How to make a Mars bar: mix cocoa beans with slavery and add capitalism to taste.

Mars bars are here used as a general signifier of industrial chocolate for the sugar craving masses. This blog entry concerns the recipe of chocolate. What does it take?

Let us begin with the basic ingredient, the raw cocoa. This is how it looks:

Let chocolate reveal itself…..

Once the cocoa fruit is cut, break it open:

Now we have our cocoa fruit opened – then we remove the beans and peel them – but only after licking and sucking well the bitter-sweet niceness in which they are encapsulated:

Then what? I started reading further down the list of ingredients and it appeared that you need five hundred years of capitalist privatisation, christian colonisation and a great dose of slavery. But in the true style of a TV-kitchen we have prepared that for you, all you have to do is to keep signing the social contract they call voting every four years and all shall be well.

To be serious, though, a significant part of the millions of children traded yearly into bonded labour, slavery (and what is worse) –to keep the “free market” afloat and the shareholders happy– end up in cocoa plantations.

“In 1994, the United Nations General Assembly defined human trafficking as “the illegal and clandestine movement of persons across national and international borders. . . With the end goal of forcing women and children into. . .Economically oppressive and exploitative situations for profit…”(UNICEF). Although most people may not be aware that in the 21st century slavery still exists, reports declare that the number of slaves at present is the highest it has ever been (Free the Slaves). Presently, about 700,000 children and women are trafficked around the world annually. The UN says that profits for this trafficking amount to approximately $7 billion a year (Anti-Slavery International). “

In other words, every time we bite into a Mars bar we get their blood in our mouth. Recall that Mars was used here only as a general term – the worst enemy of the human kind (and the environment) with regards to cocoa (and other “food”) we probably find in Nestlé.

For those interested in the rest of the process – that is how to make chocolate, watch this space!

If you are interested in finding out more about cocoa slavery, this might be a place to begin. If you google around and find out that Mars is pretending to be nice, then don’t get fooled: it is greenwash.