Chocolate, Chocolate, Chocolate

Photo used with permission from amanochocolate.com

Head on over to Amano to enter a contest to win free chocolate for a year! That's ten bars of bean-to-bar chocolate every month for 12 months straight!! Um, yes?!? The direct url to enter the contest: click here.

I would also like to use this as opportunity for a little education about fair trade, chocolate, and coffee. Many people think they're doing a great thing by passing up certain coffees and chocolates in favor of fair trade choices; however, some of us are uninformed or under-informed about very real issues. There are some great small-batch chocolate companies that work with and/or source their cacao beans directly from farmers in other countries that are not fair-trade certified: flavor and quality are the prime factors in deciding which beans to buy, not price. And for premium cacao, a premium price is paid - these small companies are dedicated to their craft and pay farmers significantly more than, often many times over, the established fair trade price for cacao. Both organic and fair trade certification are costly and lengthy in duration, and many small-time farmers cannot afford these formalities if they are not a part of a larger co-op.

So the labels we, as responsible consumers, are told to look for can be misleading. Organic and fair trade are noble programs and ideas, but they are not the be-all and end-all of responsibility. There are unlabeled and differently-labeled programs and efforts that strive for the same (and further) goals: we see this in the farmers who do not use pesticides but aren't financially positioned to afford organic certification yet (or ever), and we see this in companies that opt for direct farmer relationships rather than going through a fair trade middle-man of sorts. The point of saying all this is that we can feel okay with ourselves if we look beyond fair trade in the world of chocolate. (Many companies are calling their farmer relationships "direct trade.") Examples of such chocolate makers include Taza Chocolate, Askinosie Chocolate, Patric Chocolate, and as mentioned at the beginning of this post, Amano Chocolate. I also just read a cool blog article about a company whose chocolate I've not yet tried - which fits into the "bean-to-bar" category: Rogue Chocolatier...two years ago, the owner started his own dark chocolate laboratory...at 22 years old (my age!!!). That's so inspiring! For any inquiring minds that wish to know a little more about chocolatey indulgences, Amano has some great chocolate articles and FAQ's about chocolate. If you do not know and would like to know such things as the different between a chocolatier and a chocolate maker, I suggest the latter link.

(And examples of coffee companies with direct trade programs include Counter Culture Coffee, Intelligentsia Coffee, and Stumptown Coffee.)

Oh, yay! Yay for coffee and chocolate! Haha, somehow I managed to work coffee into this post! Kinda like eatliverun's Jenna squeezes wine into every post...