Angles ’n’ Attitudes

Xocoatl

William Bothwell I n 20 years, said a news report, with the rising cost of cocoa beans, a 100 gram chocolate bar could cost $50. At least, that may mean the end of those chocolate bunnies that have nothing to do with the meaning of Easter. By comparison, 20 years ago a gallon (4.5 litres) of gasoline cost $1.14. To put that into perspective, the average (not the median) Canadian annual income at the time was $29,500.
We know that our costly petroleum dependence has enriched the sinister and sensuous sheiks of Araby, once featured romantically in productions like Kismet and songs such as “Stranger in paradise”. Rudolph Valentino and Vic Damone could not, of course, show us everything that Middle Eastern potentates and martyrs expect to enjoy in a voluptuous paradise that might have been designed for Signor Berlusconi. Silvio’s earthly realm of a United Italy, by the way, celebrates its sesquicentennial today, March 17.
Cocoa beans, the raw material from which chocolate is made, were first harvested by the aboriginal Maya of Central America. The Aztecs gave them the name ‘xocoatl’. The yellow pods in which they form are the size of a buttermilk squash. They cling to the trunks of the trees from which workers cut them to harvest seeds the size of almonds that are held in a moist pulp.
After a process of fermentation the beans, when ground, spiced or sweetened, become the seductive confection we call chocolate. Five centuries ago the Spanish conquistadors were introduced to a brown liquid that native people claimed was relaxing and reduced fatigue. It was also said to have various curative powers.
The Europeans were surprised to find that cocoa beans were also a means of exchange in Meso- America. Four of them bought a chicken or a rabbit; 100 could purchase a slave. The gold and silver that the Spanish coveted were used by the “West Indians” mainly for decoration, thus their willingness to part with them to the newcomers.
When cocoa was introduced to Europe it quickly became popular. Aristocrats ‘took chocolate’, like coffee, at breakfast. The beans were sold with herbs in apothecary shops. Agricultural mass production in Central America gradually destroyed the broad-leafed trees that needed filtered jungle light and lush ground covering around them. Colonial growers mistakenly provided sunlit and cultivated fields. Production finally moved to Africa.
For the past century the chief source of cocoa has been the tropical West coast area of that continent, particularly the British Gold Coast (now the Republic of Ghana) and the Côte d’Ivoire. That misruled and debt-ridden former French colony once produced more chocolate wealth for foreign entrepreneurs than for the native population. The present dictatorship there guarantees that an end to worker unrest is nowhere in sight. As with other African problems, it awaits a revolutionary solution.
Carol Off, a CBC Radio reporter, published a 2006 book, Bitter Chocolate, that tells the sad story of the 19th Century European exploitation of sub-Saharan Africa. Joseph Conrad’s 1902 Heart of Darkness had lifted the curtain on Leopold of Belgium’s royal plundering of the Congo and what one critic called “the exposure of the white man’s civilised inhumanity”.
The villainy of ivory hunters and profiteers from cocoa production added to that of the old slave trade. To make things worse, native workers were subjected to deplorable conditions and were supervised by unsympathetic managers brought in from rival tribal areas who exacerbated the other problems.
As early as 1825 a young Dutchman, Coenraad Van Houten, had developed a process for roasting beans in a way that separated the bitter fat and made the pulverised product quickly and economically soluble in water or milk. Suchard and Sprüngli of Switzerland were soon competitors.
In England, Joseph Fry of Bristol blended the cocoa powder with ‘cocoa butter’ to make the first hard chocolate bars. Then bite-sized bonbons were popularised by the Lindt and Tobler interests.
Enter the Rowntrees of Yorkshire and the London Cadburys. Both families built model communities in which their employees could live. Those Quaker family enterprises pioneered social welfare and workers’ rights. That, however, was not the good fortune of equatorial farm workers, few of whom to this day can afford a chocolate bar even at 2011 prices.
In the USA, Milton S. Hershey, a maker of caramel confections, saw chocolate making machinery at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. He brought to North America a Swiss process developed by Henri Nestlé for blending milk powder with ground cocoa beans to make ‘milk chocolate’. He called himself ‘the chocolate king of America’ and founded his own model community, Hershey, Pennsylvania, dubbed “the sweetest place on Earth”, disregarding Cadbury’s Bournville, near Birmingham. Our neighbours to the south are fond of their superlativesthe greatest, tallest, richest, sweetest and so on.
A chocolate maker produces the basic product; a chocolatier creates the confectionery. The premier Canadian chocolatier is Ganong Bros. of New Brunswick. Most of us remember Neilson’s of Toronto, now subsumed in the Kraft/Cadbury conglomerate.
When inter-tribal unrest and the demand for freedom from European rule became common after World War 2 and, later, when ecological change became part of the equation, cocoa production took a dive.
Euro-American manipulation continued. The Hershey people bought billions of tons of cocoa beans, held them for a time and then dumped them on the market. The price of cocoa beans tumbled but the cost of chocolate products continued to rise. Smart business.
The chocolate-company-eatchocolate company age followed and competition will get more vicious. The recent acquisition of Cadbury by Kraft Foods forced what the Aztecs called xocoatl, “the food of the gods”, into an undistinguished blended family with Kraft Dinner and with Cheez Whiz (500 grams $3 in 1991, $6.20 now).
Watch for higher prices and lower cocoa percentages in chocolate bars. Don’t let your children get too fond of them. As adults they will have to pay much more for chocolate, all other foodstuffs, motor fuel and the energy electricity and natural gas to light, heat or cool the houses in which they will live. Let them eat cake.