Anyone with a long history of being a Church of God member surely knows about the "food" that was fostered off on us in the late 60's and early 70's that was carob. Has there ever been such a vile food substitute as this? Even turkey bacon was better than the abomination called carob.
We were told to eat this crap while God's almighty servant, Herbert W Armstrong, was eating real chocolate in his home prepared by his personal chef. Only the finest chocolate would do! Flown in from Harrod's of London, or bought at the local high-end Jurgenson's Market in Pasadena, it was the best available!
Can you imagine Herbert Armstrong eating a carob cake with thick carob icing? What about a steaming hot cup of carob! We would be in Petra before that ever happened!
The New Yorker: How Carob Traumatized a Generation
A wry disgruntlement will forever unite those of us who were children during the height of the nineteen-seventies natural-foods movement. It was a time that we recall not for its principles—yes to organics, no to preservatives—but for its endless assaults on our tender young palates. There was brown rice that scoured our molars as we chewed, shedding gritty flecks of bran. There was watery homemade yogurt that resisted all attempts to mitigate its tartness. And, at the pinnacle of our dietary suffering, worse even than sprout sandwiches or fruit leather or whole-wheat scones, there was carob, the chocolate substitute that never could.
In the nineteen-seventies, carob infiltrated food co-ops and baking books as if it had been sent on a cointelpro mission to alienate the left’s next generation. “Delicious in brownies, hot drinks, cakes and ‘Confections without Objections,’ ” the 1968 vegan cookbook “Ten Talents” crowed, noting, too, that it was a proven bowel conditioner. “Give carob a try,” Maureen Goldsmith, the author of “The Organic Yenta,” encouraged, but even her endorsement came with a hedge; in the note to her recipe for carob pudding, she confessed that she still snuck out for actual chocolate from time to time—though less and less often! No one under the age of twelve could stand the stuff. Not the candy bars that encased a puck of barely sweetened peanut butter in a thin, waxy brown shell, nor the cookies—whole wheat, honey-sweetened—studded with carob chunks that refused to melt in the mouth, instead caking unpleasantly between the teeth. My mother—who, to her children’s lasting gratitude, never compromised her pie recipes, even during her peak whole-foods years—told me recently that she was never that fond of carob, either.See full story here: How Carob Traumatized a Generation
