Urban Blog

 
Women unite! We are facing a global chocolate shortage. Climate change has hurt the reliability of cocoa crops so farmers are switching to more stable ones. Demand for luxury food is also going up as the rest of the world catches up to the West. Colin Payne has more details at Inhabitat. In the meantime, let’s think about a few chocolatey problems Colin didn’t touch on.
 
Notice that I just called chocolate a luxury food. Are we really treating it like one?
 
When we load chocolate with unpronounceable ingredients so that the actual cocoa content is less than half, can we even taste the stuff?

When we pay discount prices for cocoa products, do we care whether the farmers are paid for their work? Most chocolate producers do not pay cocoa farmers adequately for their work. Some farmers give up on cocoa not because of farming problems but because buyers are willing to pay better for other cash crops.
 
If cocoa is a luxury food, why are we eating it constantly and paying low prices?
 
To live a simple, conscientious life, sometimes you have to go back to treating luxuries like luxuries. It might mean eating less chocolate or being willing to pay what it’s really worth. Simple living isn’t about paying as little as possible for everything. It’s about dedicating your resources where they matter. If you’ve simplified your budget in other ways like hanging laundry to save electricity, you may have freed up enough money to pay what food is really worth. Buying Fair Trade is one way to pay for chocolate.
 
Inhabitat has loads of articles on cocoa.
 
Resized image is CC 2.0 by Irene Scott/AusAID