Grammar is not as sweet as chocolate is? Whom cares!

Get ready to spend more, if you love chocolate, appears to be the advice from the Wall Street Journal:

Doesn't surprise me one bit; people in the old country have always had one heck of a sweet tooth, and with better transport and refrigeration chocolate becomes way easier to sell to a rapidly growing middle class.

"Emerging-market demand is the principle reason behind the steady and consistent rise that we've seen in the cocoa market," said Sterling Smith, a futures specialist at Citigroup in Chicago.

Read that quote again.

Did you?

Notice something that troubled you, like it was some stale nut in a chocolate bar?  (BTW, if you ever gift me chocolate, make sure it is plain and simple chocolate, without nuts or fruits!)

Did you spot that it was "principle" when it should have been "principal"?

Principal derives by way of French from the Latin term principalis, meaning “first in importance.” In English, it initially referred to a ruler, but the word also came to be associated with an amount of money on which interest is paid, because that sum is first in terms of priority and the interest (one hopes) is a relative small amount.
...
Principle, by contrast, though it was originally merely a spelling variant, came to mean “proposition or truth,” and later “law of nature” and “rule of conduct.” And, unlike principal, it does not serve as an adjective except in the form of principled.

Assuming that I am indeed on the correct side of the grammar accounting ledger, if we have problems with a language that is the lingua franca of the future, too, then, well, whom who cares, eh!

What, then, can we predict English will lose if the process goes on? An easy choice seems to be “whom”. English was once heavily inflected; all nouns carried a suffix showing whether they were subjects, direct objects, indirect objects or played some other role in a sentence. Today, only the pronouns are inflected. And while any competent speaker can use I, me, my and mine correctly, even the most fluent can find whom (the object form of who) slippery. So whom might disappear completely, or perhaps only survive as a stylistic option in formal writing.

It's not only whom that might disappear but perhaps the apostrophe too?

A battle is being waged over the apostrophe, and the names of two of the online factions—the Apostrophe Protection Society and Kill the Apostrophe—suggest an extremism usually reserved for blood, rather than ink or pixels. The former, founded by a retired British copy editor, provides a gentle guide to deploying the apostrophe. “It is indeed a threatened species!” the site warns, a little preciously. The Web site Kill the Apostrophe, meanwhile, argues that the mark “serves only to annoy those who know how it is supposed to be used and to confuse those who dont.”

So, in the very near future, chocolate-devouring English speakers of the world wont (hehe) be able to understand that awesome joke about "eats shoots and leaves" I guess.

What?  You dont (hehe) know the joke?

[A panda] goes into a bar, asks for a ham sandwich, eats it and then takes out a revolver and fires it into the air. When the publican asks him what on earth he is doing, he throws a book on to the bar and growls: 'This is a badly punctuated wildlife manual. Look me up.' The barman flicks through the book and, under the relevant entry, reads: 'PANDA. Large, black-and-white, bear-like mammal native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.'

No math please, we're American

Sometimes a man has chocolate cravings. Ok, that man was me.

It was, therefore, a bad time to see this on the store shelf:

I am surprised that I didn't start eating it right there in that French store!

At the checkout counter, the early-twenties-looking cashier dude tried striking up a chat with me, and was failing miserably.  I wanted to advise him not to try so hard at small-talk.  If you ain't got it, then don't.  But, he tried.  If the world gives grades for effort, then he surely earned an A+.

After scanning the heavy and bulky items, he scanned the chocolates.

"I love these" he said.

"Me too."

"But, they are so expensive."

"I agree.  But the display said three dollars and I figured why not.  Especially when there are fifteen pieces, which then works out to only twenty cents a piece."

He stopped scanning.

He looked at the chocolates. He thought about something.

Clearly there was something going on, or going wrong.

"That is way too much math for me to do" he finally declared.

I wanted to teach him the simple math right there.  "How much is 2 over 1?" would have been my first step. He might have found it a torture.  I imagined Winston Smith volunteering the answer to 2+2 as 5.

I simply smiled instead.

No French store.  This is America alright!

After reaching home, I hunted down the news item from a few months ago:

When it comes to literacy, adults in the U.S. trailed those in 12 countries and only outperformed adults in five others. The top five countries in literacy were Japan, Finland, the Netherlands, Australia and Sweden.
U.S. adults did worse in mathematics, where they trailed 18 countries and beat just two — Italy and Spain. 

