Controversy about the taste of $10 chocolate bars produced by Rick and Michael Mast in the Bronx, USA, suggests kids throughout the globe might enjoy their own chance to sample the world's chocolate.
Mast's chocolates claim to be made from paste of melted chocolate from Valrhona, a company chef Alberic Guironnet founded in France in 1922. The Mast bars come in three flavors: dark, almond, and goat's milk.
Other expensive chocolates, often found at airport newspaper shops, are Scharffen Berger Extra Dark and Green & Black's Dark.
Less expensive chocolates can be found in a bag of Nestle's morsels used to make chocolate chip cookies, Hershey's bars, and Mars bars.
Serrv (serrv.org/chocolate), a fair trade nonprofit organization, provides a wide variety (dark, dark with mint, dark with raspberries, milk chocolate with hazelnuts, etc.) of Kosher-certified, 3 and a half oz. $3 bars. Serrv bars use cocoa produced by the Kuapa Kokoo cooperative in Ghana, Africa, which strives to increase the earnings of cocoa farmers and to run programs designed to bolster the confidence of women cocoa farmers.
While sampling a piece or two of chocolate candy or building replicas of the Leaning Tower of
Pisa or Great Wall of China out of chocolate (like those shown in the February, 2016 issue of National Geographic Kids), there are a few things about chocolate to consider. Chocolate was a popular food of the Maya people who lived in what is now Mexico and Central America over a thousand years ago. The Mast brothers say they learned small-batch chocolate making by studying methods used by Mayans.
Fast forward to 2015. Ghana and the Cote d' Ivoire account for at least half of the world's cocoa that goes into chocolate. Much of the rest comes from Brazil, Nigeria, and Cameroon. In Africa cocoa bean farmers are not being replaced by younger farmers, because the income they earn keeps them below the $2 a day global poverty level. Ghana's cocoa farmers can earn as little as 84 cents a day; in the Ivory Coast, earnings may be 50 cents a day. A video produced in mid-2014 showed how excited cocoa farmers in the Ivory Coast were when, for the first time in their lives, they tried chocolate made from the beans they grew and harvested.
The 2015 Cocoa Barometer report (cocoabarometer.org) issued by non-governmental organizations describes how the concentration of 80% of the cocoa-to-chocolate retail chain in a few companies provides no incentive to raise cocoa farmer incomes, to end child labor, to increase crop diversification, to improve infrastructure, or to provide market information for farmers.
(Chocolate also is the subject of the earlier post, "Chocolate's Sweet Deals.")
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