Dan Jones is a historian and newspaper columnist based in London. His new book, "The Plantagenets" (Viking), is published in the US by Viking-Penguin and in the UK by William Collins. Follow him on Twitter.

(CNN) What one thing in this life is truly worth fighting for? Justice? Freedom? The love of a good man or woman? Or a small tub of brown gooey paste that tastes kind of like chocolate but also kind of like hazelnuts?

Dan Jones

The answer, if you were in a French supermarket this week, was the brown gooey chocolate paste. The grocery chain Intermarché slashed its price on tubs of Nutella by 70%. Word got around. People got crazy. The result: a run on Nutella and commotion in the aisles.

Reports and online footage circulating from France allege that in the scramble to take advantage of the crazy-low price of €1.40 a jar (about $1.75 -- down from at €4.50: $5.60), young women have had their hair pulled and old women have been punched upside the head. France is not yet in Robespierre-massacring territory. But still. All this violence over a breakfast condiment! How could it be so?

JUST WATCHED See customers react to 70% off Nutella Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH See customers react to 70% off Nutella 00:30

The first thing to say is: oh my God, have you actually tasted Nutella? If you have not, then I suggest you cook yourself a crepe right freaking now and slather it with a half-inch layer of the stuff and roll it up and pig out. Hundreds of millions of metric tons of this brown gold gets eaten around the world every year because people totally enjoy the sensation of angels dancing on their tongues.

It's chocolatey, it's creamy, it's nutty, and because it's nutty that means that it's probably healthy, right?

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