At least we are better than Italy and Spain.  Wait; they are the ones with budget problems and they have math issues. Now it figures, and why our budgeting is messed up too ;)

If only that dude knew that twenty cents for an awesome chocolate is one sweet deal that won't be around for long!

If a cigar is not always a cigar, then a chocolate ...?

When our high school class met after thirty years, one classmate brought along with him delicious chocolates that were handmade by his daughter.  At that time, it was a serious hobby of hers, and my friend was a dutiful father helping her out.

A few months after that, the young woman decided to build up that hobby into a full-fledged job.  It was not the same old chocolate alone that she was making:

We have a diverse range from the traditional nuts to fruit-filled chocolates to more traditional flavours like Indian Indulgence and spicy chocolate. A whole range is in the trial phase and are yet to be introduced in the menu.

I think she is on to something--the idea that chocolate is not merely something we have as a KitKat or a Mars bar.  There is a lot more to chocolate, where we can enjoy a gazillion varieties, as we do with various foods we eat.  With a rapidly growing upper-middle class in India, this might be a good time as any to test out such a hobby as a profession.

If there can be coffee bars, then all the more the reason to have chocolate bars.  Chocolate, whose key ingredient is cocoa, ought to be way more of a delicacy, a prized one, than it currently is.  After all, cocoa cannot be grown anywhere, and is typically only in the land areas within twenty degrees away from the Equator--both north and south of it.  How this rare commodity is so valued and yet why those countries are not rich deserves a post of its own, and I shall resist that temptation here.

The point is that such a delicate plant's product deserves to be handled as a specialty, which is what the friend's daughter is attempting to do.

There are entrepreneurs of Indian origin attempting to do that on the other side of India--here in the US--as this WSJ report details:

Imagine eating a chocolate with mango or pistachio filling, or flavored with saffron. These are some of the offerings from Indian American entrepreneurs dabbling in chocolates, sweets and confections for Indian palates.
Co Co Sala is a self-proclaimed “chocolate lounge and boutique” that opened in Washington, D.C. in 2008. Its co-owner Nisha Sidhu says there was a need for “chocolate for grown-ups” and a place to go late at night for fine-dining desserts.

Chocolate with saffron?  My taste buds are salivating!

The WSJ has more:

Shefalee Patel, the owner of Sweet Silk in Queens, New York , is another chocolatier who uses Indian flavors – and French inspiration — in her confectionary.
“I noticed that even though Indian sweets are made of very rich ingredients, such as pistachios and cashews, they were either too sweet or fell short on presentation,” says Ms. Patel, who used to be a civil engineer.
“I was inspired to create sweets that elevated the beauty of Indian sweets with balance of spice, flavors, sweetness while highlighting the main rich ingredients… I wanted to create sweets that were not only pleasing to the palate but to the eye,” she adds.

I love that phrase there: "who used to be a civil engineer."  As I have often noted in this blog, life is a lot more exciting and fulfilling when our jobs are nothing but our hobbies; I "used to be an electrical engineer."

The WSJ report reminded me that I had read something similar not too long ago.  As always, Google helped me out by tracking down this NY Times report from last July:

New York stands out for having the largest concentration of high-end chocolate boutiques in the United States, and among them two Indian chocolate makers — Shaineal Shah and Aditi Malhotra — are fast becoming stars in the competitive and crowded world of chocolate.

Hey, my memory is not bad after all :)

When his confections were well received at trade shows, he was inspired to open his own store, which he did eight months ago. Xocolatti is a 110-square-foot sliver of a shop in Soho, and though Mr. Shah’s mother helped him with the packaging and flavors, he runs the show and makes each piece by hand, starting at 7 a.m. every day at a factory in Port Chester, New York.
“The philosophy behind my chocolate is that it should please all of your senses,” he said. “Each piece has a different color, smell and texture.” His 16 truffles come in traditional flavors like hazelnut but also more unusual ones such as sake and orange tangerine. Then there’s the distinct Indian influence in his work: a rose cardamom truffle and slates, or very thin bars, in a masala milk and saffron nut chikki flavors, and all his confections are eggless, in keeping with Jain traditions.

How fascinating that his concoctions will be "kosher" within the Jain traditions!

