The contemplative practices have forced me to reconcile with the fact that I take part in the food system, a system that profits off of child labor and sustains the inequalities between multi-billion companies and farmers in the Global South. This became more apparent to me through the contemplative practice on chocolate.
Before the contemplative practice, I saw myself as a chocolate fiend. Coming from a transnational family, my mother usually enlists her siblings for brands of chocolates uncommon in the States. With an abundant amount of chocolate in my house, I associated chocolate with family and a quick sugar pick me up, but through the practice, I realized at the heart of each bite is the cocoa bean.
A picture I took of some of the chocolate in my house
A cocoa bean
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Make Chocolate Fair reports that about 90% of farmers’ incomes from the Ivory Coast depend on the cocoa bean which is to be an annual average of $2,400 for a typical farm family. This compensation is microscopic compared to the total global retail sales of the chocolate industry which was reported to be 98 billion dollars in 2016.
The percentage breakdown of share in the value chain of chocolate production.
Source: https://makechocolatefair.org/issues/cocoa-prices-and-income-farmers-0
Not only is the pay insufficient for the actual value of the extensive labor, but the chocolate industry is infamous for utilizing child labor. Many broken promises have been made by companies like Hershey and Nestle to eradicate the use of child labor that fall flat due to the complexity of reasons such as poverty, lack of farm-level supervision, and the reverberation of civil war within the area. Many of these reasons for companies’ shortcomings are also weak links within the greater living food system that spans beyond chocolate.
While listening to Karen’s voice pull me into a state of self-awareness about the different parts of the commodity chains within the production of chocolate, I began to notice the bitterness of chocolate.
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