Tag: chocolate

Child Labor – Some Chocolate Has A Dark Side To It
IMPACT, TOP FOUR

Child Labor – Some Chocolate Has A Dark Side To It

Chocolate makes for a perfect gift, a comforting snack and even a health food, thanks to its plentiful antioxidants. Rumor has it that it might even work as an aphrodisiac. It is no surprise, then, that the chocolate industry garners billions of dollars each year. However, there is also a dark side to chocolate. As a cultural anthropologist who has done years of research on food and drink in Europe and North America, I have come to understand the close relationship between culinary traditions and social inequality. In a course I teach on the anthropology of food, chocolate is among the numerous food commodities that I cover in the course as an index for understanding social class relations locally and globally, including human trafficking. Exploitative labor, especially child labor, is...
Is Chocolate The Temptation Of Sin
SOCIETY

Is Chocolate The Temptation Of Sin

Temptation lives across the street in a two story contemporary building where the chocolatier resides. His passion and zest for cocoa makes his heartstrings sing. His lust for creating passion drives him each day back into the boiling cauldrons. Melting and mixing the exquisite aromas flutter into the air wafting out into the streets below. Mouths salivate as their nostrils pick up the sweet scent sliding by on the airfoils of the day. Imaginations fire up pondering the delicate treats the chocolatier has conjured up for the display. He has no menu but there are plenty of pictures hanging around taunting and teasing every patron's brain. The cocoa is mixed, pounded and patted, melted and shaped, then sprinkled, and swirled until it is molded into chocolate treats. The treats come out ...
The Fermenting Microbes – Chocolate’s Secret Ingredient That Make It Taste So Good
THE TRENDS

The Fermenting Microbes – Chocolate’s Secret Ingredient That Make It Taste So Good

Whether baked as chips into a cookie, melted into a sweet warm drink or molded into the shape of a smiling bunny, chocolate is one of the world’s most universally consumed foods. Even the biggest chocolate lovers, though, might not recognize what this ancient food has in common with kimchi and kombucha: its flavors are due to fermentation. That familiar chocolate taste is thanks to tiny microorganisms that help transform chocolate’s raw ingredients into the much-beloved rich, complex final product. In labs from Peru to Belgium to Ivory Coast, self-proclaimed chocolate scientists like me are working to understand just how fermentation changes chocolate’s flavor. Sometimes we create artificial fermentations in the lab. Other times we take cacao bean samples from real fermentations “in the ...