Americans and milk chocolate. What a deep and awful relationship.

Did Hershey’s chocolate sell dark chocolate, until the past few years? Did any of us eat anything but milk chocolate? I remember when a Hershey bar in my lunch was a wonderful thing. Milk chocolate, of course. Like Hershey Kisses.

I also can remember giving one-pound bars of chocolate as Christmas gifts, maybe 10 years ago, and one of the guys who received a dark chocolate bar complained that it was “trick” chocolate.

He expected milk chocolate; he got dark. I think he may have thrown it away.

And others may recall when getting a box of chocolates, the kids, especially went for the light-colored chocolate, the milk … while adults ate the dark. Seemed strange, to kids, but as usual the adults knew what they were doing.

I have preferred dark chocolate for decades. Certainly since I first encountered the exquisite European dark chocolate.

And now I have tilted over to dark choco entirely.

The tipping point?

The dark chocolate Kit Kat bar.

I had been eating milk chocolate Break bars since I arrived in Abu Dhabi. They cost about Dh2 (54 cents) in the candy machines, and I would have one. Because they were there, more than my really liking them.

Then I began stocking my desk with boxes of 12 Break bars. Always available, in case I needed one.

(Break bars, by the way, are a regional Kit Kat knockoff; almost always cheaper.)

It was my go-to chocolate. Until I splurged on the Kit Kat dark a few months ago. And now I am done with milk chocolate.

Dark chocolate is so much better. To eat and, apparently, for a human body.

Any health benefits? Fine. Great.

I’m doing it for the taste. The sharp taste of dark chocolate rather than the greasy, cloying, too-sweet taste of milk chocolate.

Done with milk chocolate. I am giving away all of it.  I want dark chocolate M&Ms if I can find them, and dark choco bars, at all times.

OK, with one exception. I will still eat the occasional frozen Snickers bar, when I cannot find a dark choco variety of it. (Nearly impossible, in the UAE.)

Dark chocolate Kit Kats. Dark chocolate everything. The only way to go for anyone older than 12.