The Secret History of Chocolate: Spooky Week #1

someone who really loves chocolate is really really bleak. Yeah, but before we get into exactly how bleak it is, uh, we're gonna look at sort of the early history of chocolate. So most so, okay, there's there's a lot of disagreement about exactly how old chocolate is. I've seen sources that say three thousand BC. I've seen sources that say seventeen hundred BC. The seventeen hundred BC is the one that's pretty consistent. It seems like the Olmecs had something like chocolate.

That's it. It's a sort of bitter drink that they sometimes to put vanilla or red pepper.

seems to use it for ritual purposes. Yeah. I think at some point the I think it was the the Olemex at some point we're doing these like they were making fermented alcohol out of so so normally with with chocolate, you're using like the cocoa beans, right, but there's like a flesh and the flute fruit around the beans and they were making like a fermented thing out of that, and I don't know, I leave as an exercise to the reader with you count that as chocolate. But the

sort of conventional story goes okay. So like several thousand years after the Olmes, the Assex and the Mayans using it for ritual purposes and the story basically is okay. So Herman Cortes drink chocolate with stick King Maktazuma. Cortes goes, this is bitter as shit and sucks ass, but he brings it back to Europe anyways, and in Europe they mix it with sugar and also with honey, but mostly with sugar, and it becomes, you know, it becomes very

very popular drinking Europe. And at some point, this is like the eighteen forty so like like takes some about like three hundred years to figure out how to make cocoa powder. But once you have cocoa powder, you can It's not it ceases to be bitter like it in the in the way that it sort of is naturally.

define it today. And that thing is slavery. Yeah, yes, yeah, And you know this is slavery is a very sort of important part of the history of chocolate because slavery is what transforms the older ritual chocolate used by a bunch of different indigenous societies for several thousand years, into modern chocolate. And this is this is a point that I want to make because most most histories of chocolate tend, you know, when they're trying to find the origin of

modern chocolate, they go, oh, it's chocolate bar. And I think they're wrong. I think they're very wrong. I think the distinct European innovation of chocolate is to add sugar to it. Yes, and this raises the very bleak question where does sugar come from? And the answer, of course is slavery. Sugar is one of the primary crops of slave economies in both the colonies and the West Indies.

It is one of the key elements of the so called triangle trade where you know, you may have you probably have learned this in school, but you know, for people, for people who've been out of school for a long time. So the triangle trade is Europe. Since manufacturer goes to Africa. It trades that fruit enslaved people and slave people taken from Africa to the colonies and sometimes to America, sometimes

to the colonies in the West Indies. Uh. And then they take you know, the products of slavery from plantations back to Europe. And that's you know, rice, indigo, tobacco, cotton, molasses, rum, and critically sugar back to Europe. Actually, wait, did did they Did they teach you the triangle trade?

sort of fields around the study of slavery. And one of his arguments is that the British industrial proletariat is fueled by slave sugar because the sugar is a stimulant that you know, they're putting it in tea, which another stimulant. They're putting it in whatever they drink, and this is a thing that allows them to keep working for longer than they otherwise would have been able to.

You know they do this with tobacco too. You haven't you have something that you're only supposed to use in fairly small amounts for ritual purposes, right, And the Europeans are like, okay, but what if we purified the shit out of it and they just ate it literally every day?

plus slavery. It is a fusion of coca, which is an indigenous ritual drink sees is a part of the wages of colonialism by the European empires, and sugar a slave crop that drove the colonial prontation economy. And you know, you might say me, you know you're being harsh here, right, even if we accept your argument about chocolate and the sixteen hundred, surely, surely that's not sure. Now, wasn't wasn't.

in sugar production five hundred years ago. And this is one of the sort of stunning things about you know, the miss of capitalism, right, which is that, Okay, capitalism has had four hundred you know, I'm gonna give them a bit of credit and be like, Okay, I don't know, like I'm gonna I'm gonna give capitalism a little bit of credit and give it only was being responsible for four hundred years of this and not five hundred years

of this because you know, whatever complicated arguments about whether the capitalist transition is in the fifteen hundred and sixty hundreds, but you know, they have had four hundred years to solve the problem of slavery on Hispaniola. Has it done that? No, it is there is still slavery on the island of Fifthpaniola four hundred years later. We're going to be discussing in a second. Still the best possible thing here is that maybe and this is it is arguable, maybe last

year they're stopped being slaves there. Now I don't even think that. I don't think that's true. And we're going to get into that, but you know, before before we sort of launch into you know what, like whether or not there are so slaves on Tecker replantations, in the Dominican Republic. If you have had four hundred years to solve a problem and you have not solved it, you are never going to solve it.

