Child Labor and Cheap Chocolate

What's the real price of our food?

Roasted into a bar of chocolate could be human rights abuses. Is this a cost we have to pay for our food? Image from Pixabay.

I have been writing about chocolate for my book, Food Science and Food Systems: A Call for Change, as it makes a good case study. Chocolate has a simple seeming supply chain. However, there are many cracks in that supply chain; the most significant if which is the use of child labor and human rights abuses on cacao farms. This is coupled with the low price of cacao beans, the raw ingredient which makes chocolate. One concern about children working on farms is that they are missing out on education and the poverty cycle continues.

I am deeply concerned with the idea that a child might have harvested my chocolate at the cost of their educations, so I was relieved to find the Chocolate Score Card at Green America. Use this score card to find out which companies are doing the most to reduce human rights abuses within the chocolate food system.