Mars bars are here used as a general signifier of industrial chocolate for the sugar craving masses. This blog entry concerns the recipe of chocolate. What does it take?
Let us begin with the basic ingredient, the raw cocoa. This is how it looks:
Let chocolate reveal itself…..
Once the cocoa fruit is cut, break it open:
Now we have our cocoa fruit opened – then we remove the beans and peel them – but only after licking and sucking well the bitter-sweet niceness in which they are encapsulated:
Then what? I started reading further down the list of ingredients and it appeared that you need five hundred years of capitalist privatisation, christian colonisation and a great dose of slavery. But in the true style of a TV-kitchen we have prepared that for you, all you have to do is to keep signing the social contract they call voting every four years and all shall be well.
To be serious, though, a significant part of the millions of children traded yearly into bonded labour, slavery (and what is worse) –to keep the “free market” afloat and the shareholders happy– end up in cocoa plantations.
“In 1994, the United Nations General Assembly defined human trafficking as “the illegal and clandestine movement of persons across national and international borders. . . With the end goal of forcing women and children into. . .Economically oppressive and exploitative situations for profit…”(UNICEF). Although most people may not be aware that in the 21st century slavery still exists, reports declare that the number of slaves at present is the highest it has ever been (Free the Slaves). Presently, about 700,000 children and women are trafficked around the world annually. The UN says that profits for this trafficking amount to approximately $7 billion a year (Anti-Slavery International). “
In other words, every time we bite into a Mars bar we get their blood in our mouth. Recall that Mars was used here only as a general term – the worst enemy of the human kind (and the environment) with regards to cocoa (and other “food”) we probably find in Nestlé.
For those interested in the rest of the process – that is how to make chocolate, watch this space!
If you are interested in finding out more about cocoa slavery, this might be a place to begin. If you google around and find out that Mars is pretending to be nice, then don’t get fooled: it is greenwash.
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ummm yup, this didnt help me at all! im trying to do a project for world studies, but i need mars bars, and i dont really wanna go buy them, but i really dont wanna go make them. seems like too much work for me, a 13 year old!
can you help me find out more about which companies DO use the cocoa beans that are “produced” with slavery?
It is difficult to know for sure, since the big companies keep many secrets – but one thing you can know for sure is that whether it is serious, old fashioned slavery, bonded labour or a killing wage slavery, there isn’t that much difference (to those who have toil all day long).
For sure, if you have any moral and ethical concerns there is no way you can go near Nestlé and Cadbury products – as well as Kraft (Toblerone) and Mars bars. Those companies are involved in pure evil, but so are most corporations – since capitalism is a system of violence and marginalisation. Take for instance note of the fact that there are many more slaves in the world today than there ever were:
“Today … an estimated 27 million people across the world are being robbed of their most basic rights as workers and as humans. These are children, women, men, and families being held as modern day slaves in everywhere from the United States to Brazil, India to Russia, and China to the Ivory Coast.”
See also:
http://www.greenchange.org/article.php?id=2305
http://www.iabolish.org/slavery_in_depth/global-slavery.html
Capitalism keeps spiralling downwards, as the latest financial collapses also suggest: we’re nearing another era of fascism or the end of everything that we thought we knew and took for granted.
It is probably easier to know which companies DO NOT use slaves, such as:
http://www.kallari.com/
An Alternative to Capitalism (which we need here in the USA)
The following link takes you to an essay titled: “Home of the Brave?” which was published by the
Athenaeum Library of Philosophy:
http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/steinsvold.htm
John Steinsvold