When most people are asked if they like chocolate they will say yes. There are more people who do than don’t. This answer though is an uninformed response. As far as most people are concerned chocolate comes from the store, we are unaware of the process that gets it into the pretty packages we bring it home in. However, there are some things people don’t know about the process, good and bad things. There are environmental effects as well as economic effects that play into the world of chocolate too.
The use of the cacao plant has been dated back to over 4000 years ago in 2000 BC in the Amazon rainforest. Some of the first records of chocolate go back to the Maya civilization; they referred to the plant as xocoatl. They thought chocolate was a food of the gods and symbolized life and fertility. It was often used in religious ceremonies as offerings to their gods. As the Mayan civilization spread through the Yucatan Peninsula, they began to be among the first to cultivate cacao plantations around 600 A.D. At this time chocolate was a drink that had spices like cayenne pepper added to it, similar to what we would call Mexican hot chocolate today. It remained in a drinkable form with a few changes to the recipe over the years until around the mid-19th century.
In 1846 Joseph Fry created the first molded chocolate bar but it was a bittersweet taste, they began being mass produced in 1866. Then around 1875 Henry Nestle the creator of evaporated milk and Daniel Peter, a Swiss chocolate maker came together to make a more sweet and palatable chocolate. It wasn’t until the year 1900 that Mr. Hershey began production of the first American made chocolate bar which is still sold in stores today. Of the world, the US is only responsible for about 20% of the world’s chocolate consumption. The average American consumes around 11 pounds of chocolate each year that doesn’t seems like much but it is when you take into consideration that 1 pound of chocolate takes 400 dried beans to create.
The work that goes into the cultivation and harvesting of cacao plants is a very hard and strenuous process. Each tree takes around 3 years to mature to fruit bearing age. Once it bears fruits it only yields 30-40 pods per year, and each pod only yields about 30-40 beans. The harvesting process is done by hand because the chocolate pods can grow from anywhere on the tree. They are collected in baskets carried by the workers, after being cut from the tree with saws. Once a workers’ basket is full, they return to the clearing and process their baskets. They begin this by splitting open the pods and scraping out the pulp and cocoa beans. The beans and pulp are then left to ferment for between 3-7 days. This is where the rich chocolate flavor and sweetness begins. Once the fermentation process is over the beans are laid in a single layer and dried in direct sunlight, then packed in bags and sold and shipped around the world where the manufacturing process begins.
Most of the chocolate comes from West Africa which collectively supplies nearly 70% of cocoa beans, in particular the Cote d’Ivoire supplies around 35% of the world’s cocoa. Most of this work is done by the extremely poor, child laborers or even slaves. According to the International Labour Organization, child labor is defined as “work that is mentally, physically, socially or morally dangerous and harmful to children, and interferes with their schooling by depriving them of the opportunity to attend school by obliging them to leave school prematurely or by requiring them to attempt to combine school attendance with excessively long and heavy work” (International Labour Organization, 2004)
They spend their waking hours devoting their life to harvesting cocoa beans for anywhere between 85-50 cents a day or in most cases no pay at all; most will never taste the refined chocolate products they supply the beans for. The children usually between ages 12-18 work around 12-18 hours a day. Some children as young as the age of 5 have been discovered working the plantations though. These children are usually kidnapped or involved in human trafficking and sold to plantations for pennies, in return for dangerous and physically taxing work. According to an article released in 2018, “Most child slaves on cocoa farms (Ivory Coast and Ghana) come from Mali and Burkina Faso, two of the poorest nations on Earth. The children, some as young as ten, are sent by their families or trafficked by agents with the promise of money. They are made to work long hours for little or no money” (Dumay & Guthrie, 2018). Some of these children get will be beaten if they try to escape or if they aren’t producing satisfactory work.
Despite the efforts of the world’s biggest chocolate industry slavery still runs rampant in West Africa. The work they are doing is only touching around 10% of the affected children. A study published by Fortune magazine in 2016 there are an estimated 2.1 million children involved in cocoa slavery. In the same article a young boy is interviewed and asked what he thought of people in other countries enjoying chocolate. His reply is truly disheartening, he is quoted responding by saying, “They are enjoying something that I suffered to make, they are eating my flesh”. That statement is not nearly as easy to swallow as a Hershey bar.
Child slavery obviously being the worst offense of the chocolate industry, it also takes a hefty toll on our environment. Researches in the UK have been studying the carbon footprint of chocolate and the findings are shocking. A study that was published in food research international, found that the chocolate industry produces nearly 2.1 million tons of greenhouse gases each year. In the same study it was found that one chocolate bar uses around 260 gallons of water during the manifesting process.
The chocolate industry makes of 100 billion used a year and still hasn’t figured out a way to avoid child slavery, and destroying the environment. Considering it’s us the consumers who pay a few dollars every time we buy a chocolate bar. If we diverted our money to freeing the children who suffer so we can satisfy our sweet tooth, the chocolate industry would have no choice but to divert their attention and funds to helping to end the destruction of lives and our planet. In an ideal world one child should never have to suffer so another could enjoy a chocolate bar.
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Dark Side of the Beloved Chocolate.
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