Schadenfreude is an ugly, base emotion and one we’d all be better off eschewing whenever possible. And yet, sometimes you just can’t help it.

A damning exposé published by the business website Quartz this week gave rise to one of those moments. The exposé concerned Mast Brothers, aka Rick and Michael Mast, a pair of anachronistically bearded Iowans who turned a repurposed factory in Williamsburg, Brooklyn into a world-famous artisanal chocolate empire. It is just too perfect an example of the Emperor’s-New-Clothes phenomenon that plagues our silly world.

According to Quartz, while trumpeting their product as “bean-to-bar” – a term meant to indicate adherence to principles of natural purity but which instead sounds like a measurement for male genitalia – the Mast brothers created their original recipe out of a paste made by melting down chocolate bought from Valrhona, a company founded in 1922 in Tain-l’Hermitage, France, by a chef named Albéric Guironnet.

Tour guides at the brothers’ Williamsburg factory told people that they had learned the art of small-batch chocolate making by studying the methods used by the Incas and Mayans.

Mast Brothers chocolate bars sell for $10 a pop. You can see why people are mad. Mast Brothers has a harder time.

“There is absolutely no need for sensationalized negativity or to spend energy diminishing our contribution to the chocolate community,” the company said in a press statement on its website, insisting that “any insinuation that Mast Brothers was not, is not or will not be a bean-to-bar chocolate maker is incorrect and misinformed”.

Surely, there is never any need for sensationalized negativity. But a certain amount of non-sensationalized negativity plays an important role in our efforts to right the wrongs we find around ourselves. (Or within ourselves, really. This one is as much on us, society, as it is on Mast Brothers.)

So: what the fuck? Why did anyone ever agree to pay $10 for a chocolate bar?

The Mast brothers are stationery makers who started a pretend chocolate company. They make chocolate that doesn’t taste very good and package it in wrapping made out of Jared Leto’s business cards from American Psycho.

The design is really quite beautiful – abstract color fields that hint at details from Matisse’s cutouts. I could look at these chocolate wrappers all day; I could frame them and hang them on the wall. Credit should go to the company’s creative director, Nathan Warkentin, who used to make leather jackets.

I like dark chocolate, myself. I prefer it to milk chocolate. An open bag of Nestlé’s semi-sweet morsels is a dangerous thing to have near me in a kitchen while cookies are being made. I’ve tried some of the high-end, high-percentage cacao stuff – the Scharffen Berger and Green & Black’s that came before Mast. It’s the type of thing people bring as a gift when they come to visit from another city. Gets good shelf placement at airport newspaper shops. I have enjoyed it; I can hear myself remarking on how different, how much “deeper” or “more complex” it tastes than the candy bars I grew up eating.

Which bar is best? Photograph: Dave Bry

I am as much of a schmuck as the next guy. But upon reading about the Mast Brothers scandal, I decided to do a taste test. I took out a second mortgage on my home and went to my local gourmet market and bought three Mast chocolate bars (Dark Chocolate, Almond and … Goat’s Milk), one Scharffen Berger Extra Dark, one Green & Black’s Dark, and a Hershey’s Special Dark.

All the Mast bars were far too chalky and bitter. The almond one tasted like bark. Or, I guess, the shells of cacao beans. The not-quite-finely-ground-enough shells of cacao beans? Is that what kept catching in my throat as I swallowed? Whatever it was, it kinda hurt.

Goat’s milk chocolate, meanwhile, tasted like cheese. The funky, distinctly mature taste of a product made out of protein that comes from a barnyard animal. It had that funk, that sweaty-gym-sock sourness that we who like funky cheese appreciate very much in a cheese. I like that always-sort-of-disgusting taste a lot! I am an adventurous eater!

There is a cheese my friend Georgia brings to my house sometimes called Brebirousse d’argental. It tastes like a sweaty gym sock that you might have found lying in the hay of a cow barn. As weird as that sounds, I love it. I think it is absolutely delicious. So rich and satisfying in all these different ways. It is really absolutely not what I want when I am about to eat a piece of chocolate, though.

The Sharffen Berger was also much too intensely acidic. “Like a fine red wine,” it said on the label (awesome!), “our 82% Cacao Extra Dark bar has notes of dried figs and a mild peppery spiciness.” An accurate description, I thought, as I took a second bite and did not want a third. (Not if wasn’t going to get me drunk.) Also: would I have thought that had I not just read the words? What if there wasn’t that stately looking ibex on the label? Now there’s a good-looking goat. I hope they didn’t milk it.

The Green & Black’s was definitely the best of the fancy pants brands. Very fruity and not so unpleasantly sharp.

Best of all, though? Honestly? Good ol’ Hershey’s.

A little too sweet, maybe? Sure. Especially compared to its company. A little plasticky tasting? Chemical-y? Also, guilty. But it was silky and soothing, a balm for a throat scraped raw by jagged shards of cacao bean shells. Whatever non-organic, non-bean-to-bar, probably poisonous ingredient those corporate monsters at Hershey’s HQ are putting into their chocolate that the artisans are not – “emulsifier”, I suppose – it turns to liquid deliciousness in a way that that the stuff of the artisans simply does not.

It will be interesting to see how this Mast Brothers scandal plays out. Were they ever actually selling Valrhona chocolate as their own? Or did they just take some creative license with their marketing myth-making?

Whatever the case, the thing that seems clearest here is that a lot of people chose to buy $10 chocolate bars in large part because they cost $10. We buy attractively packaged luxury items for the sake of buying attractively packaged luxury items. That’s about it. And that’s stupid. We’re stupid, us. Did you hear about the guy who made a foam roller and sold it for $189 but business was slow so he raised the price to $365 and now has a hit on his hands?

That Hershey’s bar cost $2.

Ratings

Mast Brothers Dark Chocolate: 1

Mast Brothers Almond: 1

Mast Brothers Goat’s Milk: -4

Sharffen Berger Extra Dark: 1

Green & Black’s Dark: 3

Hershey’s Special Dark: 4

Rating system: from best to worst

5 stars: Parliament’s 1975 album Chocolate City

4 stars: a nice red wine

3 stars: plonk

2 stars: 21st-century Brooklynites’ penchant for dressing like it’s the 19th century

1 star: Being the sucker born the specific minute that you were born