A few Lents ago, I gave up chocolate for six excruciating weeks. On Easter morning, my kids awoke me with a chocolate Easter bunny as big as my foot. I sat up in bed and devoured the whole thing right then and there--despite the discomfort of nature calling.
Pathetic, no? That’s how much I adore chocolate.
Thus, when I skimmed a horrifying article about the origins of chocolate almost a year ago, I chose not to dwell on it.
My friends Mark and Liz, after reading the same newspaper story, chose otherwise. They educated themselves on the topic, wrote legislators and vowed to eat only “innocent” chocolate.
At a dinner party, I self-consciously apologized to Liz as I nibbled a truffle. “Oh, please,” she forgave without piety. “There are a zillion causes I should take on that I don’t. This just happens to be the one that I did.”
A zillion causes, indeed. We’d go hungry and naked if we thought too much about how our products got from there to here.
So on I went, willfully ignoring that ugly information filed in a far corner of my brain until New Year’s Eve, when my son accompanied me to buy snacks for our small fete.
“Let’s get some Paul Newman chocolate chip cookies; Liz and Mark and their kids don’t eat most brands of chocolate,” I casually remarked.
Suddenly, I was stuck explaining an issue that I didn’t totally understand myself. By the time I’d finished, I felt foolish about all that “guilty” chocolate inhabiting our pantry. And my pure-hearted ten year old felt appalled.
“I’m never eating that kind of chocolate again!” Matt decided on the spot. Shamed by his instantaneous indignation, I promised to join him in his boycott.
Last week, Matt brought home an essay he wrote in class about his New Year’s resolution:
“At the same time we sit at home watching TV and eating chocolate, (west) African children are picking cocoa beans in the blazing sun! My resolution is to not eat any chocolate made from companies that use children as workers. A solution is to eat “Paul Newman” cookies, which get their chocolate from Costa Rica. This will not only change my life, but may help the children. I will try to keep this resolution so kids do not work eighty hours a week.”
