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This Valentine’s Day, tell him you don’t love him with Japanese women’s “chocolate maggot” recipe

Casey Baseel Feb 14, 2018
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A tasty, clever way to say “We’re just friends” in a country where women give chocolate to both lovers and platonic male acquaintances on February 14.

In Japan, it’s customary for women to give chocolate to men on Valentine’s Day, and that Valentine’s Day chocolate gets subdivided into two categories. The first is honmei choco, which loosely translates to “real target chocolate” and refers to sweets given to a serious boyfriend or a guy the girl has genuine romantic feelings for. The other is giri choco, “obligation chocolate,” which is given to male friends and coworkers to say thank-you for general consideration and kindness throughout the past year.

In general, gourmet, expensive chocolate (or home-made chocolate, if a women really wants to pitch her woo at the strike zone of a guy’s heart) gets used for honmei choco, and mundane, cheaper sweets are chosen for giri choco. After all, if it looks like you spent too much time or money on it, a guy might mistake your platonic giri choco for amorous honmei choco…unless, that is, your home-made giri choco looks like something completely unromantic, like Japanese Twitter user @4MuiMui’s does.

日本の義理チョコ文化を楽しもう！ pic.twitter.com/7qPmxDeH6V

— むいむい (@4MuiMui) February 11, 2018

@4MuiMui started with a bag of Tohato Caramel Corn snacks, though you could use any bite-sized snack food with a similarly bulbous or curved shape. Using the cream filling scraped from a pack of Oreo-like cookies, she attached a single piece of chocolate-covered puffed wheat to their tips, then covered the rest of each piece in the cream. Finally, she strategically added a few dots of the crumbled-up biscuits to create chocolate maggots.

“Let’s have some fun with Japan’s giri choco culture!” tweeted @4MuiMui, who finished her disgusting yet delicious edible art project by placing her creations in plastic trays atop a cocoa powder habitat. Among those who heeded the call was Twitter user @TxbNFkLBQczGndA, but she wasn’t the only one.

pic.twitter.com/4m0crQoizq

— すいか (@o0o0oOkan) February 13, 2018

参考にさせていただきました！！ pic.twitter.com/KNcT8Lm60O

— 社畜じゃなくなったツナ.1y🎀 (@tunatuna073) February 13, 2018

https://twitter.com/kaito_tako_wrun/status/963032434836041728

Of course, you could always just select chocolate that’s so pedestrian that there’s no way anyone would ever think it’s anything other than giri choco. But if you’d prefer to give something that’s absolutely not boring, but by no means more meaningful than just a simple “Thanks for being a good friend,” maggot chocolate is a repulsively attractive choice.

Source: Jin, Twitter/@TxbNFkLBQczGndA