show at least a bit. We've arrived here at one of the real weaknesses of both sort of liberal and radical accounts of how the capitalist economy works, because both sets of accounts as their starting point the fact that capitalism is based on free labor, that it's free people who enter into contracts to sell you their labor, and that forced labor is this sort of like hauled over from older economic systems.

as it exists. And you know, so, there's always been a racial component to this, right And this is like trivially obvious, right, Like, there's a racial component of slavery, Like, holy shit, it's mostly about race. But I think, you know, we can we can expand this a little bit and it gets you to a some sort of interesting things, which is that race is one of you know, so like obviously capitalism is supposed to be based on wage labor, but race is what mediates your access to wage labor

in the first place. So, you know, white, like if you're an American, right like, white Americans have basically always been able to get access to to wage labor, you know, And as shitty as wage labor is, it's it's not as bad as the other things you can get forced into you know. But yeah, so like if you're black, like you know, you get as successive forms of slavery.

If you're indigenous, they tried to enslave you and then either sort of kept doing it or gave up and just killed did the genocide Asian people like who came to this continents and also sort of the West Indies largely get debt pion engine and entered service to you and you can you can sort of work this out

so on and so forth. There's there's different like modes of stuff that are the normal sort of like what you by default have access to if you are ex race, right, Yeah, And obviously this this sort of racial access to wage

labor is spread across the world. You know, your your access to wage labor is dependent on sort of your subject position as colonizer colonize as well as you know, your sort of global and also you're like local racial hierarchies because oh boy, can that shit be really fucked up. But the upshot of this is that many of the descendants of enslaved Haitian people are still effectively enslaved today on sugar plantations than making republic. And so we're gonna

we're gonna tell that story. But first word, oh god, do you know what doesn't know? I cannot guarantee that our products and services are slave free like I wish I could.

jobs for you, like come like do this work. And so a bunch of people get in like these like army vans and then they get there and they get worshed out of the van. A bunch of guys point guns at them and go, you're gonna work for free or we're gonna or like or we're gonna kill you. So this is really bad. And this is this is how a lot of like through the eighties and kind of early nineties, this is how a lot of sugar

production worked in the Dominican Republic. And you know, it's it's very notable here that Dominican Republic produces a lot of sugar, and it produces a lot of sugar that specifically the US uses. Now, this is like state run slavery right on, sort of like state run plantations. So then we had neoliberalism and so the state run plantations get privatized. However, come they still run on slave labor. So there's a very good Mother Jones report about this.

I'm gonna read some of it here. Kakata is one of about one hundred, according to a local missionaries estimate, isolated camp scattered around Central roman. Central Romana is a giant sugar plantation. Central Romana's one hundred and sixty thousand acres of sugar cane attract almost as big as New York City. Most of the workers and their families live in these battaiyas, rising in the morning to work the cane and the punishing heats, clearing weeds, slashing and spraying

the stalks. Nearly all are men of Haitian descent. Some were traffic back in the day of the journalist is doing this was the guy who basically uncovered a bunch of the original armies like the military slavery program in the nineties, and so he went back like a couple of years ago. So he's talking himself of Some of the people were traffic back touring the military slavery program.

Others were born and lived stateless, and others came from hating Moore recently paying smugglers to sneak them across the border for years, the government has resisted providing legal status to people of Haitian heritage in the country, even though born there and estimated two hundred thousand people who for generations have been to mean by race and class are stateless. For the men in the camps, Sentra Romana is the state. Their villages are patrolled by armed company police empowered to evict.

Centraro Romana owns the land or the Haitians work the railcars where they wigh and load the can and stocks, and the dwellings where they sleep. They are miles from

the nearest Dominican town not controlled by the company. So things going great here and the conditions you know, okay, so the sort of the capitalist reforms and ioliberalism has brought to this system are the number of child slaves has decreased dramatically, because that was a big thing when the first reporting, when everyone was like, holy shit, there's

a bunch of child slaves. This is a terrible Yeah, so we have less child slaves, right, and you know, so instead of the child slaves, right, it's now mostly adults. But the conditions here are still effectively slavery. Even even after this sort of child slavery stuff like is driven under. On a good day, these workers make three dollars a day and they are effectively and sometimes literally unable to leave. Now,

there are a lot of reasons for this. One of the big ones is that most of the workers there are most like basically all like you might find a worker somewhere who isn't stuck in this, but they're caught in these debt traps by Central Romana, who and these

are like classic company but they're not. They're worse than like, you know, the classic American company town because at least an American company town, you can go to another town that is not controlled by the company, whereas these people like cannot, and so they're caught in these debt traps by Central Romana, which is the company that owns these plantations. And because they're so in debt, they're constantly forced to work for the company in order to pay off their debt.

