Sickle and Chocolate

Back when I was a kid, there were two Germanies, and we would get packages from friends in the East every once in a while. Just like the packages we sent over there, they would contain various kinds of sweets: cookies, gummy bears and chocolate. Unfortunately for us kids, we much preferred the Western candy to the Socialists' concoctions. There was a strange taste to it, and I especially remember the gummy bears, which tasted unlike any gummy I ever had, and the chocolate, which wasn't entirely unfamiliar. I recall the cookies being alright, but cookies are one of my favorite foods, so who knows how good they really were. Back to the chocolate though, it tasted a lot like some of the very cheap varieties we had on our side of the Iron Curtain. Not so much of that creamy richness and delicious cocoa, but more of an assault of sugar that did not melt smoothly in your mouth but dissolves into what feels like tiny crystals of sugar.
Anyway, years passed, the memory of the Socialist chocolate drifting deeper and deeper into my subconsciousness. Until one day, I took a trip right to the very heart of capitalism and, against my better judgment, partly out of terrible despair, bought a regular little bar of Hershey's chocolate. Maybe it was the fact that it is so widespread and widely loved in the US. Maybe it was just curiosity. But what I know for certain, is that it tasted a lot like what I remember the chocolate from the German East to taste like. Especially with regards to that grainy sugar taste and texture. And just recently I realized the irony in all this. That the system that embraces free markets and enterprise, and believes in their superiority in bringing out the greatest in human endeavors, and the system that stands for the exact opposite of that, that believes that human endeavor is best carefully regulated and controlled for the greater good, both produce the same kind of funny-tasting chocolate.