There are, I know, cannibals still at large, and small children who eat the frosting and leave the cake. There are mammalian females of many species that, in pressured circumstances, will devour their own young. These and other violent extremes I can comprehend and can, in some deep crack of my inner self, find some sympathy for. But that class of insensate savages that take the center of their Volcano Bar in one bite, separate from the enveloping chocolate, sets the small hairs of my body stiff and vibrating, causes waves of shock to traverse my entire nervous system, and sends venomous serpentine convolutions into my very dreams. These grotesque and impious humans may include in their number some small portion of nearly suicidal aesthetes intent on blotting out every drab complexity of their prosaic existence by repeated, massive, petrifying jolts of ecstatic sensation, much as a violent psychopath is relieved of his symptoms by the passage of insupportable forces of electricity through his body. For these devotees, if indeed they exist, I can summon a horrified pity and a niggling drip of understanding. But there is that majority of the Big Bite perpetrators, many thousands strong, whose act is unconscious, unresponsive, motivated only by animal hunger or most ignorant habit. When that mellow nugget passes their lips nearly whole, its nature is relegated to the mechanical atrocities of the molars. No concept of the chemical processes of appreciation is present. The lump, smeared, chomped, and mixed only crudely with saliva, passes the uvula, is gripped by the uncaring esophagus, and is shuttled without thought into that senseless chamber of destruction—the stomach. The prospect of such waste is devastation.

My own way is slower. It is really useless to begin a Volcano Bar with less than an assured half hour of undisturbed leisure before me. Every glittering soupçon of the center must be nibbled off simultaneously with the exact balance of chocolate wall. Too little of one or the other, too large a bite, an interruption that forces me to swallow before the dark and light have completed their warm amalgamation in the hollow of my tongue and been circulated through the areas of my mouth like newlyweds at a reception—any of these accidents precludes the full enjoyment of the strange combination. They produce a certain willful bitterness, as in “Jeez!” (short, I have always supposed, for “Jesus!”), and they require a resettling, a beginning again, a moment of contemplation, a composed and reverent spirit, before resuming my affectionate consumption. It seems to me there is more pleasure inherent in a properly approached Volcano Bar than in the average five-course meal. And in those old days it still cost a dime.