Some Christmas trivia
Nollaig Shona and Merry Christmas wherever you are reading this. I’m taking a break for the next two weeks to spend time relaxing with family and friends. I sincerely hope that you are doing likewise.
Knowing in advance that I would be scarfing down chocolate like nobody’s business, I decided to do a quick side-by-side comparison of the energy potential of chocolate vs. some of our favourite high explosives.
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You might not know this, but the sweets you’re munching on right now have quite a lot of energy in them. In fact, they are comparative to some high and low explosives:
This is all pretty approximate, of course, taking the average energy per 100 g of chocolate as per the nutritional information on the box (I had to open one for research purposes, of course). Chocolates contain about three to four times more energy as explosives on a per-weight basis.
So, should you go out on start using chocolate bombs and bullets? Not quite. For one, it’s Christmas, and you shouldn’t be coming up with new weapons designs right now. More importantly, however, is that chocolate (or any food) releases its energy into the body at a much slower rate than explosives react:
It’s all about the rate of energy release. Nuclear reactions happen over nanoseconds, high explosives take microseconds to react, propellants in guns are a thousand times slower still, and food takes anywhere from minutes to decades to convert all its chemical energy to useful work.
This is why explosives are such important and, dare I say, useful chemicals—for peaceful purposes as well as wartime ones, although I must admit that their nefarious use often dominates.
So enjoy your turkey and ham, your mince pies, and your sweets: you’re giving your body more fuel than you would get from high explosives, but thankfully over a much longer time period.
I’ll leave you with a picture of ChatGPT’s finest bomb disposal operator trying to disarm these highly dangerous chocolate sweets.
Happy Christmas all, thanks for your support and engagement in 2025, and I wish you and yours the very best for 2026. I’ll see you then.
Cover picture: We counted every chocolate in Quality Street, Roses, Heroes, and Celebrations, The Mirror, 21st Dec 2024
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