The Bitter Side of Chocolate

Mars bars will never look the same again

review by HANDANI DITMARS

After reading Carol Off’s Bitter Chocolate: Investigating the Dark Side of the World’s Most Seductive Sweet (Random House), you may never look at a Mars bar the same way again.

In a style that mixes hard-nosed reporting, historical exploration, and sardonic wit, Off uncovers the dark side of Big Chocolate—the name she gives to the corporate offspring of the theobroma plant, which was first cultivated in ancient Meso-America by the Mayans and Aztecs.

In well-researched and often-compelling prose, Off takes the reader on a rich, darkly textured journey through the history of chocolate and delivers an inside look at the multi-billion-dollar-a-year industry.

Her thesis—that chocolate has evolved on the back of slave labour, greed, exploitation, and murder—may well leave a bitter taste in your mouth. But she makes her case so strongly and with such nuanced flavour that the book becomes as hard to put down as a bar of Toblerone.

Off begins with mouth-watering accounts of Mayan and Aztec chocolate concoctions, in tales dangerously perfumed with the whiff of human sacrifice and slave labour. She explores the conquista and mass production of cocoa by brutal Spanish overlords; the advent of Chocolate Houses in 18th century Europe; the Industrial Revolution; and, finally, the current troubles in Cote D’Ivoire, a country that produces almost half the world’s cocoa beans. Off’s story is of a commodity that rivals oil in its unrelenting path of destruction and political intrigue.

She describes 18th century French aristocratic ladies quaffing vanilla, cinnamon, and clove-scented cocoa in “delicately painted porcelain cups” as they discussed the great ideas of the day. She comments that chocolate not only indirectly caused misery for exploited Indian workers but also formed a “sensual bridge” to European culture in the mixing of Spanish and Indian cuisine.

Along the way, Off gives detailed histories of the 19th century chocolate barons—the Frys and the Cadburys—who formed part of a quasi-Quaker mafia: families that were morally upright and full of benevolent goodwill toward their factory workers while turning a blind eye to the slave labour that farmed the cocoa beans in Africa.

Off’s focus on the neo-slavery of child cocoa-bean plantation workers in the Cote D’Ivoire and the tangled web of complicity between a chaotic dictatorship with ties to the Bush regime, Big Chocolate, and dodgy Israeli “finance” and arms companies is riveting.

Off even scrutinizes “fair trade” chocolate which, she points out, while admittedly well-intentioned, is cumbersome and bureaucratic and ultimately stymied by restrictive European trade tariffs that mean developing nations will always remain suppliers of raw cocoa beans but never part of the lucrative and largely European processing industry.

Before you despair at the thought of never tasting Toblerone again, rest assured that—as Off makes clear—there are some alternatives out there.

In one chapter Off visits an organic cocoa bean co-operative in Belize (run by a cousin of none other than Buzz Hargrove), offering some hope for the future of “ethical chocolate.”

Still, Off does not flinch at exposing the reality of trying to produce “fair trade” chocolate in a world of rabid market forces. It’s a tricky, often uphill battle, but a worthy one nonetheless.

When Hadani is not eating chocolate, she travels to war zones and writes dispatches for the Independent and the CBC. Her book Dancing in the No Fly Zone chronicles her six years reporting from pre- and post-invasion Iraq.