…the children who struggle to produce the small delights of life in the world I come from have never known such pleasure, and most likely, never will. It’s a measure of the separation in our worlds, a distance now so staggeringly vast…the distance between the hand that picks the cocoa and the hand that reaches for the chocolate bar.Bitter Chocolate traces the fascinating origins and evolution of chocolate from the banquet table of Montezuma’s Aztec court in the early sixteenth century to the bustling factories of Hershey, Cadbury, and Mars today, revealing that slavery and injustice have always been key ingredients. The heart of the book takes place in West Africa inside the Ivory Coast—the world’s leading producer of cocoa beans—where, as Off discovers, profits from the multibillion-dollar chocolate industry fuel bloody civil war and widespread corruption. Faced with pressure from a crushing “cocoa cartel” demanding more beans for less money, poor farmers have turned to the cheapest labor pool possible: thousands of indentured children who pick the beans but have never themselves known the taste of chocolate.
Bitter Chocolate: Investigating the dark side of the world’s most seductive sweet
ReplyDeleteby Carol Off
It’s the measure of a vast gulf between the children who eat chocolate on their way to school in North America and those who must, from childhood, work to survive…between the hand that picks the bean and the hand that unwraps the candy bar.
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