There was a storm in a chocolate box last week in Europe, home of the very best of the rich, sweet, inessential but life-enhancing stuff.

The controversy started with the European Union's announcement that it planned to revise its laws -- binding on all 15 member nations -- to allow up to 5 percent vegetable fat in chocolate produced within the trading bloc. In a week dominated by news of atrocities in Chechnya, disastrous floods in Mozambique and political murders in Iran and Pakistan, this would hardly seem a matter of great moment to anyone but cocoa producers. Much of the world couldn't care less -- and probably couldn't tell the difference anyway. One man's Cote d'Or, as they say, is another man's Crunky.

Yet in Belgium, a country renowned for its top-of-the-line chocolate, the news struck hard. The country has always prohibited the use of substitutes for the cocoa butter that devotees say accounts for Belgian chocolate's singular richness. What will happen, they wonder, if the local ban is overruled and quality control must depend on voluntary compliance? What is the world coming to when, instead of pure cocoa butter, a consumer may find any one of illipe, palm oil, sal, shea, kokum gurgi or mango kernel fat in his or her pricey after-dinner chocolate? One begins to see the Belgians' point. Mango kernel is all very well, but kokum gurgi? Shea? Those don't sound like things to give your sweetheart on Valentine's Day.