© Leah-anne Thompson
It is promoted by the tabloid press, passed on in forums and by email, and told late at parties to shock everyone — especially vegetarians: blood chocolate. The story begins with a knowing question: surely you are aware that blood is used to make chocolate? Everyone knows that.
Sometimes the storytellers add chopped Asian hair, borrowing from another urban legend. In that version the hair belongs in bread and the blood in chocolate. Ox or cattle blood is particularly popular in the modern legend, because the disgust at blood can then be combined with fear of BSE. Some narrators even report supposed cases of people contracting BSE through chocolate. The pseudo-logic is obvious: if chocolate contains cattle blood, then surely it can transmit BSE.
But chocolate does not contain blood merely because the claim is repeated. Ferrero, whose spread Nutella has repeatedly been selected as a target of the story, commissioned the Institut Fresenius in 2000 to examine the product. The institute stated, in substance, that neither blood nor blood components nor other animal ingredients were present and that the processed ingredients were declared.
Other manufacturers, including Lindt & Sprüngli, likewise stated in response to enquiries that their products did not contain substances such as blood or animal hair. Apart from declared ingredients such as milk components and, in particular products, egg-containing ingredients, they described the raw materials as plant-derived.
Chocolate expert Thomas Pape of the German chocolate information centre, author of Schokolade. Eine kleine kulinarische Anthologie, considered the use of blood in ordinary chocolate implausible. Prof. Reinhard Matissek wrote in 1995 that neither cattle nor pig blood was used in chocolate manufacture in Germany or the European Union and pointed to traditional ingredients such as cocoa mass, cocoa butter, sugar and milk.
Where did the rumour come from?
Matissek suggested that a patent application by a Düsseldorf inventor contributed to the myth. A private chocolate spread using blood had allegedly been developed, but the patent was not granted.
A 1998 enquiry by Die Zeit to Lindt & Sprüngli produced two possible sources:
- a research project in the former GDR that supposedly experimented with blood to give chocolate a stronger colour;
- a patent application for a process intended to raise the protein content of foods — not only chocolate — by adding blood. Again, the patent was reportedly never granted.
A German tabloid is said to have publicised such a patent application irresponsibly and created connections with the chocolate industry that did not exist. A large circulation, repeated retelling and the human appetite for disgusting secret ingredients are sufficient ingredients for rapid legend formation.
The broader lesson: a rumour can begin with a real document, a research idea or a patent application and then mutate into the claim that a common product secretly contains the alleged ingredient. The existence of a proposal is not evidence of widespread practice.
Literature: Reinhard Matissek, “Schweineblut in Schokolade? – Ein Horrormärchen”, Ärztliche Praxis, 11 February 1995.