Fair Trade Chocolate

I have always loved chocolate, especially milk chocolate. Avoiding milk chocolate is one of the difficult things about being on a diet. However, now I am not sure that I like milk chocolate best of all, because I have tasted Fair Trade chocolate.

MJ brought me varieties of Fair Trade chocolate bars from the Whole Foods Market in San Antonio, since not much is available around Corpus Christi, TX. After eating Fair Trade milk chocolate, which has 40-45% cocoa in it, I find that I prefer it much more than the normal U.S. milk chocolate bar. I bought one (on impulse) and found it to be too sweet. Plus, such an average milk chocolate bar has only 10% cocoa and lots more sugar; no wonder I find it so much sweeter.

Since preparing for and participating in the Green Fair at First United Methodist Church this past Sunday, I have learned about the injustice and cruelty perpetrated in the production of cocoa/chocolate. An excellent source to learn about this is here. This site also has an extensive chart showing whether various chocolate companies use slave labor and/or have organic ingredients. Also the book Bitter Chocolate: The Dark Side of the World's Most Seductive Sweet by Carol Off has extensive data and information about the history and current production of chocolate.

Here is a little bit of info about cocoa and slavery:

• West Africa collectively supplies nearly 70% of the world's cocoa AND the Ivory Coast produces nearly half of all all the world's cocoa.

• There are about 600,000 cocoa farms in the Ivory Coast, with an estimated 15,000 children forced to work as slaves on these farms.

• It is estimated that 90% of cocoa farms on the Ivory Coast use child labor.

Since 90% of most U.S. candy purchases are impulse buys, we can affect the large chocolate companies by NOT buying the "slave chocolate" so readily.

We can write to the big chocolate companies and ask them to buy Fair Trade cocoa. (I just ordered some from Amazon.com here.) Tell them that you expect something to be done immediately to ensure that cocoa imported into the U.S. is not harvested by enslaved children.

• Hershey Foods Corporation, 100 Crystal A Drive, Hershey, PA 17033; (717) 534-6799--POST on their Facebook site.
  

• Mars., Inc., 6885 Elm Street, McLean, VA 22101; (703) 821-4900

• Nestle USA, (800) 225-2270