Simple pleasures... and fair trade chocolate

This week is my husband's birthday, so I made chocolate chip cookies. Homemade chocolate chip cookies at our house are fairly rare and rather expensive, because I've given up on the usual chocolate chips you buy at any grocery store. The company that produces them buys cocoa without caring about anything but passing on low prices to consumers. The only way I can be sure that human trafficking, civil war and child slavery aren't ingredients in my cookies is by buying fair trade chocolate chips, which are usually at least four to six times more expensive than the other kind.

Up to five years ago, I was an oblivious chocolate lover, never giving a thought to labour practices in equatorial countries that produce cocoa. But as Carol Off, CBC journalist and author of Bitter Chocolate: Investigating the Dark Side of the World's Most Seductive Sweet (2006, Random House Canada, ISBN 0679313192) says, "as consumers, what we want is cheap goods. But what we should know is that when we consume something that is cheap, generally someone is paying for it someplace else. That's the message about chocolate."

When Lee and I attended Mark A. Burch's workshop on Voluntary Simplicity and Nonviolence the year before Carol's book came out, my eyes were opened to many things I really didn't want to see. When I heard about children -- the same age as my girls -- addicted to drugs and forced to work on chocolate plantations to the point of exhaustion and death, I almost cried. That and many other violences built into our consumer culture made the weekend workshop tough to take in, and I carried the grief and guilt twins around for about a week afterward. But as Mark says, guilt is only good for about ten seconds, and then you have to do something with it. So I did my own research and made a lot of changes, one being that I began to buy fair trade certified chocolate whenever it could be found.

The cost of fair trade is what chocolate really should cost in terms of paying its producers an equitable wage for what they do. Fair Trade also means, usually, that farmers employ more organic methods to grow cocoa berries, leaving soil, air and water in better condition than non-organic growers do.

Chocolate used to be a luxury afforded only by the wealthy on a regular basis. And when you pay the price for fair trade chocolate ($19.75/kg at Earth's General Store), it becomes a precious commodity once again. My girls understand about the problems with cheap chocolate. Suzanna even did a school presentation on it. We've stopped giving out mini-chocolate bar Halloween treats. We never gobble an entire chocolate bar all at once any more. One small piece, savoured and appreciated, is enough. These days, I make ginger snaps, orange shortbreads and oatmeal cookies a lot more often, saving fair trade chocolate chips for special occasions.

I suppose I should also be writing to grocery stores, governments and chocolate giants about refusing sources of tainted chocolate, but then I should also be advocating fair labour practices around almost every item I purchase. It gets overwhelmingly complex when I think about it. But being someone who wants to keep things simple, the simplest thing I can do is vote with my purchasing power, buy fair trade, and share what I've learned with others so they can do likewise. And you can join me!