Matt Schiavenza

Our friend Daniel Gross continues his journey in China for Slate, this time traveling down the Yangtze River to report on progress of the Three Gorges Dam. For the most part this report avoids the inaccuracies that characterized his last one. But at the bottom of the article, in an aside, Gross wonders why he can’t find chocolate in China.

Shanghaiist says that if Gross wants chocolate, he had plenty of options- from the mundane to the sublime- right in their fair city. Actually, Gross doesn’t even have to go that far. Virtually every town in the country has a local shop (小卖部) or market （超市) that sells Dove chocolate bars, which to the taste buds of this chocolate-fan aren’t half bad.

Not to mention, most markets of a decent-size have chocolate ice cream bars and most towns and small cities have cake shops. I’ve eaten chocolate cake at birthday parties in which I was the only foreign guest.

In Kunming, even local shops sell Snickers and one or two places have Twix, Hersheys, and the like. Run-of-the-mill chocolate is available nearly everywhere, even in the countryside. While on bicycle trips chocolate bars function as energy food for mornings and early afternoons when fruit sold by the side of the road just won’t cut it.

In a way I sympathize with Gross; no doubt he hasn’t spent much time in China and his editors have asked him to make sweeping generalizations in line of what Slate’s readers expect. But simply asking a local where to find chocolate would have sufficed, no?