I like white chocolate because I don't like it. It's true. There are a lot of reasons to dislike it. It is waxy, tastes like spoiled milk, and looks like tooth decay. If white chocolate were the only candy in the world, I wouldn't touch it. But because it is couched among millions of superior options, I end up eating it pretty often.

The choice makes me feel good because the negotiation of unpleasantness adds an intellectual factor to a one-dimensional experience. With white chocolate, there is a decision involved about whether to enjoy it or not.

White chocolate belongs to a cadre of items whose appeal lies in direct proportion to their quotient of unpleasantness: oysters, fennel, mincemeat, foie gras and some more that I can't think of.

Clearly this is all culturally subjective. There is also a threshold involving how gross a food can be before it taxes the limit of negotiability. Like the difference between, I don't know, rock-climbing and base-jumping.

Back to white chocolate. Another reason for its magnetism is that people seem to fetishize weird-looking pale things: marshmallows, Moby Dick, albino animals, Andy Warhol. I know I do-- when I was in Barcelona two summers ago, my roommate and I made a special trip to the zoo to see the albino gorilla Floquet ("Snowflake"). It turned out the gorilla had died and our guidebook was out-of-date, so we got postcards instead, which I kept tacked to my bulletin board for a long time.

My point is, there might be an untapped psychology to this. Some more evidence: I've noticed that a disproportionately high number of people have seen (and remember) the movie Powder, which is a really forgettable film except that the guy in it is white-colored. He even gets struck by lightning in the end, bringing the whole white idŽe fixe to a climax.

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