Chocolate by Sarah Moss (ebook voice reader .TXT) 📕

plantations from Brazil to their colonies in West Africa. Once the slave trade had been officially abolished, it was no longer viable across the Atlantic, but at its source in West Africa it was still functional because it was internationally invisible. Scandal rocked the chocolate industry in Britain in the early 1900s after British journalist Henry Woodd Nevinson travelled in 1905 to Portuguese colonies in São Tomé and Angola to investigate rumours that practices of slavery still existed. Cadbury, who had long been buying cacao from São Tomé, had been investigating the rumours but when Nevinson’s report – and photographs – were published first in Harper’s Monthly Magazine and then in his book A Modern Slavery, the firm was openly accused of knowingly participating in slavery. Following a 1908 editorial in the London Standard that accused Cadbury’s of hypocrisy for continuing to buy São Tomé cocoa, Cadbury Bros. sued for libel. In the ensuing trial, Cadbury argued that while it had been aware of labour abuses, its position as a purchaser of cocoa is what gave it any power at all to help improve conditions (lines of argument that would become familiar in arguments over divestment from South Africa much later in the century). The jury found in favour of Cadbury, but the publicity was far from all good, and the award of one farthing (a quarter of a penny) in damages hardly showed confidence in the firm’s altruism.

Banania poster,

What might be called a last, schizoid gasp of chocolate’s long nineteenth century is visible in a Dutch ad campaign from 1958. The advert begins with the standard admonition to mothers to feed their children ‘pure’ and ‘nutritious’ chocolate: ‘MOTHER, give them more than something tasty. Give them something nutritious at the same time ... Venz chocolate sprinkles. Then they get pure chocolate – full of easily digestible fats, proteins and calcium.’ Opposite the image of the product–complete with its picture of the happy child on the label – there is an image of Indonesian natives, gently and generously offering up their harvest of cacao pods. As usual, this advert covered up a more complex relationship. This vision of maternal/colonial benevolence came ironically – but probably not coincidentally – in the same year that the Indonesian government nationalized Dutch businesses and the Dutch were formally ejected from their former colony. As in so many other circumstances, chocolate was called in – symbolically at least – to smooth over and ‘sweeten’ bitter feelings.

4The Chocolate Box

By the end of the Second World War, chocolate had acquired its familiar forms and most of its familiar associations. In the second half of the twentieth century chocolate has become ubiquitous in the Western world, an everyday purchase for millions of people. Particularly as firms try to come up with new ways of marketing this familiar product, the meanings and associations of chocolate have continued to twist and turn. While chocolate manufacture and consumption has spread globally, national styles and patterns of consumption have remained strong. The origins of chocolate, particularly its Latin American roots, which were first exoticized and then mostly erased over the course of the long nineteenth century, have returned on the tides of artisanal authenticity and concern over fair trading. To the extent it had ever disappeared, chocolate’s image as a decadent indulgence has resurfaced – with both positive and negative connotations – particularly in its associations with women.

Economically speaking, the main development since the end of the war has been increased globalization and consolidation of the chocolate industry. Because of the climate conditions it favours, cacao is still restricted to the parts of the tropical zone to which it had spread in the nineteenth century.The interruption of chocolate supply and demand caused by the Second World War was followed by the emergence of a larger global marketplace and increasingly powerful multinational firms that came to penetrate national markets. Four firms, Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, Barry Callebaut and Nestlé, now handle over half of the world’s cacao beans. Most of these cater to industry, and supply a large amount of chocolate couverture, which is melted and used as a component in making a wide range of chocolate confections. Furthermore, via mergers and acquisitions, most of the familiar firms that defined chocolate production and marketing 100 years ago are now brands or subsidiaries in major multinational corporations. US-based giant Kraft Foods, for example, now owns Suchard, Côte d’Or and Baker’s, among many others. Beyond these major industrial suppliers who go largely unnoticed by consumers, certain individual chocolate products like Mars bars are recognized the world over (even though they actually vary in form from country to country). Ironically, what most Americans recognize as one of their most quintessential national products, the chocolate chip, is most commonly associated with the Swiss giant Nestlé.

Confectionery on display in a shop.

The ‘globalization’ of chocolate is not always what it appears. Hershey’s chocolate, which many Americans still view as standard, has a slightly sour flavour that has never caught on in most places outside the US. When Britain joined what was then the European Community in 1973, its chocolate with high milk and vegetable fat content did not meet the criteria to be sold as chocolate, and names such as ‘household milk chocolate’ (stressing, as ever, connections with milk and domesticity) or even ‘vegelate’ were mooted. The controversy over British chocolate was only resolved in 2003, when the EU ruled that other countries were not allowed to label British chocolate as ‘chocolate substitute’ due to its vegetable fat content. Beyond these regional differences, there are also large portions of the world where chocolate is not the ubiquitous flavour or form it is in the European and anglophone world. In Trinidad, once home to some of Cadbury’s most important plantations, some natives still drink what they call ‘cocoa tea’: a drink made from chocolate press cake much like what was consumed throughout much of the nineteenth century. In Africa, where the majority of the