Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

Whatever is planted in Bali by definition originated in South/Central America so it's probably covered in this new classification system - how is not clear.

@aharste -
This is very close to my sentiment about chocolate though it articulates the importance of connectedness in a way that I talk about in a different context. Thanks for pointing this one out.

@ilovebutter -
I have a lot of trouble with continuing the debate about serving size when it comes to chocolate for the simple reason that all of the number with respect to the chemical makeup of cacao products that might have an effect on human health are way to general. The numbers the USDA publishes on cocoa powder for example talk about two types, natural and alkalized. However, there are huge differences in chemical makeup based on the genetics of the cacao and other aspects of processing.

In order to be of any possible meaningful therapeutic value, I think it's necessary to test every single cacao product individually and report on the specifics of that product. It's also probably necessary to go beyond simple ORAC evaluation and look into much more precise analyses as, for example the presence of a specific iron cation that is involved in the metabolism of other chemical components of cacao.

For me, I think a better measure (because it is a more closely corresponding measure) than serving size would be to report antioxidant activity on a "per 100 calories" and/or "per 100 fat calories" basis. If you take a look at it that way, cocoa powder comes out far ahead of chocolate.

If you are seriously into macarons you should look out for the best-selling Macaroon Swoon by French pastry chef Stephane Glacier, MOF. Even though it's a lot more expensive than Hermes' book (it's $126.95 from Kerekes), it has sold more than 40,000 copies in France. His basil macaron with tomato gelee is the next one on my list to make.

A good online source for macarons (and madeleines) is MadMac one of whose founder is Florian Bellanger who used to be the exec PC at Fauchon here in NY.

A little bit of macaron history from the MadMac site:

The Macaron cookie was born in Italy, introduced by the chef of Catherine de Medicis in 1533 at the time of her marriage to the duc d'Orleans who became king of France in 1547 as Henry II. The term "macaron" has the same origin as the word "macaroni" -- both mean "fine dough".

The first Macarons were simple cookies, made of almond powder, sugar and egg whites. Many towns throughout France have their own prized tale surrounding this delicacy. In Nancy, the granddaughter of Catherine de Medici was supposedly saved from starvation by eating Macarons. In Saint-Jean-de-Luz, the macaron of chef Adam regaled Louis XIV and Marie-Therese at their wedding celebration in 1660.

Only at the beginning of the 20th century did the Macaron become a "double-decker" affair. Pierre Desfontaines, the grandson of Louis Ernest Laduree (Laduree pastry and salon de the, rue royale in Paris) had the idea to fill them with a "chocolate ganache" and to stick them together.

@pheel - This is my opinion and there is no need for me to present a balanced view.

@timruddell - it is a fair comment and very much central to the question at hand.

By "Fair Trade" I mean FLO - the international Fair Trade Licensing Organization (headquartered in Brussels) and the various licensees, including Trans Fair USA.

What many people fail to recognize is, that no matter its humanitarian manifesto, Fair Trade is, first and foremost, a business. Two of the reasons Fair Trade is not more widely accepted are:

a) the business model is fundamentally flawed
b) there are not enough checks and balances in the system

The business model is flawed (in my opinion) because:

a) The cost of certification is born by the co-ops being certified. There is an annual recurring fee that amounts to a kick-back which, in some cases, represents a significant portion of the premium the co-op receives for its crop. In order to be "fair" Fair Trade should bear the cost of certification.

b) All of the market risk is born by the co-ops. Fair Trade receives the same licensing fees no matter what the price of cacao is on the world market. The premium paid to the co-ops floats with the market price and goes down as the market price goes up. Above a certain price point, Fair Trade actually makes more more money than the farmers! To be fair, the prices paid to Fair Trade should reflect market economics and the differences in market economies in different countries.

c) The ultimate consumer (the chocolate eater) does not realize that most of the extra money they pay for Fair Trade certified chocolate does not go to the farmer, it goes to the manufacturer of the chocolate. If the average premium paid to the farmer is US$.10 (ten cents) per pound, and Fair Trade makes US$.10 per pound from every organization that wants to license the Fair Trade label, and on average, one pound of cocoa beans is made into two pounds of chocolate, then the premium the consumer pays for a Fair Trade chocolate should not reasonably be several dollars per pound.

d) While the certification process focuses on environmental and labor practices, it overlooks areas that would significantly increase output and quality. Training farmers in simple orchard management techniques (e.g., proper pruning) has been demonstrated to as much as double production. Training farmers to improve fermentation practices increases quality - and the prices they can command for their cocoa.

There are not enough checks and balances in the system:

Although Fair Trade requires that certified co-ops be democratically organized, it is the management of the co-op that decides what is done with the premiums: There is no mandate that the premiums get paid to the farmers. There is also the assumption that because the co-ops are democratically organized that they are not corrupt. This is not a valid assumption.