But you know, they never actually make enough money to pay the debt off, and so they have to take on more debt to survive until you know, and largely what happens is these people work there in debt until they die. This is classic debt Pia nine where it sort of debt transforms people into the effective property of the debt holder, who exacerbate the debt by denying them

the ability to live without taking on more debt. A very common way this happens is with medical debt, which is something you know, I think we're familiar with to some extent here, but is egregiously worse. And the other thing that I was realizing about this is that this is actually really eerily similar to the way that Cortez and the Conquistadores and slaved indigenous people during the genocide.

They would do the same thing of like, well, okay, now you're in debt to me, and because you can't pay the debt, you have five hundred percent interest per week, and so you know, that just accumulates, and now you work for me for the rest of your lives. And this is you know, this, this is one of the one of the sort of ways in which this the long shadow of Spanish imperialism like looms over the Dominican Republic, even in what has really been about two hundred years

of the age of the American Empire. You know, and as you know, obviously like as much of an effect as the Spanish empire has had here and oh god, it's not good today. It is the American empire that lines the pockets of the slavers of the Dominican Republic. So such a Romana is owned by this this family called the Funjewel family, who are these Cuban expats who run this like enormous resort in shit where they live

in Florida and are handed. This is really fun. One hundred and fifty million dollars for the American state every year in the form of price supports for sugar. So like, you're an American, right, Like obviously your tax money very obviously goes to support slavery because we have prisons, and so your taxes are paying to enslaved people, but your taxes are also paying for slavery and other countries. It's incredible, really really great stuff from the American political system here.

And you know, and the way this has been maintained is through like two I think in the last twenty years. Mother Jones reported they've they've spent the sugar lobbyist spent two hundred and twenty million dollars on campaign contributions and lobbying, and it works really well. They've been able to influence

the system for a very very long time. The other funny thing about the Fundtural family is that they've created the perfect political trap, which is so one of one of the brothers is like a Trump guy and the other person is a Hillary supporter, and they're both like incredibly a mesh in both of the circles. So it's great.

Things are going very good. So after so the Mother Jones investigation was like in the last I think it was like last year the year before, and when the Mother Jones investigation about the fact that like all of this shit was still happening came out, uh, there was a there was a giant uproar about it. And a couple of things happened. One is that so the village of the journalists had visited, uh CenTra Romana, Like they

didn't even bulldoze the villages. They blew everyone's houses down with like sledgehammers and forcibly move them to like other villages and separated people's families. So that's that's great. And then so in late twenty twenty two, under under pressure from this reporting, the US government like banned imports from

that specific company. And okay, it's unclear what is going to happen with it, if you know, if if they're gonna get unbanned eventually, uh, if it's gonna stick, if they're just gonna like, I don't know, like transfer the assets to another company or something and use that instead. As so, as of right now, this specific set of plantations is not able to export sugar to the US. So this is this is as much of a victory over slavery as we're going to get in this episode.

And this victory is that it's only gonna get work. This is this is the peak of anti slavery stuff we're gonna see here. Yeah, so enjoy it while you can. And do you know what else you should enjoy?

in West Africa. They're also one of the only media people I've ever seen talk about the fact that a lot of this stuff, it's not exactly the same, but a lot of the sort of slavery stuff also seems to be happening on plantations in Brazil, but there's effectively no coverage of it that's not in Portuguese. I don't know. So like, eventually, one day, I guess, like the fact that other places other than West Africa have slavery will hit the anglophone media class or whatever. But until then,

I'm going to read this section. In West Africa, coco is a commodity crop grown primarily for x Coco is the Ivory Coast primary export. It makes up about half the country's agricultural export and volume. Most coco farmers earn less than one dollar a day and income below the extreme poverty line. As a result, they often resort to the use of child labor to keep their prices competitive.

In many cases, yeah, yeah, this is one of the things that happens when you're reading about child slavery stuff is even people who like are trying to you know, draw attention to how bad this is. You get stuff like that that's like Jesus Christ. Yeah, so you know they're making sub one dollar a day, they're using child labor. In many cases, this includes what the International Labor Organization

calls quote the worst form of child labor. These are defined as practices quote likely to harm the health, safety, or morals of children. Approximately two point one million children in Ivory Coast and Ghana work on cocoa farms, most of whom are likely exposed to the worst form of

child labor. Which is also really good that like we've we've, we've, capitalism has finally reached the you know, the apex of its its control of the commanding heights of the world economy, which means that we're talking about we're trying to make tear lists of how bad child labor is.

