How to Choose a Chocolate Bar

How we can learn how to do ‘self-consent’ from learning how to choose a chocolate bar.

(Note – this is all about choosing food, so be careful with this resource if you are struggling with food at the moment.)

What makes choosing hard?

There are lots of things that we can and can’t choose to do. Much of it is to do with how much power we have, how accessible things are to us, and (let’s face it) how rich we are.

Also there are so many rules about how we should choose – I call them ‘should stories’. These ‘should stories’ aren’t about what is right, or wrong, or ethical; just what is expected, or what we’re supposed to do.

All of these stories about what we should be doing, as well as whether we should be thinking of ourselves at all, can really make us feel a bit detached from our bodies. We can become passive, not active, and less able to feel joy. Marketing and advertising contribute to this by telling us we lack something, and selling us something that will fill this ‘lack’.

So we’re going to learn how to get better at tuning into our body by learning about how to choose a chocolate bar.

What makes choosing a chocolate bar harder

I like to nip out for a bar of chocolate from time to time, because there are shops near me and I can afford to buy a chocolate bar (just about). But when I’m really trying to work out which one to choose I find it’s not easy.

There are rules about the kind of chocolate that a big 49 year old man, with a beard, should be choosing. Social expectations about what kind of thing is okay for me to choose. I should be choosing something big, chunky, and grown up like a Yorkie, or a Mars Bar, or a Twix (maybe). I should not be choosing a Flake, or a Curly Wurly, or a Freddo. This sounds very silly, but advertising, branding, lettering, colouring, work in this way. ‘Should stories’ like this are very powerful.

Check this out from the gender module of my Teach Yourself Sex Ed course. How have chocolate bars been advertised to you? Are there any which you ‘should’ or ‘should not’ have?

All of this stuff is going through my head, but also it’s happening in real time. If the shopkeeper is right there I can feel their eyes burning into my head (even though they probably aren’t bothered at all). I get very flustered, picking things up and putting them down again. ‘Am I in someone’s way?’ ‘Do I look weird?’ I might have been standing there for about 20 seconds, but it feels like hours. All just so I can buy the chocolate bar I actually want to eat.

How to make choosing a chocolate bar easier

When we’re really trying to choose something we actually want, it’s about trying to really tune into our bodies, and not the ‘should stories.’ So this means doing things like: imagining what we would do if it were another person. We can ask ourselves good questions. Tap into our memories, and our imaginations of different chocolate bars we’ve had or might like. We could listen to our bodies as we are choosing. We could also consider what we want the chocolate bar to do for us.

Asking good questions

A way of countering all the marketing and the idea we are lacking something, there are ways for us to be more active. What will getting a chocolate bar do and what difference will it make? To help get our thoughts and our bodies working together you could ask yourself some of these kinds of questions.

What size do you want the chocolate bar to be?
How chocolatey do you want it to be?
Do you want white, milk, or dark chocolate? Think of this as a spectrum.
What about some other flavours too? Like caramel, fruit, raisins (that’s a fruit), nuts, biscuit, nougat (that’s the bit in a Double Decker that hurts your teeth if you eat it upside down.)
Think about the texture. Light and airy? Crumbly? Crunchy? Chewy? Or do you want a solid, chunky bite of chocolate?
Do you want the whole chocolate bar to be super sweet or a bit more bitter?
What about trying something totally new? Or do you want something you know you like, or do you want to try something you haven’t had in years? (Bring back Fuse bars please Cadbury’s)
How much do you want to spend?
Do you have any ethical considerations? Like, is it fair trade cocoa and sugar? Are you boycotting the parent company?

If you’re really struggling to work out what you want, you could think about what you definitely don’t want. Thinking about things you definitely don’t want can help you to think about the kinds of things that you do want in a chocolate bar. What would be the opposite of what you really don’t want?

