The one source of added sugar in my diet is chocolate, and while I probably don't need to remove
all added sugar from my diet, now that I'm trying to do Keto, I've noticed that my appetite goes up dramatically after eating relatively small amounts of sweetened chocolate, but not unsweetened chocolate and seemingly not milk or fruit. So I've been trying to find decent unsweetened eating chocolate (
my favorite is hard to find in stores and wicked expensive to boot), and in the process been reminded of three things which annoy me every time I encounter them.
First, not only is unsweetened chocolate (except the absolutely awful Baker's brand) very hard to find but because it's almost always sold as baking chocolate, it's clearly conched for a much shorter period, leading to a gritty texture and more bitter flavor. This is true even for brands such as Ghiradelli, which produces eating chocolate which is smooth and without bitterness, and baking chocolate almost as bad as Baker's.
Second is the tendency of companies to offer low-sugar or sugar-free alternatives by using alternative sweeteners instead of simply cutting back unnecessary sugar. This reaches its nadir in those disgusting "sugar-free chocolate" made with non-caloric sweeteners which you now find everywhere. (I've tried a few, and while they don't always have off tastes, they're
always way sweeter than normal chocolate.) This is doubly annoying with chocolate, because it lets manufacturers save money by using Forastero cacao (the cheapest, most common, and only bitter strain of chocolate) not conch it, and then replace expensive chocolate with cheap sweeteners.
Finally, and most annoyingly: there's Google's tendency to use near-synonyms with no option to turn them off. The case that prompted this is really annoying: I cannot even think of a product "sugar-free" and "unsweetened" are synonyms: "sugar-free" always means "sweetened with something else" in my experience, in much the same way that "no added sugar" means "we used apple juice or dried dates instead of corn syrup or white crystals." But this isn't the first time I have seen this. Every couple months, I have a very hard time finding something because Google is helpfully including near-synonyms, and a near-synonym which differs in some crucial way from what I'm looking for dominates my results. And somehow, Google bolding those near-synonyms as if they returned what I'm looking for just makes me that much angrier.