Ten Facts about Chocolate

This being the season of chocolate, I thought I would do some research and see what interesting facts I can learn about chocolate.

1. People spend more than $7 billion a year on chocolate. The fact does not state if this is each or grouped together, but I figure that I have significantly helped to reach this total.

2. According to the fact sheet, the per capita consumption of chocolate indicates that each person consumes 12 lbs of chocolate a year. I want to know if this is my limit, like the monthly data usage for Verizon. If this is my limit, I am in big trouble--and it's only February.

3. David Gerrold consumes well over 12 lbs of chocolate a year.

4. In the movie Psycho, Hitchcock used chocolate syrup to simulate blood in the shower scene, which may be why Janet Leigh spent so much time in the shower--she wasn't screaming; she was opening her mouth to catch the chocolate!

It is a little known fact that she gained 5 lbs during the filming of that scene. (OK, I made that last part up.)

5. The first known use of chocolate was by the Mayans from about 250 to 900 A.D. They used cacao for many things, including money. 10 beans would buy you a rabbit, or a prostitute. Of course if you spent all your beans buying a prostitute, you would have no way to keep her happy because you couldn't offer her chocolate truffles.

6. The first recorded case of "Death by Chocolate" occurred in the 17th century when the Catholic church in Chiapas, Mexico issued a ban on chocolate. The townspeople refused to uphold it and the bishop was found dead from poison mixed in his own chocolate. (Even then the clergy were issuing "do as I say, not as I do orders".)

7. More than 60 million Hershey's kisses are made each day. My mother buys most of them.

8. More than twice as many women as men eat and crave chocolate (and this is a surprise to anybody?)

9. The biggest chocolate structure ever made was made in Belgium, using at least 50,000 chocolate bars.

10. People rarely buy chocolate for fat people.

So. Given #10, I have watched each year as Walt buys chocolates for the kids. We've never done gifts for Valentine's Day (such a silly custom), but sometimes a girl just wants to have an excuse for chocolate, you know.

So this year I set about deciding how I was going to treat myself. My first thoughts always turn to See's, the candy I grew up on, but I'm not sure you can actually buy See's in Davis and I certainly wasn't going to drive 20 miles to get myself a few pieces of chocolate. And besides, someone had brought a box to See's to my mother recently and I had had some there.

I thought about getting myself a candy bar, but that seemed too mundane.

I thought of going to the candy store in town but I get all flummoxed when presented with a number of choices behind a glass when someone is waiting for me to decide. And what if they weren't really good, or at least not the taste I was looking forward to.

I bought chocolate croissants for us for breakfast this morning, and served them with strawberry smoothies (Walt found two awesome cards, one from him and one from "the girls.").

I also went to the supermarket and bought a bag of Lindor truffles (which I love) to take with me to the book store.

(I wanted to read a Harlequin romance novel because I've never read one and I figured a good bodice-ripper might be just the thing to read on Valentine's day, but I couldn't find one, so I read this instead...I couldn't pass up the baby feet in the picture!)

There is one of the pen palling bloggers who has been touting her chocolate product. I keep seeing ads for it everywhere, and even sent some to Jeri and Phil for Valentine's Day.

I was recently in the supermarket and noted that it is not available on the store shelves, so I treated myself to a block of chocolate on a stick, which you immerse in a cup of hot milk and let melt for a hot chocolate treat to end the night.

I think I'm all chocolated, now, and able to go for another year before such a splurge! (But I'm dangerously close to my 12 lb limit for 2012.)

Sacrifice Is Easy, Until It's Hard

It's easy to make sacrifices for causes you believe in. It's more difficult to go all the way.

Example -- it's easy to encourage people to stop buying dogs at pet shops because 99% of pet shops buy from puppy mills. It's easy to take in cute little dogs to foster in order to save them from being killed at the Shelter and feel good about the difference you are making.

But when we learn about how cattle are treated, or the conditions under which chickens live to produce the eggs that we eat, it's more difficult to stop eating meat or to give up our omelettes in order to campaign for better conditions for food animals.

