Let us be clear about the specificity of today’s celebration. It is not National Chocolate Day (that’s July 7), nor is it National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day (August 4). Today is about the actual chocolate chip. The toll house morsel. The thing that looks like a Hershey’s Kiss, only much smaller. The food, made out of (usually semi-sweet) chocolate that does not look even slightly like any other sense of the term chip (as in “off the old block” or “on your shoulder”), but without which we would be reduced to—perish the thought—cutting up large chunks of chocolate into small pieces like savages. As, indeed, people did before chocolate chips as we know them today first hit the shelves in 1941.
When the chips are down, you have to put all your chips on the table, and…OK, I’ve got nothing. But I’m totally down with a day celebrating the chocolate chip. I consume chocolate chips pretty much every single day—in yogurt, mixed into pancake batter, on cereal or ice cream, straight out of the bag, or even, occasionally, as a cookie ingredient. I might even go so far as to say that chocolate chips helped make me what I am today, which is…hungry for more chocolate chips.
