were drinking an $8 cup of hot chocolate while taking that pic 🙂

Very good, but not as good as from the city bakery ( http://nymag.com/listings/restaurant/city_bakery/ )

Urk: See http://nymag.com/nymetro/shopping/columns/testdrive/n_9696/