We sign petitions and write letters against the unethical treatment of dolphins who often die getting caught in the nets of tuna fishermen...but we still eat tuna sandwiches.

It's easy to protest against animal testing, unless scientists are using animals to test a drug that may be helpful to you or to someone you love.

We decry the treatment of elephants in circuses and zoos and donate to organizations like the Elephant Sanctuary, which rescues mistreated animals and lets them live out their days in a good place, but we still take our kids to see the circus, or to watch the animals at the zoo.

As altruistic as we like to believe we are, and as many good things as we do, we do have to admit that we are hypocritical in our good works.

Today I am thinking long and hard about information that I learned about today. I am going to quote liberally from this web site.

All food has some dark side we'd rather not think about. Eating meat involves killing animals, and that's not pleasant. Eating tuna kills dolphins that get caught in the fishing nets. But eating chocolate causes real human misery that can be easily stopped.

Did I really want to know about the tragedy of the making of chocolate. If I know about it, I will feel guilty unless I feel I am doing something to prevent it. But...chocolate???

Americans are the leading world consumers of chocolate. We import 729,000 tons of cocoa beans costing $15 billion annually and consume about 4 billion pounds of chocolate every year. Most of the consumer chocolate comes from Hershey and Nestle (USA) as well as Cadbury (UK), who buy their cocoa products from suppliers like Archer Daniels Midland who, in turn, secure their raw cocoa from Africa's Ivory Coast.

It's been 200 years since the abolition of slavery in most countries. But in the Ivory Coast, the slave trade is booming like never before. The UN estimates that 15,000 Malian adolescents are kept as slaves there.

Most of the enslaved child workers come from neighboring Mali, which is one of the poorest countries in the world. Young people hoping for work are easy prey for child traffickers who sell the children as cheap labor to increase the profits of large plantations.

It's easy to lure children from poverty-stricken families where parents sometimes sell their children to "recruiters" for as little as $1.50, assuming their kids will get a chance at a better life. Traffickers play on these hopes and dreams, spending up to two months in certain areas recruiting and even convincing parents to pay the passage fee from the village to the farms. "You can make a lot of money in the Ivory Coast that will let you buy a bicycle, clothes, or food for your family," is a bold but effective line that traffickers reportedly use to recruit young workers and legitimize their search. Unfortunately, the promises of being able to support your family or afford small luxuries are too good to be true.

But once they have been delivered to the cocoa plantations, it's too late. The dream of new opportunities and of helping their impoverished families soon evaporates along with their hope. Children often are made to work 12 hour days of hard labor in the hot sun. Their living conditions are crowded and often unsanitary. Often the receive no wages at all.

If you check out the web page, you will read the story of this boy, who escaped with a bunch of others. When they were captured (they almost always are), they were beaten over many days and the wounds of those children who survived, which become infected, rely on maggots to be cleaned.

It's not a pretty story. It is a terrible story.

But it's chocolate.

How dedicated am I to the eradication of the enslavement and beating of children? Am I willing to be as dedicated to saving children as I am to saving dogs?

Am I willing to give up chocolate, knowing that my contribution will make not one whit of difference, but knowing that if enough "me"s give up chocolate and tell the industry that we are doing it and why, maybe someday something will change.

Robin Romano, a photographer, extensively investigated slavery and child labor in the Ivory Coast. ... In a lecture at the Univirsity of Connecticut, he quoted one of the enslaved workers as saying, "Tell them when they are eating chocolate, they are eating my flesh."

I'm going to have to think about it. No more Hershey's kisses at my mother's? No more McDonald's Iced Mocha to keep me awake? Sacrifice when it really matters is hard... Sacrifice when you can't see that it makes any difference at all is harder.

How about you? What are you willing to give up to make a statement about stopping child slavery?

LATER: My friend Mary W. added this comment on the mirror site to this blog, Funny the World: Emily heard about this last year and was very upset that she would need to give up chocolate. We did some research and it turns out if you google fair trade chocolate, there's a fair number of sources. This one http://www.theochocolate.com/ is local to us and you can buy their chocolate at our grocery store. Much better.