I KNOW this will sound like the worst sort of sacrilege to some people, but is there too much chocolate in the world?

Chocolate is absurdly plentiful these days, spilling out of almost every shop you enter. A stationery shop I went into the other day had set aside one shelf for chocolate. What was that about? A shop selling paper and pens was also trying to push chocolate. Are we all so addicted to chocolate that we can't even pop out for a packet of biros without having to chomp on something sweet?

Chocolate means more to this city than most. You could say York is built on chocolate. As sweeping statements go, that one gets the brushes working, although it is only true up to a point. Train carriages should probably be mentioned in there somewhere too, although if it's the authentic ring of local history you seek, it might be an idea to look somewhere better informed.

But chocolate - you can't get away from it in York. Its smudged fingerprints are all over the city's history, as we were reminded last year when Terry's of York finally closed and became Terry's of Wherever It's Cheaper To Produce The Stuff.

Much sentiment was attached to the now-departed firm, thanks to a long association with the city. Sadly, sentiment counts for nought in the modern corporate world, as employees of Terry's found out.

Now the new year brings indications that all might not be well at Nestl Rowntree, with a headline in Tuesday's Press asking: "Is this the end of the line for Nestl in the city?"

It is unthinkable to imagine York without Rowntree, considering the deep business and social roots the Rowntree family has in York. Yet unthinkable things often end up being thought of nowadays, and the patriarchal Rowntrees did surrender long ago to the biggest food corporation around.

According to workers who spoke to this newspaper, there are 30 weeks' worth of unsold KitKats filling warehouses at the factory. Exactly how many KitKats is that? The story didn't say, although presumably it runs to many thousands.

This raises the teeth-staining, stomach-straining possibility that we should all do our bit for Nestl Rowntree by eating as many KitKats as we can get what's left of our teeth into. The trouble is, such public-spirited gluttony would only see us getting all fat and spotty, and ripe for a city-wide visit from that truly scary woman off the Channel 4 programme, You Are What You Eat.

Dieticians are all on a mission to make us healthier these days, and while these bossy cabbage-soup people can be annoying with their puritanical instructions to eat this and lay off that, they do sadly have a point. And they could just be helping to finish off Nestl Rowntree in York.

This is a big statement to make, I guess, and it can't be supported by anything as journalistically rigorous as facts or figures. But my line of argument is simple: the concentration on healthy eating is bringing home to us that we don't need to stuff ourselves with mass-produced chocolate bars, even if they do have a link to York's history.

This city is historically complicit in getting us to eat something we do not need. In the past, this mattered less because the confectionary bars were proper treats, something to be eaten occasionally. Where the chocolate industry has gone wrong is in marketing treats for every day, which end up not being treats at all, just unnecessary, over-sweetened "food" of questionable worth.

The trouble with writing about these things is that you end up sounding like a puritanical twit. I'm honestly not being a calorie killjoy. I enjoy chocolate, preferably dark and of decent quality, just not every day.

But is there too much chocolate in the world? If KitKats are being stockpiled in York, it would certainly seem that way.

Updated: 08:53 Thursday, January 26, 2006