I have visited cacao plantations in four countries - Ecuador, Venezuela, Mexico, and Belize - including Fair Trade certified co-ops and Rainforest Alliance certified co-ops; and I am about to visit several more in the Dominican Republic. In the case of the Fair Trade and Rainforest Alliance certified co-ops I made two or more visits over the course of 18 months to two years. So when I say that there is corruption in the management of certified co-ops it comes from first-hand experience.

The place where I have seen Fair Trade work is when a company gets closely involved overseeing its investment in the co-op and its farmer members. That place is Belize and the Toledo Cacao Growers Association. In this case, Green and Black's has (or at least had until earlier this year when that person succumbed to pneumonia - I don't know if he has been replaced) a full-time representative in Punta Gorda overseeing the operation ensuring that the money gets distributed properly and that information about crop prices and premiums paid is accurate.

On the other hand, in the Luz y Guia co-op south of Guayaquil in Ecuador, the local national cacao growers association, Fedecade, routinely appropriates the premiums and uses them to solidify its political base - in other words the monies are used to cover the "overhead" costs of managing the co-op and little or none of the money makes it to the farmer. Or at least that was the case in 2005 when I was last there.

Part of the problem is that there just aren't enough people in the system. When I was in Belize in May, 2007 I learned that Trans Fair has one field worker for cacao for all of Latin America. That's not enough.

@tnewms - I did not use the word "widespread." I said that there are abuses, however I don't believe the figures that are used. There are over 600,000 smallholder farms in the Ivory Coast alone. If the number of field workers in Western Africa is even 100 times larger than it is for Latin America that means that each field worker would have to visit 6,000 farms to collect the data they present. However that's not the case so they're using statistical means to arrive at their figures, and, as the old saw goes, "there are lies, damn lies, and statistics."

I am not a statistician, so I don't know what the sample size would have to be in order to be statistically accurate. However I know of at least one way that the numbers can be skewed. Most of the reported abuses I have been made aware of are near the border with Mali. So, if the sample, or a large part of it, is drawn from this region then when extrapolated out across the entire country the numbers would be high.

It is also important to remember that these are family farms. In the US, every day young children participate in farm work, some of it involving threats and hazards from farm equipment and chemicals. During harvest times, these children are sometimes even be asked to work from dawn to dusk to get the harvest in - easily twelve hours. Do we consider that to be abusive child labor? If not, why not?

It is important to educate children - and many adults - about inequities in the world. It is just as important to get the facts right and, from my perspective, this campaign does not and presents the "facts" they do present in an alarmist way.

For all its shortcomings, Fair Trade provides "a" solution - not "the" solution. However, the Fair Trade movement has garnered huge institutional acceptance and there are not enough people looking at what they are doing and saying, "You Can Do Better. You Should Be Doing Better." We need to promote alternative methods and processes and figure out which ones work and which ones don't and realize that what works in one country might not work in another and not impose a single system worldwide.

I am one of the surprisingly small number of people who do not accept Fair Trade at face value and speak up. If you really want to know what's going on, I suggest you make it a point to travel to a third-world country and see the actual situation on the ground and not rely on anyone else's reports. Even mine.

Actually, I personally don't care one way or the other. However, many people do and will, so that will be an impediment to widespread adoption which is a point of clarification I should have made in the article.

For what it is worth, one of the reasons that many European manufacturers have stopped using soy-derived lecithin in their chocolates is that it is hard to find lecithin that is guaranteed GMO-free. This is done to remove a barrier to purchasing raised by customer perception irrespective of there being any rational basis for that perception.

I actually think that messy, inaccurate, selective "breading" would be tasty and aesthetically pleasing. No reason to be an ascetic and not enjoy.

cybele - I had hoped that people would cotton on to the fact that my tongue was pressed firmly to my cheek as I wrote this. No, sugar is not what makes chocolate "feminine." Chocolate itself is, of course, gender neutral; people's attitudes toward chocolate are not gender neutral. I think it's interesting (or funny or sad depending on my mood) that chocolate is not considered "suitable" somehow for gifting at Father's Day by many people. That was my motivation for penning this post. I debated for a long time adding even more tongue-in-cheek references (like 'manly man' and 'girly man' from Saturday Night Live) to make it even clearer but I tossed them into the bit-bucket for the sake of brevity.

frederika - A lot of people really like Vosges' bacon bar but, for my taste, I like to enhance my bacon with chocolate, not enhance my chocolate with bacon. It's a philosophical thing.

Erinay77 - The bar in question is the Salty Pretzel bar from The Chocolate Bar.

