Should cocoa-substitutes not get a standardised name, as they spread?

The news that chocolate by any other name may taste as sweet but might not really be very chocolatey at all could not have come at a worse moment. After all, people here may have been contemplating a comforting nibble or two of their favourite bar to chase away Maggi-deprivation blues. Of course, global warming and unrest in the cacao bean bastions of west Africa may indeed lead one day to cocoa butter being replaced by vegetable oil substitutes perforce. But several companies have clearly jumped the gun — and been less than honest — by changing over but merely rechristening their oil-laced products as ‘ chocolate candy’ (instead of, say, milk chocolate) to avoid being hauled up for violating norms. So, the devil lies in the (small print) yet again.

Given the inevitability of widespread use of vegetable oil substitutes for the unctuous and increasingly expensive cocoa butter — which imparts creaminess to quality chocolates — it may be time to coin an umbrella term for them. Cocoa margarine, perhaps? Chocospati, an evocative word coined by Hindi wags, is another option. That naturally begs the question of what such products with fudged cocoa butter standards should really be called. Can we suggest chocofake? It would be a worthy companion to two words already doing the rounds: mockchoc and mockolate.