If your doing the egg thing this Sunday are you buying fair trade slave free sourced chocolates?

I wasn’t that great. Our church has a fair trade store so maybe I’ll buy a couple of bars of fair trade chocolate to take to my daughters house after church.

My eggs come from the refrigerated section at Wal-Mart – whatever is on sale. My chocolate comes from aisle 1 at Wal-Mart – usually covering a nut or raisin.

Free trade? What’s that? :)

Free trade protects vulnerable workers in the third world from exploitation ESP the trafficking of child slaves to pick coco beans

slaves’ tears make the chocolate taste even better.

@ragingloli you are a funny one :)

@Arewethereyet It wasn’t a serious question. ;)

I know :)

I am not eating any chocolate eggs, but I remember them fondly!

Seriously ?

I decided not to go crazy on chocolate this year. I gave my kids money. That’s healthier but more importantly, more useful to them. I did buy them each a Cadbury’s Cream Egg, so I could have done better there. It didn’t occur to me and now you mention it, I wish it had. Good reminder. Thanks.

I don’t do the Easter egg thing anymore, I’m too old for egg hunting. The only reason I used to do the egg hunt was because I wanted chocolate, and I’m now old enough to afford to buy enough for myself to get sick on it if I want.

As for fair trade chocolate, that is the only kind I eat, and that is the way it has been for the last 2 or 3 years or so, since I watched a 2 hour documentary on how chocolate companies do business.

I am not really one for “cracking down” on slave labor, because I have learned over the years that these people don’t have a choice. Often by fighting slave labor, you end up hurting the slave much more than the slave driver, who compared to the slave that gets to lose their job and starve, only see a small temporary dip in profits.

If I were to boycott every company that uses slave labor, I would probably not be able to buy a single product ever again. Even fair trade companies can be a bit unethical at times.

The reason I have made an exception with chocolate, is because it is not just slave labor, but child slave labor, and real slave labor where they don’t get paid anything at all. Some of them get to lose a finger or get an infection, all of them miss out on an education, and to make matters worse, the poor fucks don’t even know what chocolate looks like, much less get to taste the stuff, all they ever get to see is the beans.

Also, in the child slave labor industry for chocolate, lots of the children are abducted or actually sold by their parents to the farmer, making it slavery in the most traditional and literal sense.

The chocolate companies have the power to stop it, but they choose not to. You will some times see a company like Cadburies make some kind of pledge or new policy, but its effects seldom last longer than a week or two, and it usually does harm at the same time.

There should just be a law for this one, that outright forbids a company to profit in this way. I mean, its chocolate for fuck sake, rivaled only by bacon. If all companies were forced to be ethical by law, and they all had to put their prices up 100% or 200%, we would all still keep on eating chocolate, it is not like we will stop eating the stuff, just because it costs $3 instead of $1. Hell, it is a luxury item, if chocolate were $100 a bar, people would still buy it.

I just don’t buy the whole “we are only trying to be competitive” bullshit that these companies spout. Lies, you are just being lazy, greedy and unethical.

Jeez is there anything safe to eat anymore? How does one find out if it is safe or not? But I do agree with @poisonedantidote – often the money earned by the worker, while not adequate by another’s standards, is adequate to keep the family from starving.

@poisenedantidote thank you, thank you, thank you, bravo. You did an amazing job and totally spot on!

The eggs and chocolate I have for my Easter celebration are all organically raised and grown by me.
Complete free range and no pesticides for everything I grow.
I may consider myself a slave to my own crops, but that is simply the way choose to live my humble life.
It is for my own consumption aside from the poachers who happen to stumble upon my treasure trove. :o

Wow @blueiiznh sound like a fantastic self sufficiency outfit you running, congrats I’m impressed

@Arewethereyet As you should be.

And I am, are you growing your own cocoa beans, I hear they are quite a challenge and only grow in specific regions?

I built a bio dome to replicate the perfect climate for them.

OMG that’s incredible!