In the Bronx - one of the great butcher shops in NYC is Biancardi's on Arthur Ave just two doors north of the retail market. I've been going there for over 12 years and Sal (Biancardi) is my go-to guy. I get great service and I can call ahead and order anything I need - they do it just the way I ask. So ... go ahead and take the time to create a relationship with your butcher; the better they know you and you know them - and, well, it all shows up on the plate when you sit down to eat. (Looking for great fish? Cross the street and to your left - look for the blue awning that says Randazzo Brothers.)

:: Clay
creator and moderator: TheChocolateLife

benknight -
While the chocolate might not be "bad" it certainly will not be at its best after more than a month in storage at room temperature. My recommendation to you, especially if you happen to be studying in Barcelona or will be visiting there shortly before you leave, is to pick up some Spanish chocolates. Some names to look for include Enric Rovira, Oriol Balaguer, Cacao Sampaka, and Blanxart.

:: Clay

Disclosure:

I was on the same University of Chocolate trip to Ecuador in 2005 that both Sam and Langdon were on. I think I am responsible for convincing them to make the trip. I, too, was surprised at a lot of what I saw there.

Hi, Sam! Hi, Langdon!

That said, think a lot of this is the pot calling the kettle black:

Wages

The minimum wage in the US (about $15,000 for 2000 hours/year -- BEFORE TAXES) isn't enough to support a family of four these days in lots of US cities; while it may be above the official poverty line I can assure you it would be a threadbare existence.

Child Labor

While one definition of chores might be "household tasks like washing the dishes, or doing the laundry," I can assure you that the chores on a family farm in the US (and Australia - I have relatives that own a sheep station and I have been there during shearing) include tasks that involve heavy physical labor. Is AU$20 week allowance fair pay for the work being done?

We can bicker about this all we want, but we can't pretend that the problem is only in far-away places. Chances are there's an emotionally and/or sexually abused child on family farm being asked to perform "adult" chores for starvation wages (allowance) within an hour of where you are sitting as you read this. Is that morally any different from a child on a family farm in Ecuador or Costa Rica?

Sustainability

Reading Sam's account, there is no way cacao can be a sustainable commodity because of the oil required to transport it. If we take Sam's argument literally and to its illogical extreme, the TAVA factory should be in Vanuatu within horse-drawn cart distance of the village where the cacao is grown, made completely from materials sourced within a day's walk, be 100% solar-powered, and the chocolate made solely for local consumption so as not to consume any petrochemicals. Of course, a cacao/chocolate business organized along those principles wouldn't be sustainable, would it? The Grenada Chocolate Company comes remarkably close except that they only source 25% of their power from their solar installation and the finished chocolate has to be shipped off the island.

Fair Trade Often Isn't

At the risk of being very non-PC, FLO is a bunch of white people in air-conditioned offices in Europe telling non-white farmers toiling in the tropics what's fair. Come again? How come the farmers didn't get to decide what was fair?

Certification Programs, Useful as They Are, All Share the Same Basic Flaws

The farmer or the co-op has to pay a certification fee. Certification organizations are businesses and I think they should pay the farmers rather than charge them. It is the cost of certification, which is borne by the farmers and co-ops, that is the largest barrier to widespread certification. After how many years how many Fair Trade/RA certified cocoa co-ops are there?

The farmer bears all the risk. FLO takes a fixed fee per unit irrespective of the price of the commodity involved. The fee FLO takes should float along with the commodity so that they are sufficiently motivated - as a business - to do what's necessary to grow the business. Right now the economics are entirely artificial and therefore not sustainable.

All certification programs assume that all actors in the supply chain are honest. Come again? We don't assume that our governments are honest so why should we assume that some cooperative in Ecuador is above reproach?

In Conclusion:

While I agree that certification programs are better than not having certification programs, they are only one approach. I agree that rather than arguing over the relative merits of one approach over another, the goal should be to try as many things as possible to see what works best. What works best in one country may not work in another. There are no simple answers, there is no magic bullet.

Where I do applaud Sam and Langdon, from what I have seen of their trips to Vanuatu, what I have heard them say, and what I recognize as their determination and commitment to make it work is that they are taking personal responsibility for implementing their position; they are walking the walk, not just talking the talk. Mott Green (founder of the Grenada Chocolate Company) falls into that category, too. They are not handing off their responsibility to some third-party certification organization which has different business objectives. They are living their ethics, day in and day out.

In the long run, I think that's what's necessary - taking personal and/or corporate responsibility. Unfortunately that's expensive, so public companies, ever mindful of their share price, will never be allowed to do the right thing by stock market analysts who punish the share price if earnings are as little as a penny under expectations. They will always abdicate responsibility to NGOs and claim that they are doing the "right" thing. Not.

:: Clay
www.discoverchocolate.com