into slavery work. A lot of them are sold by their own families who do not have enough resources to take care of them, and are like, okay, we'll basically sell these people so they can go do this job. And these families don't know that, like their child is about to be enslaved, right, they're just like, Okay, well they're going to go off and do work. But the other way that this happens is that kids from like

villages in other countries. But there's a lot of focus on Mali as one of the places this happens for him. But yeah, so there's a lot of these effects what are effectively raids into into Molly from the Ivory Coast to like steal children. And it's also happens to Bikina Fosso, you know, and this gets to the point where, you know, I'm gonna read a quote from of these from from this report again. In one village of Bikina Fosso, almost every mother in the village has had a child trafficked

onto cocaine farms. Traffickers will then sell children to cocaine farmers. So this is like the worst paranoid fantasies of every American right winger, except it's you know, this is just how chocolate is made.

But the Food and Powerment Project describes like children as young as five are forced to work up to fourteen hours a day, like chopping down cocoa pods and then chopping them open with machetes. And sometimes these people get Sometimes these kids are using chainsaws to like clear wood,

they clear down like forests. Yeah, and you know, okay, so this goes exactly how you expected to go, which is a bunch of these kids just have a bunch of fucking scars from when they've been slashed by machetes because again you're handing the machetes to children, some of whom are as young as five. And then they have to carry one hundred pound bags of cocoa beans through

the jungle. And this is the thing that's also happening in the Tamaican Republic, and this happens a lot in a lot of places, is that they just get you know, when when companies want to spray like they're fars with pesticides, right, they don't even bother even like clearing people out, which might you know, help like a tiny bit to make

them not like die from fucking poison. But no, these fucking dipshits just like spray them with toxic chemicals as they just like spray them with pesticides like a lot of whom are christinogiens a lot of And this is happening in the Dominican the surcane fields in the Dominican Republic too, and a lot of those people just fucking died because you know, they were stayed with these chemicals.

There was a really terrible story of a guy who was trying to sue Central Romana and just fucking died from the like he wasn't able to get a pay off for a lawsuit because he died in twenty twenty before the lawsuit could like finish. So here's another great quote from the Food Empowerment Project. The farm owners using child labor usually provide the children with the cheapest food available, such as corn paste or the cassava and bananas that

grow in the surrounding forest. In some cases, the children sleep on wooden planks and small windless buildings without access

to clean water, sanitary bathrooms. And you know, another key part of this, right is like, okay, so the conditions are obviously unbearably bad, but you know, a key part of this, like any system of slavery, is the physical violence against the enslaved people who are repeatedly and often beaten and abused and tortured in ways that are very reminiscent of sort of like older epik of slavery if they try to escape. Now, this is the companies care about this to the extent that is bad. Pr Yes,

and the charcot companies repeated, like the charcoal companies. Okay, they they signed a thing in the year two thousand where they said we're going to eliminate child's the worst forms of child slavery by two thousand and five.

that fucking school. I don't trust any of these motherfuckers and ne or should you, because it turns out there was so okay. So they released this report on how bad child slavery is, right, but there was a leak of the original version of the report that was supposed to come out, and the original version of the report has the number of child slaves at like two point

two million. Now, when the report actually comes out with no justification whatsoever and using a bunch of numbers for child slavery that are from before COVID nineteen, the Noak report was like, ah, there's only like one point six million child slaves. So six hundred thousand child slaves just sort of vanished in an editorial process after they got they came under fire from uh, the they came under fire from the chocolate lobby.

desperate things. And you know, Okay, so we tease this a little bit, and you might be thinking, well, I can eat fair trade chocolate, right, I can pay ten dollars for a chocolate bars as a fair trade on it, and it will and that will make sure that I'm only eating chocolate produced by free labor. Nope, the certifications for the chocolate are fucking bullshit. You're still eating slave chocolate.

The follow was an excerpt from a study conducted by the Corporate Accountability Lab on the failure of initiatives in the chocolate industry like certifications quote. In order to understand the gap between consumer perception and farmer impact better, we brought certified chocolate bars to villages where some or all

of the farmers were certified. We held up the bar with the label and explained to the farmers what consumers expected out of the label, primarily that farmers were paired a fair price, earned a decent living, and certain practices like child labor and deforestation were not present. We also explained the difference in retail price between fair trade and uncertified chocolate. The overwhelming response from farmers to this information

was shock and outrage. One farmer pulled out his worn shirt in front of him and asked if it looked like he earned a decent living. A woman in one village said, you can hardly afford to send to your children to school, so how could anyone think she earned a fair price? Are farmer consultations revealed virtually imperceptible differences between certified and uncertified farms in terms of living incomes, poverty, education,

access to healthcare, farmer bargaining power, or access to information. So, yeah, all the people who are telling you they're doing some fair trade shit, they're keeping your money and the places they're getting it from are as fucked as her. She's yeah, so this is bad. Now. You might also think, Okay, we can get out of this by buying from coco cooperatives. Except except, and this is a wonderful thing that capitalism

is brought on the world. Most coco collectives aren't actually like workers collect like aren't actually co ops.