It is such a "sweet" coincidence that as I was nearing the end of this post, a colleague walked in with a bar of dark chocolate.

May you, the reader, have an extra sweet day!

Now, my turn to get emotional over what a student said ...

Yesterday, I got an email from a student, requesting that I serve as a reference.  In that email, she wrote:

You were my professor years ago, back in 2006. I asked you to help me with a independent credit through writing a paper. Maybe the topic might ring a bell. The paper explained why students from Hawaii chose to go to a college like WOU, a far location all the way in Oregon.

As if I could have ever forgotten this student.  Because, and as I wrote back to her:

Many times I have used you and your work as an example of how students can feel that they did something substantive as opposed to merely going through the motions of the class requirements.  I also remember that my comment made you emotional--when I said you can show that report to your mother and tell her, "look ma, I did this" .... I felt so terrible when you told me, after composing yourself, that your mother had passed away only a few months prior ....

It is such a typical line used so often in America: "look ma, .."  I felt so terrible when that phrase made this young woman cry. 

After I emailed her, I regretted even reminding her about my faux pas.  I worried that I might have made her cry all over again.

Turns out that it only prompted her to recall the rest of the story, which I had forgotten.  She--now a mother of two kids--writes:

You know the best thing that happened out of that emotional encounter was .... chocolate! You were so nice, and tried to console me with a bar of chocolate. And it absolutely worked. Until this day, when I visit the mainland and go to a Trader Joes, there is no way I'm leaving the store without that Belgium chocolate bar. So that incident was a true gem, and stuck with me all these years. Chocolate can fix any problem!

I suppose I felt so awful about having triggered an emotional response in her that I had forgotten what happened after that.

I am not surprised, however, that I offered her chocolate.  I do that even now.  Even when students do not cry in my office.

I have no idea about the lyrics in this old favorite of mine that I have embedded here ... the melody feels just appropriate for the moment ...

The end of the world in 20 years: chocolate will become expensive

The world could run out of affordable chocolate within 20 years as farmers abandon their crops in the global cocoa basket of West Africa, industry experts claim.

If that is not a sign of the coming end of the world!

"What the hell," you say?  Why this crisis?  It is actually a good thing.
But, how can this be good?  Because it makes us wake up to the reality of cocoa production:

Farmers in the countries that produce the bulk of cocoa bought by the multinationals who control the market have found the crop a bitter harvest. The minimal rewards they have historically received do not provide incentives for the time-consuming work of replanting as their trees die off – a task that usually means moving to a new area of canopied forest and waiting three to five years for a new crop to mature.

"It's hard to maintain production at high levels in a particular plot of land every time, because of pest problems that eat away at the yields and the farms need to be rejuvenated," explains Thomas Dietsch, research director of ecosystem services at the Earthwatch Organisation. "Although research into new varieties and better management methods could solve those problems, the other challenge is that cocoa is competing for agricultural space with other commodities like palm oil – which is increasingly in demand for biofuels."

Meanwhile, as the supply of the raw material diminishes, millions of new consumers in the developing world are becoming addicted to the sweet energy-fix at the end of the processing chain. "Chocolate consumption is increasing faster than cocoa production – and it's not sustainable," Tony Lass, chairman of the Cocoa Research Association, told the annual conference of Britain's Academy of Chocolate last month.

Despite price rises on the trading floor, precious little reaches the smallholders who make up 95 per cent of growers, according to Mr. Lass, a former Cadburys trader and ethical sourcing advisor who has co-authored a book on the cocoa industry.

"These smallholders earn just 80 cents a day," he says. "So there is no incentive to replant trees when they die off, and to wait up to five years for a new crop, and no younger generation around to do the replanting. The children of these African cocoa farmers, whose life expectancy is only 56, are heading for the cities rather than undertake backbreaking work for such a small reward."

This graph, from UNCTAD, is data from 2005/2006 on cocoa beans production--the share of the producing countries.  Note the importance of the two neighboring West African countries

A contrast to this geography is the geography of consumption of cocoa.

As one might hypothesize, poor people don't eat a whole lot of chocolates nor do they drink chocolate milk by the gallons.

The following chart explains it all:

I would not mind paying, for instance, a special tax every time I buy a candy bar if I can be guaranteed that the money will go directly to the cocoa producing farmers who engage in this labor-intensive activity for which their monetary rewards are low.