Providing food for thought at this year’s Brisbane Writers Festival is Canadian journalist Carol Off, whose new book Bitter Chocolate delves into the dark side of the confectionary trade.
Recently published by The University of Queensland Press, the book offers a stinging exposé of the chocolate industry throughout the ages and is one of several UQP titles featured during the four-day event.
To research the book, Ms Off traveled to Côte d'Ivoire in West Africa where the majority of the world’s cocoa comes from.
“I always start an investigation from a sceptical point of view so I took everything I had been told with a grain of salt,” Ms Off said.
“I was surprised to find the deep cleavage between the people who produce cocoa and those who consume it.”
Ms Off said the Spanish stole the secret of chocolate from the Mesoamericans, whose use of cocoa concoctions dates back thousands of years. From there, it was only a matter of time before the chocolate craze spread throughout Europe and then America.
“I always over research my books because the subjects fascinate me. I'm a journalist - not an historian - so I relied on the anthropologists who had already done much of the groundwork,” she said.
“I found a long history of cocoa as a product that was consumed by the elites while it was produced by slaves. That history goes back to ancient Olmecs and the Aztecs ruled by Montezuma who was the world’s first chocoholic.”
The book discusses a number of topics including the famous “chocolate strike” by children in Canada in the 1940s and the growth in fair trade and organic cocoa farms.
Bitter Chocolate also details how some of the biggest names in the business were complicit in the slavery trade during the 18th and 19th centuries, despite their public opposition at the time.
“What fascinated me most was the history of the world’s first cocoa barons and chocolate industrialists,” Ms Off said.
“Milton Hershey and the Cadbury brothers were deeply religious - zealots really - who made social utopias for their workers in the US and Great Britain. But their ugly secret was that their cocoa beans were produced by slaves even as they were dedicated abolitionists.”
She also discovered disturbing reports that African child labour continues to be used in cocoa farms and her subsequent investigation into the practice forms an important part of the book.
“I was surprised that the farmers and their labourers - mostly conscripted and forced labour of children – didn’t know anything about chocolate,” Ms Off said.
“They harvested the beans and cultivated cocoa but they told me they had no idea what westerners did with the beans or how they were consumed. They had never tasted chocolate and probably never will.”
Bitter Chocolate is available in bookstores across Australia, with the author appearing at the Brisbane Writers Festival on the 19th and 20th of September. For program details, visit www.brisbanewritersfestival.com.au
Other UQP authors attending the event include Simon Cleary (The Comfort of Figs), multi-award winning poet Sam Wagan Watson and Indigenous activist and academic Dr Jackie Huggins.
Media: Cameron Pegg at UQ Communications (07 3365 2049, c.pegg@uq.edu.au)