What does our body say

As you ask yourself these questions, see if you might pay attention to what your body is saying. What is happening in your mouth? Does your tongue tell you anything? Do that thing of closing your eyes and moving your tongue up and down in your mouth: what do you really fancy? When you imagine the chocolate bar do you notice any flashes of ‘yes’ or ‘no, not today’ or anything in between?

Imagine opening the bar, how will you know that you have chosen the right one? What will you notice? What will be happening in your body? Think of a time when the thing you’ve chosen was absolutely the right choice, what did you notice then?

Be beside yourself

Imagine that you are doing this with someone else that you really really loved. You might stand beside them. Maybe you might ask those questions. Perhaps you might just say, ‘it’s okay, we have all the time in the world, let’s get what you really want’. Maybe you might help them to notice what is going on in their bodies. You can do this for yourself too. It might be hard to do, because one of the should stories we get is that we shouldn’t love ourselves (here’s how to love yourself). However this act of being ‘beside’ ourselves is really important. Practising being beside yourself whenever you buy a chocolate bar is really useful. You could even pretend that ‘you’ are at home and you are buying ‘them’ a nice treat.

Give yourself time and space

Even if you spend ages choosing, it won’t take more than a minute and the only person who cares will be you. So plant your feet on the ground, spread your toes out, relax your shoulders. Take a breath, and focus on what’s in front of you. Keep planted and breathing until you feel a flash of ‘yes’.

It’s okay not to

If there’s nothing there that you really fancy, no flash of ‘yes’, and nothing happens when you do that weird tongue thing I taught you, then you can just walk away. Even if you’ve been there for a whole minute, just walk out, you can leave! Making yourself do something just because you have already invested time and energy into doing something is not great. Because ….

Consent is all about how we maximise our freedom to choose to agree, and we can do it for ourselves too. Consent is what we are doing when we are really trying to have a nice time, with our body and minds connected and working with each other. Having fun by ourselves is important, and it’s a relationship (which the ancient Greeks called Philautia, read more about this in my more than one love resource).

Learning how to treat ourselves with consent means that we learn what consent feels like and how we might do it with others too. It’s also really useful for those times when someone is asking you what it is you would like to do. By practising, you can tune out of the should stories and tune into your body, the situation, your choices, and what might feel really great. This goes for watching TV with someone, a greeting, or having sex. This means that we can be honest and not just try to give the other person the thing we think they want.

One: no, so jot that down. Two: I think ‘self-ful’ is a better word, so let’s start using that. Also, the BISH philosophy is that ‘the self’ is never just contained within each individual person. We are all in relation to the world around us and that’s how we ‘become’.

Nipping out to the shop to get a chocolate bar is part of your becoming ‘you’. So the chocolate bars, the shop, the time you spent, your feet planted on the floor, the shopkeeper, the advertising executives who make Mars Bars for old men, the cocoa farmer, the factory workers in their white hats, are all part of what is helping ‘you’ to emerge.

The experience you get from doing this, your ability to share these skills with others, understanding how to listen to your body, is also really great for everyone else in your life. It’s a win win. When we maximise our freedom to choose, we are maximising our joy and also our capacity to act but also that of our loved ones: because they emerge with us just as we emerge with them.

The key here is that we don’t use these skills to fuck other people over, to make people feel bad, or to deprive them of resources. If we do that, then we actually also do the same to ourselves, because we can’t disentangle our ‘selves’ from other selves. Make sense?

If you’re a fellow educator and you would like an activity which uses the idea here to use in your workshops, buy my Consent Teaching Pack download over at Bish Training.

BISH is run by me, Justin Hancock. I’ve been a trained sex and relationships educator since 1999. I’m a member of the World Association for Sexual Health. As well as BISH I also have resources, a podcast, and a coaching service for over 18s, as well as some of the best RSE teaching resources around. Find out out about my other work at justinhancock.co.uk. My work has featured (positively) in the media, like the BBC, Financial Times, The Economist, The Guardian, Sky One, and Novara Media.

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