So for several months now I've had this huge problem. I'm a serious chocoholic (that's not the problem) and although I've probably been aware for a couple years at least that there are serious problems with fairness on the labor end of the chocolate trade, it wasn't until I heard the report on Marketplace earlier this year that the magnitude of the problem really became human to me.
And now I just can't bring myself to purchase non-fair trade chocolate.
If you're not familiar with the problem, the short explanation is that any chocolate you've eaten made by a major U.S. or European manufacturer may have been touched along the line by a slave worker — a child slave, likely as not. At least, the manufacturers claim they're unable to prevent that due to political volatilty in West Africa and uncertainty in their supply chains.
Pause.
You know, I don't think Wal-Mart is good for much of anything, but if we could get Wal-Mart to decide it's a bad idea that Mars can't promise me a child slave never touched that M&M anywhere along the line....well how fast do you think the manufacturers would clean up their acts? Wal-Mart so famously pressures even the largest suppliers to bend to its will. Of course, it doesn't have the best labor record itself. (Heck, all the more reason to make the chocolate manufacturers clean up theirs. Everyone gets clean in the same wash. But I digress.)
Back to my personal problem. Because I know you are worried about that. So I can't buy regular chocolate anymore. So here's what happens: I am eating, over the past several months, significantly less chocolate, probably than ever before in my whole life. But I don't want it any less.
I buy a decent amount of fair-trade chocolate, spending a small chunk of my disposable income to do so, especially from my favorite neighborhood store, The Turnip Truck. However, despite now meeting my ethical standards, I also still have my culinary ones. So I can't buy bad or flavorless fair-trade chocolate. I've found a couple things I like:
Green and Black's Hot Chocolate
Endangered Species Milk Chocolate with Peanut Butter Brittle
But I have not yet found any equivalent to Hershey's Kisses, or M&M's or some similar little chocolate snacky piece. For when you don't want a whole candy bar but just a few bites. Or for something you can put in a jar on your desk and everyone in your office can eat out of. You know, the kind of thing that creeps out the germ-o-phobes and that everyone else is delighted you keep so they can get their chocolate fix too.
Let me know if you have something I should try. For the record, every single time I go to Target and Publix, I'm reading the labels on half the chocolate there, hoping that suddenly a major brand (or even a minor one) has been able to certify itself as fair-trade. This exercise is taking up a lot of my time. I'm still waiting.
