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!

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.