CHOCOLATE - The Secret Ingredient
Chocolate – Most of us absolutely love sitting down to a lovely piece of chocolate at the end of a busy working day. Dark chocolate more specifically is full of free radical fighting anti-oxidants, which are fantastic for our health. Aside from that, the sensation of eating chocolate releases our ‘feel good’ hormones, serotonin and dopamine, which at the end of a stressful day are just what we need!
However, have you actually sat back and thought about ‘where’ that delicious chocolate comes from? Yeah yeah it comes from a cocoa bean we all know that, but WHERE was it harvested? And by who? Well, I was teaching a SOSE class the other day and we watched a documentary on chocolate and child slavery. As we live in beautiful Australia, it is easy for us to remain in our little bubble of sunshine and rainbows and be naïve to some of the horrible things that are going on around the world. This documentary was produced by ‘CNN’ and is an initiative titled ‘The Freedom Project – Ending Modern Day Slavery’. It is quoted that currently, up to ‘75% of the world’s cocoa beans are grown in small farms in West Africa. In the Ivory Coast alone, there are an estimated 200,000 children working the fields, many against their will, to create chocolate enjoyed around the world’ (http://thecnnfreedomproject.blogs.cnn.com). Essentially, these child slaves can be as young at 6 years old and are being taken away from their families and forced to work on cocoa farms. They do not go to school and are stripped of the opportunity to have an education, all because we demand to have our mars bar exactly when we want it.
Unfortunately, all of this comes back to money. Traders, processors, exporters and manufacturers all demand their margin so they are able to make a profit. Child slavery is a sacrifice that has been made, a corner that has been cut in order for people to make their way through life.
In the past decade this issue has been one of global attention and corporations such as Nestle, Ferrero and Cadbury (to name a few) have been questioned as to what they are going to do about the problem of ‘unfair chocolate’. Initiatives, which include getting the children to school and developing a ‘sustainable’ future for the cocoa industry, are of slow progress. However, if we become more ‘mindful’ and aware of where our chocolate comes from, perhaps decide not to buy that extra kit-kat because a child harvested it. Maybe together we can make enough of a difference to the chocolate economy that prices must rise in order to pay ‘adults’ a fair wage to work on the cocoa farms instead of children. Let’s put our own selfish indulgences aside so we can help provide the children of West Africa with the opportunity to gain an education and pave the future they have dreamed about.
For more information on this, visit:
http://edition.cnn.com/2014/02/13/world/africa/cocoa-nomics-from-bean-to-bar/index.html
