India, May 1 -- What you are seeing, dear reader, is the second version of this week's Rude Food. I have been meaning to write about chocolate for many months. But things took an unexpected turn along the way and I had to junk the piece that I first intended to write.

It all started when the global prices for cocoa, the raw material that gives us chocolate, shot up. They reached such high levels that most manufacturers who used chocolate for popular and easily procured chocolate snacks began panicking. Chocolate bars became unaffordable. So they looked for substitutes.

This is not as hard as it may seem, because the popular definition of chocolate has always allowed for cheaper substitutions and variations. I should know, because I have...