 This shift in our relationship with cacao turned chocolate into the sugary sweet confection we know today. Chocolate has become the object of intense fascination, craving, obsession, addiction and, sadly, modern child slavery. Half the world’s cocoa is grown on about 600,000 plantations in the Ivory Coast. An investigative report by the BBC indicated that hundreds of thousands of children are being purchased from their parents for a pittance, or in some cases outright stolen, and then shipped to the Ivory Coast, where they are sold as slaves to cocoa farms.
The $13 billion U.S. chocolate industry is heavily dominated by conglomerates that control two-thirds of the market. Many of these companies use huge amounts of Ivory Coast cocoa, so their products almost certainly exploit child slaves. At the same time, a growing number of companies are taking the steps to assure their chocolate is untainted by slavery. They use only organic or Fair Trade cacao. Along with the move toward organic agriculture and non-exploitive labor practices, chocolate companies are combining real foods, whole grains, nuts, fruits and orange zest with chocolate.
How can we recapture the health-giving energetics of pure chocolate, its natural festive qualities and the ceremonial rituals it evokes? We can express our gratitude by knowing and honoring cacao’s Amazon Rainforest origins. The Amazon represents the greatest source of life energy on the planet. From the mere three percent of its 265,000 botanicals Western science has researched, we derive nearly 40% of our modern pharmaceuticals. What other treasures lay waiting in the expanses of Rainforest now threatened by loggers, ranchers, miners and oil drillers?
As we consider the origins of our chocolate, we come to appreciate the sources of the cacao we enjoy. This appreciation may draw us closer to the source of our other daily foods. Considering the sources of our chocolate – Third World countries with staggering human, social, economic and environmental challenges – we may imagine solutions for those conditions.
Finally, remembering the ingenious processing that gets the cacao from tree bean to mouth-watering chocolate morsel, let us bring equally imaginative mindfulness to the quality of all our food and of all our relations.
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