The Divine Experience of Eating Chocolate 

Who needs aspirin when you can have a Hershey’s Bar? Whether you’re dealing with physical discomfort or emotional stress, chocolate is the ultimate remedy. Even if it doesn’t heal you completely, it will undoubtedly make you feel better. 

When we explore what goes into a chocolate bar, we uncover the profound kindness Hashem bestows upon us with every bite.  

Chocolate is made from cocoa beans, sugar, and milk. Cocoa beans come from the cacao tree, native to South America. Inside each cacao pod are about 40 beans. Each tree produces around 150 cacao pods or 6,000 cocoa beans. This is the ingredient that makes something chocolate. 

How do these fruits grow? Through sunlight, water, and soil.  

These are daily gifts from our Creator. 

We do not possess the technology to synthesize enough light to enable all the cacao trees to produce enough pods for the 6 million tons of chocolate we eat each year.  Only the sun, created and sustained by Hashem, provides the necessary light for these trees to flourish. Combine that with the rain from the heavens and the soil from the earth – and every year, billions of these trees, each produce 6,000 cocoa beans. 

How God Turns Bitterness into Sweetness 

Did you know that the fruit that produces chocolate is one of the most bitter fruits on earth? While the cocoa bean forms the base of chocolate, it’s the addition of sugar that transforms it into something sweet. 

But where do those sweet white sugar flakes come from?  They come from a surprising source: Grass. 

Sugar cane, a type of grass, starts from small seeds planted in the earth. In just ten months, these seeds grow into huge stalks, as tall as an average person. The stems of these stalks, which are as thick as a baseball bat, are harvested, processed, and transformed into sugar. 

Once the sugar cane is harvested, the field is empty with no stalks remaining. Each year, the world starts out with an empty field. Every year, God causes trillions of seeds to grow from the size of tiny pebbles into towering stalks. 

Hashem’s annual miracle turns chocolate from bitter to sweet, showcasing the incredible natural process behind one of our favorite confections. 

Divine Alchemy: Turning Grass into Milk 

Milk comes from a cow. But how does the cow produce milk?

Cows eat grass and hay, and from these nutrients, their bodies produce milk. But where do grass and hay come from? They come from sunlight, water, and soil.  

Grass grows from these God-given elements. A single wheat seed is planted in the earth, and a few months later, a tall stalk emerges, about half the height of a person. A tenth of the stalk contains the wheat seeds used for flour, while the rest is bundled into hay for cows to eat, producing milk in the process. 

The ability of cows to transform food into milk is a daily miracle.  

Imagine if you had never lived on earth and suddenly arrived, discovering trees, sugar cane, and milk for the first time — wouldn’t you think these were magical? 

Wonders in Every Bite 

A simple piece of an Elite Chocolate bar contains countless miracles that make it such a treat. 

• God maintains His sun at a perfect distance from Earth-149,600,000 kilometers away- providing the ideal conditions for seeds to grow without freezing or burning. 
• Hashem showers the right amount of rain so that cocoa trees, sugar cane plants, grass, and wheat stalks can thrive without dehydrating or drowning. 
• The plants themselves are engineering marvels. As the wheat plant grows, multiple long blades of grass serve as water carriers to the stem, which is shaped like a cylinder to maximize water intake.  
• Seeds grow in two directions: downwards to absorb more nutrients from the soil and upwards to blossom into fruit, grass, and grain. 
• HaKadosh Baruch Hu gives us taste buds that allow us to savor the experience of eating chocolate. 
   

By reflecting on the Divine processes that make it possible to enjoy a piece of chocolate, the blessing gets sweeter than the snack itself!

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David Ben Horin lives in Afula with his family, millions of sunflowers, and Matilda, our local camel. David‘s Israeli startup, 300 Marketing Solutions, is a lean marketing agency for startups and small businesses that creates and promotes SEO-optimized ROI-driven to the right audience on LinkedIn to make your business the star of the show.