Growing up, Halloween never ignited the same enthusiasm in me as it did in my classmates. This may have had something to do with the fact that I spent roughly 99 percent of my time in grade school trying to blend in. To my great displeasure, everyone stood out on Halloween-even me. Coming to school in a highlighter-yellow Big Bird suit renders all efforts at invisibility pointless, even when you’re surrounded by mutant ninjas, gypsies, and genies. And since my candy was confiscated shortly after arriving home, there was hardly anything to look forward to.
But I grew up, and I bore no old grudges against a holiday that makes my mother and most other people happy.
Recently, though, I realized just how much chocolate is bought and consumed around this time of year, and, more importantly, how little of it is fair trade. Never, in all my years of torturous trick-or-treating, did anyone ever drop a bar of Scharffen Bergen or Green and Black’s chocolate into my plastic jack-o-lantern. Considering the incredible cost one would incur giving that stuff away for free, who could blame them? Most Halloween booty-M&M’s, Hershey’s, Reese’s, Kit Kats-excite my taste-buds just as much as they aggravate my conscience.
All chocolate is not made equal. Aside from the variations in taste, there is also the moral consideration of where it comes from and how it gets to us. Cocoa beans come from a variety of different tree species, the most common of which is the Forastero tree, grown in areas of Brazil, Indonesia, Latin America, and the Ivory Coast. Farmers in the Ivory Coast export the greatest number of cocoa beans worldwide, accounting for 43 percent of the world’s supply. Most of those farmers, however, have never tasted or even seen the final product. These small-scale landholders are forced to sell their product to deceitful middlemen at unreasonably low prices. In order to lower production costs and balance the scales, these farmers often keep their children out of school to help cultivate the cocoa beans and may eventually begin to rely on the slave labor of trafficked children.
Unknowingly, most Americans support this child labor every day, or at least every week, when they wake up to a steaming cup of hot chocolate or indulge in a square of dark chocolate, 60 to 80 percent of which is pure cocoa. When we top our frozen yogurt at Leo’s with mini M&M’s and Reese’s pieces, we too, in our own small way, give indirect support to these injustices. Perhaps there truly was a time when the occasional piece of chocolate was as innocent and as pure as it was in the world of Willy Wonka and Charlie Bucket, but that time has clearly passed.
I do not propose to spoil your Halloween entirely. There are still plenty of sugar-packed, cocoa-free products with which to celebrate. My personal favorites are Twizzlers and the ever-festive candy corn. And if cocoa-free products just don’t do it for you, head to Whole Foods, Trader Joes, or Dean and Deluca to get some organic, fair-trade, truly guilt-free goodness.
Even if you can’t quite wean yourself off of M&M’s and Hershey’s all at once, you can still help support fair trade products by donating to organizations like TransfairUSA, The fair trade Foundation, and Global Exchange. You can also get involved in Global Exchange’s “reverse trick-or-treating,” by requesting a free package of fair-trade chocolate and flyers to hand out this Halloween. Global Exchange is funding this effort for the second year in a row and hopes to get more kids and other trick-or-treaters involved in using Halloween as an opportunity to educate their neighbors about fair trade, rather than to simply collect candy. By putting pressure on non-fair-trade companies, you can help give them their just dessert. Ultimately, it’s a small price to pay for the lives of others.
