Talk:Dark chocolate

Plain chocolate

Hi Mucketymuck, I am not opposed to having plain chocolate somewhere in the lead, but I would much prefer it weren't in the first sentence. One reason is because I have a strong preference for the lead sentence being as tight as possible, which you may not share, but the other is that according to the crude metric of the Google Books Ngram Viewer, "dark chocolate" is about 60x more frequent than "plain chocolate", and "plain chocolate" is used at around the same frequency as the other names I list.

I also appreciate you finding a source for the claim that dark chocolate in the British Isles is known as "plain chocolate", but the reason I was removing it was because it is already sourced in the body, making the citations in the lead redundant. I will note that the webpage identifies itself as written by "Disa" rather than Nigella herself, and does not identify plain chocolate as the name used in the British Isles, just that it is not what is used in the US. Rollinginhisgrave (talk | contributions) 08:42, 5 August 2025 (UTC)

To be frank inclusion in the lead is overemphasis anyway. But the entire terminology section is poorly written and self-contradictory. It seems to be saying that semi-sweet chocolate is different from dark chocolate while also saying it's a category of dark chocolate. It needs a rewrite. oknazevad (talk) 10:34, 5 August 2025 (UTC)

100% agree. I kind of threw stuff in the terminology section intending to come back when I know how to work in bean-to-bar content into the broader article, but haven't gotten there yet. I'll have a go in the near future of at least fixing that short section. I'm inclined to say the whole article needs to be cleaned up. Rollinginhisgrave (talk | contributions) 10:50, 5 August 2025 (UTC)

Sure enough, on taking a second look, I notice that the discussion of terms I cited from Nigella Lawson’s website isn’t attributed to Lawson herself, so I’ve changed the author’s name. Since Lawson is British, I reckoned (brashly?) that her site would serve as a representative source of national name usage. Also, aware of how “dark chocolate” has come to overshadow “plain chocolate” in general use even in the U.K., I modified my mention of it at the outset with the adverb “traditionally,” which I think serves the point, but Rollinginhisgrave struck it out, apparently deeming it superfluous. Perhaps “by tradition” would work better?

I do agree with oknazevad that the article's Terminology section needs work. But much of what’s written and published about chocolate types and specifications is rather confusing and contradictory—not just, e.g., the EU standard I read of years ago that British chocolate violated with its custom of allowing fats other than cocoa butter in the product (void now after Brexit, I guess), but legal categories in the trade in general. These vary among nations, and many published sources don’t come close to sorting them out. Like many things—maybe more than most—chocolate tends to inspire its devotees to rapturous devotion and intransigent opinion rather than scholarship! Good thing we have the revenant Rollinginhisgrave patrolling this article with death-defying devotion, if this Talk page is any indication. Mucketymuck (talk) 06:54, 6 August 2025 (UTC)

I very much agree with you on the sourcing for terminology around types of dark chocolate, this stuff is by no means scientific. The issue isn't so much regulatory; I was happy with how white chocolate#regulations turned out and would model this article on that if I could, but dark chocolate's legal identity has received less attention, and several categories of dark chocolate are not legal. The scholarship on chocolate definitions is also hyperfocused on craft chocolate. Hopefully the sources present themselves. Btw, if you're interested in the EU chocolate debate, I'd welcome any contributions at Draft:EU chocolate war.

On plain chocolate in the lead: In food writing, "traditionally" should almost always be avoided, see Macrakis's excellent essay Wikipedia:WikiProject Food and drink/Original, authentic, and traditional. As a general matter, WP:TRADITIONAL warns Expressions like "former", "in the past", and "traditionally" lump together unspecified periods in the past. "Traditional" is particularly pernicious because it implies immemorial established usage. Certainly the page cited won't be able to meet any historiographical standards for commenting meaningfully whether it should be deemed "traditional". Rollinginhisgrave (talk | contributions) 07:44, 6 August 2025 (UTC)

Wikipedia articles usually have alternative English-language names for the topic mentioned in the first instance to aid recognition by newcomers to the article before using the most common name thereafter e.g. in the Outer Hebrides, Sega Genesis and Mars bar articles. As for the more common name in British English, I took the liberty of running a comparison on Google Trends, which keeps track of what people search for on Google, on usage of "dark chocolate" and "plain chocolate" in the UK since 2004 and found that the preference for "dark chocolate" seems to have increased over the intervening years. I decided to cite the website for Terry's Chocolate Orange remembering when it used the term "Plain" on the red boxed product in the early 2000s. I decided to also cite Cadbury's website as examples of usage of the term "dark chocolate" by the major brands. As for the term "black chocolate" I have so far only seen it used by the brand Ghana which is the most popular in Japan but also sold in South Korea.Tk420 (talk) 19:49, 1 September 2025 (UTC)

I forgot to mention in my last comment, a theory for how "dark chocolate" became the preferred term over "plain chocolate" is due to there being more varieties of chocolate available nowadays when "plain chocolate" can be taken to mean any unaltered chocolate (including milk or white) with no extras added e.g. nuts, mint or puffed rice.Tk420 (talk) 19:49, 1 September 2025 (UTC)-edited

References

Scary sentence not necessary because of separate section

In the second paragraph of this article we have the sentence

"Because of the high cocoa percentage, dark chocolate can contain particularly high amounts of heavy metals such as lead and cadmium."

There is already some information about this further down the article, with more context. I feel like just putting this sentence in the second paragraph already is unnecessary and feels out of place. Having it so early on in the article, right after a general description, may raise a lot of questions without giving much futher context or answers (or sources) until much further in the article. Rerbun (talk) 19:54, 10 December 2025 (UTC)

The lead is a summary of the text in the article. This is a non-issue in my opinion. Veg Historian (talk) 20:15, 10 December 2025 (UTC)