There are a number of records of people whose lives have been preserved by means of chocolate. One of the most recent was the case of Commander Stewart, who was torpedoed in H.M.S. "Cornwallis" in the Mediterranean in 1917. He happened to have in his cabin one of the boxes of chocolate presented to the Army and Navy in 1915 by the colonies of Trinidad, Grenada, and St. Lucia, who gave the cacao and paid English manufacturers to make it into chocolate. He had been treasuring the box as a souvenir, but being the only article of food available, he filled his pockets with the chocolate, which sustained him through many trying hours.[3]
[3] See _West India Committee Journal_, p. 55, 1917.
We have already seen the high food value of the cacao bean: what of the sugar which chocolate contains? Sugar is consumed in large quantities in England, the consumption per head amounting to 80-90 lbs. per year. It is well known as a giver of heat and energy, and Sir Ernest Shackleton reports that it proved a great life preserver and sustainer in Arctic regions. Our practical acquaintance with sugar commences at birth--milk containing about 5 per cent. of milk sugar--and when one considers the amazing activity of young children one understands their continuous demand for sugar. Dr. Hutchison, in his well-known _Food and the Principles of Dietetics_, says: "The craving for sweets which children show is, no doubt, the natural expression of a physiological need, but they should be taken with, and not between, meals. Chocolate is one of the most wholesome and nutritious forms of such sweets."
Both the constituents of chocolate being nourishing, it follows that chocolate itself has a high food value. This is proved by the figures given below.
As with cocoa, we have first to know the composition before we can calculate the food value. The relative proportions of nib, butter and sugar, vary considerably in ordinary chocolate, so that it is difficult to give an average composition: there are sticks of eating chocolate which contain as little as 24 per cent. of cacao butter, whilst chocolate used for covering contains about 36 per cent. of butter.
As modern high-class eating chocolate contains about 31 per cent. of butter, we will take this for purposes of calculation: