Death By Chocolate

This has been a different kind of weekend.

This past week, I had done some investigations regarding slavery and chocolate. Did you know over 40% of the worlds chocolate comes from the Ivory Coast where child slavery runs rampant? Did you know that 12,000 children have been trafficked into cocoa farms in the Ivory Coast? Why? So you can have that chocolate bar or M&Ms or those chocolate chips for your cookies. It kind of puts a bitter taste on chocolate for me now and lead me to a cleaning out of my fridge and pantry of all the Nestle, Hershey's, and Mars/M&Ms chocolates I had.

And for all those wondering, those big chocolate companies like Hershey's, Nestle, and Mars continue to turn a blind eye to the fact that they are buying cocoa from farms where children are enslaved. Their comments? They don't own the farms, they only buy the cocoa. Nice! Way to be a corporate citizen.

What can you do? First start by buying only Fair Trade Chocolate. Fair Trade products are certified guarantying farmer do not use any kind of slavery to farm the raw cocoa beans and that chocolate manufacturers are paying a fair price to the farmers for the cocoa beans. Look for the label above on your chocolate (and your tea and coffee too) and talk to your grocery stores manager if you don't see any Fair Trade Products. You can learn about Fair Trade here.

I found both Fair Trade chocolate chips by Sunspire and Fair Trade cocoa powder by Equal Exchange in one of my local markets. I was surprised however that Trader Joe's, the local choice for all the liberal earth conscious organic granola munching folks out here in Seattle does not have Fair Trade chocolates on their shelves. I was disappointed.

I haven't found any Fair Trade chocolate syrup, so if any of you know where I can get some, please let me know. Otherwise, I will have to figure out how to make my own using my recently found Fair Trade cocoa powder and Alton Brown's recipe.

On top of all this, I went to see the movie "The Amazing Grace" on Sunday. This movie details the wonderful story of William Wilberforce, who lead the British Empire to abolish the slave trade back in the late 1700's - early 1800s. What an amazing man and what amazing conviction. I highly recommend this movie.

Seeing this movie lead me to further investigation on slavery. Via the International Justice Mission website, I found this exerpt which shows we are a long way from William Wilberforce's goal to end slavery.

There are actually more slaves in the world today than were extracted from Africa during 400 years of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

In fact, experts say that there are more than 25 million human beings held as slaves in our world today. These people are not slaves in a metaphorical sense – they are actual slaves held in forced servitude by other human beings.

When Wilberforce sought to abolish the slave trade in the British Empire in 1807, about 40,000 to 50,000 new slaves a year were being boarded onto British ships. While a nightmarishly large number for its day, there are far more children sold into sex slavery every year in the 21st Century -- as a many a million a year according to UNICEF – to say nothing of the millions of adults held in other forms of slavery in the mines, rock quarries, brick factories, plantations and rice mills of our world.