are also technical. I talked about this in my episode of Bachelor's episode a long time ago about this milk company that poisoned three hundred thousand babies, and that company was technically a co op, but like it was a co op in the sense that there was a small group of workers who were basically managers who owned shares, and then they just hired every source everything out to independent contractors, so it functioned like a normal company. Yeah,

and this is the thing. A lot this the cocoa trade stuff is actually worse because most of these things that are called co ops aren't even co ops at all. They're just set up by cocoa growers as like fake co ops. And there they are like a very very small number of of these coco farms that are actually workers cooperatives, but there's no way to tell which one is which unless you spend a bunch of time like

actually going and tracking the cooperatives down. So there's no sort of like ethically way out of this, right, You're just kind of you're you know, like you can't. You can't eat your way out of this problem. And of course everything across the board, all the these conditions have gotten worse since the pandemic. So you know it's it's not only is capitalism not making things better every like, things are in fact getting worse. Now, all right, I

promised you the lawsuits. We're gonna talk a bit about the lawsuits. So there were actually two big lawsuits. There were eight people from Mali who were enslaved by cocoa plantations after being traffic from Mali sued Nestley, Cargill, Berry, Caliba, I don't know, some French shit mars Alam, Hershey's and Modeleas to try to get conversations from the companies by virtue of the fact that the companies sold products made by their child slave labor.

of which is are just amazing. So I think the most famous one is the Supreme courts eight to one decision that said, well, so, like, all this stuff happens, but it happened outside the US, so you can't sue companies for it here, which is an amazing piece of logic, which is just like, oh yeah, no, actually, like corporations, like American corporations could just go everywhere else and do crimes.

And this is and the American legal system is specifically written in such a way that like, if an American corporation enslaves you in like the Ivory Coast, there's nothing you can do about it in the US. And then a judgment do you see throughout the other case because you know, their argument was, well, you can't prove that the companies knew you were being enslaved on those farms.

There's no quote traceable connection between the people who enslaved you in the company, so there's nothing we can do.

And the reason both these arguments work is the reason for the structure of the chocolate market, right, the reason cocoa plantations in the Ivory Coast and all so Brazil can get away with this, you know, well, the reason that those plantations are in the Ivory Coast or Brazil or other places The reason they're happening there and not in the US is because these are places where you can get away with that level of exploitation in corporate violence that you know in the US would be a

lot more difficult, and this shields them from legal liability. Furthermore, instead of just you know, jumping, instead of just running the cocoa plantations themselves, which these companies could easily do, right, this is a very very large trade. They could just sort of like they could invertially vertically and not even vertical integrate, they could just actually make chocolate, like they could just run the process, and they they very specifically

choose not to do it. And the reason they choose not to do it, this isn't one hundred billion dollar industry, right, but instead they what they choose to do is to just buy cocoa from the chocolate market where all these sort of nebulous producers sell, which allows the chocolate companies to go, oh, well, these people don't work for us. We just buy chocolate from the market. How are we supposed to know which these plantations use slave labor?

like they're completely unaffiliated with. And this gives them, like, it gives them like two degrees of legal separation, because it's not just that their contractors are doing something that they didn't know about, it's that they're just buying it, right, And this fucking sucks. And you know, since laws exist to protect the ruling class, judges and courts can just wave their hands and go, well, these companies definitely enslaved you, but we have no choice but to let them off

completely scot free. So sorry about that. And I want to end today with something that has been running through my mind every since I fucking started researching this, which is that the worst onisie must pay for their times.

The state has failed, the court has failed, the NGOs have failed, and if anything is ever going to fucking happen that forces these companies to be in any way, there there is to be like a single iota of justice for the fact that all of these companies have been fucking gorging themselves on the profits of slave labor. At all, we are going to do it or no one is, So congratulations you. The American worker is unfortunately incumbent on you to deal with these fucking corporations that

have been destroying the entire world. So yeah, happy spooky week everyone.

all sides. Here is what it feels like. I mean, this is this Halloween chocolate problem.

round of chocolate companies. It will be doing exactly the same ship. So you have to you have to destroy the system of property by which these things are allowed to exist. And at that point maybe you can start on being able to eat food that isn't produced by slave labor.