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The Ten Most Recent Posts By Clay Gordon

From Required Eating

If the Label Says 'Chocolatey,' Then it Ain't Serious Chocolate

Posted by Clay Gordon, May 14, 2008 at 11:00 AM

20080514-lol-cocoa.jpg

cocoaclassics.com

I was reminded while doing some grocery shopping recently just how important it is to pay attention to what you put in your cart and how you can't always trust your old stand-by brands, especially when those brands start showing up on products outside the area the company built its reputation on.

Case in point: Land O'Lakes®. I've always thought pretty highly of their dairy products and it really didn’t surprise me when I noticed their name on some bags of powdered hot chocolate mixes. What did surprise me was the phrase on the front of a bag of Land O'Lakes Triple Chocolate International Drinking Cocoa™ ... "Brimming With Chocolatey Flakes."

Just between you, me, and everyone else who is going to read this–chocolatey is shorthand for faux-chocolate. Even though the FDA legalized white chocolate in 2002 (a crime against chocolate according to most chocolate lovers) they actually do regulate the use of the word chocolate very closely; a food or ingredient must contain a minimum percentage of ingredients that actually come from a cocoa bean in order to call itself chocolate.

So, when Land O'Lakes says that their Triple Chocolate International Drinking Cocoa is Brimming With Chocolatey Flakes what they're really telling you is not to expect much actual chocolate in the product. A glance at the lengthy list of ingredients reveals just how true this is.

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5 Comments | Tagged: chocolate, drinks, hot chocolate, Land O'Lakes

From Required Eating

To Store Chocolate or Not to Store?

Posted by Clay Gordon, May 9, 2008 at 10:00 AM

"The best place to store chocolate is in your mouth."

20080509-choc.jpg

Phinney Chocolate "inclusion" bars, here with curry.

Consider this fact for a moment: more than 90 percent of Americans consume chocolate in some form every day.

Americans are obviously fascinated by chocolate. The retail chocolate business in the United States is more than $15 billion annually. That makes the United States the largest market for chocolate in the world. While it is true that Americans might not eat as much chocolate per capita as other countries, the fact that there are over 300 million chocolate eaters in the US compared with only 7.5 million in Switzerland, the country with the highest per capita consumption, lets the United States take the overall crown by a wide margin.

I have been writing about chocolate and giving chocolate appreciation classes for a decade now. One question that Americans obsess about when it comes to chocolate also happens to be one of the major differences that separates Americans from the rest of the world when it comes to appreciating fine chocolate: "What's the best way to store chocolate?" The answer I now invariably give is, "The best place to store chocolate is in your mouth."

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13 Comments | Tagged: chocolate, food storage

The Ten Most Recent Comments By Clay Gordon

From Required Eating

To Store Chocolate or Not to Store?

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

Clay Gordon at 10:02AM on 05/13/08

From Required Eating

To Store Chocolate or Not to Store?

The 90% statistic comes from a research report published by the market research firm Packaged Facts. The key to the statistic is in some form.

To get to the 90 per cent figure it is necessary to include chocolate milk, chocolate soy milk, chocolate breakfast cereal, chocolate yogurt, chocolate ice cream, chocolate ice milk, chocolate frozen yogurt, hot fudge, regular fudge, chocolate chip pancakes, chocolate chip cookies, chocolate wafer cookies, chocolate chip muffins, chocolate chip anything, chocolate snack cakes, brownies, chocolate pudding, fudge, hot chocolate, most everything with the word mocha in it, and that's before we even get around to thinking about the chocolate in candy bars, chocolate bars, and confections. A surprisingly large number of savory dishes, and not just Mexican ones, use chocolate to add depth, complexity, and richness.

When you think about chocolate that inclusively, you'll see that it's nat all that difficult to get chocolate (the sixth food group) into your diet every day - it might even be impossible to avoid if you have kids.

Hi, Cybele. Great photo of your wine fridge. I outgrew mine a long time ago and upgraded to a wine cellar down in my basement (very common here in the Northeast [basements, not wine cellars] but not so common in LA). Airtight containers are a good idea, hadn't really thought of using Pyrex but it's a very good choice for many reasons and it would be great for combating the humidity problem I face in late summer.

Clay Gordon at 4:06PM on 05/09/08

From Required Eating

Chocolate Purist: An Interview with Sam Madell

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

claygordon at 4:29PM on 01/23/08

Responses to Comments by Clay Gordon

From Required Eating

To Store Chocolate or Not to Store?

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

Clay Gordon at 10:02AM on 05/13/08

From Required Eating

To Store Chocolate or Not to Store?

Clay
Nice to have a fellow chocophile on board. For the novice, this is a must read article. Superbly done. See you back at "the ranch".

Mark

Boscompb at 9:58AM on 05/12/08

From Required Eating

To Store Chocolate or Not to Store?

I'm storing chocolate I bought in Belgium about a month ago to bring home with me when I'm done studying abroad in Spain in June. Right now I'm keeping it in a plastic bag in an odorless closet. I open the window to the room often, and luckily I think the Spanish spring is not too bad with humidity and temp usually stays between 60-80 F. I hope this will keep the chocolate quality high enough to have been worth it to bring all the way home to the US from Belgium!!

benknight at 11:31AM on 05/11/08

From Required Eating

To Store Chocolate or Not to Store?

This article made me feel so much better about the fact I shop for what I want every day, rather than have a zillion boxes from CostCo. I always feel like a 'bad woman' or a 'non foodie' becauseI can't feed the multitudes, but my rationale is that I can shop beforehand, and feed them fresh stuff!

I do, however, keep a chocolate stash (guilty lurking look). And for once I'm in the 90%

The Swiss eat even MORE chocolate than we do, I've heard.

HeartofGlass at 7:39PM on 05/10/08

From Required Eating

To Store Chocolate or Not to Store?

Clay - my husband has a wine keeper (300 bottles) and I used to have a shelf on that ... but he's gone and filled it up so I needed my own. I keep my less expensive stuff in plain old insulated ice chests in a dark closet.

cybele at 7:42PM on 05/09/08

From Required Eating

To Store Chocolate or Not to Store?

Even after the explanation, I am still blown away by that statistic. 90% really eat that much choc? I knew I was low versus other people that may consume chocolate, but being in the 10% is not what I thought.

Was really happy to see I was not the only one thinking that way.

Butrflygirly at 7:42PM on 05/09/08

From Required Eating

To Store Chocolate or Not to Store?

Thanks for explaining that stat further, Clay. It's too bad that report isn't available for free; I'd really like to have a poke around in the data. I'm still a bit perplexed, to be honest, as I don't think I've had any of the foods you listed in weeks. But perhaps I'm a very atypical American.

roskva at 6:40PM on 05/09/08