Life’s Like a (Shrinking) Box of Chocolates
I read in the Metro paper this morning that there’s a looming global chocolate shortage.
Everyone repeat after me: Noooooooo!
Apparently growers in Africa (where most cocoa is from) don’t want to grow cocoa any longer as the trees take three years to mature and cocoa planters get paid less than a dollar a day to farm the stuff. Sounds like a raw deal to me, I can’t say I blame them. The article projected that in twenty years chocolate will be “as rare and expensive as caviar.” Gads, that would really stink.
What can we do about this? Maybe pay the African growers living wages for a start. If I have to shell out 25 cents more for a Snickers bar, I’ll do it. I really hope this doesn’t start a new trend of chocolate hoarding. I can imagine the very wealthy buying walk-in refrigerators and converting their extra guest room in some tax-sheltered country to a chocosafe.
Now’s the time for a sequel to Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory about the forthcoming lack of the sweet brown stuff. I can just see it: Charlie (Wonka having gone to the big candy shop in the sky — I know it’s sad but the original flick came out forty years ago, he’d be older than Granpa Joe by now), comes up with a foolproof formula for synthetic chocolate that tastes as good as the real thing (made from…I don’t know eco-styrofoam peanuts?) and the Slugworth company will stop at nothing to get it. That’s all I got, someone else will have to flesh it out.
A world without chocolate — or worse, a world where only the very rich have chocolate — would be a crummy place to live. Hopefully someone will come up with a solution. In the meantime, I’m savoring every morsel.
Robin Eisgrau
