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Historic Cash Crop Turns Cash to Crap

By Ed Goldman

Chocoholics of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your caffé mochas!

If that rallying cry is puzzling, you need to know three things right away: 

1. Cocoa doesn’t come from chocolate bars, chocolate milk, hot chocolate or chocolate-flavored Ex-Lax. Most of it comes from beans grown in West Africa—specifically, the Ivory Coast, Ghana, Nigeria and Cameroon.

2. No, kids, “Cameroon” is not the same thing as a macaroon, though the latter cancontain chocolate. Also, James Cameronis the director of the films “Titanic” and “Avatar” while Emmanuel Macron is the current president of France (but you may want to check back here later).   
3. Cocoa growers aren’t going to keep growing those beans because the cost of doing so has become prohibitive and for them, less profitable. Expenses shot up about 177 percent last year owing to “supply shortages, weather disruptions and European Union deforestation regulations,” according to various sources, all of whose tones seemed to alternate between dark and bittersweet.

It all boils down to this: If growers can’t make money on a crop, your love of its products still won’t amount to a hill of cocoa beans. It’s not called the coffee-growing service, after all. In the private sector, “nonprofit” ultimately means the same thing as “discontinued.”

I know a number of people who rely to some extent on the availability of chocolate. Their feelings can vary—from taking delight in a very occasional box of Raisinets, usually consumed while watching cinematic superheroes in tights, boots and capes claim they’re heterosexual, to driving their SUVs through the window of a See’s Candy Store and refusing to stop Hoovering every bonbon in sight even when told, “Step back from the free-sample counter, Ma’am. We don’t want to shoot you.”

I remember when I first became as fascinated by chocolate’s place in history as in my mouth. In the third grade, we read about the star-crossed relationship between Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortés and Aztec King Montezuma. I wasn’t especially interested in the details of their encounter—Montezuma, thinking Cortés was a god, gave him his kingdom, whereupon Cortés returned the favor by imprisoning Montezuma—as much I was on learning that Montezuma’s beverage of choice was chocolate. Thinking it an elixir, he supposedly drank 50 goblets of it a day. Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is possibly the real root of the euphemism “Montezuma’s revenge.”

This knowledge, coupled with my Uncle Moishe’s telling me that if I drank cocoa for 99 years I’d live long, made me request a cup of Nestle’s Quik hot chocolate every morning with breakfast. (About my uncle’s advice. Please understand I was nine years old and that it wasn’t until I told my dad what Moishe had advised—and my dad smiled and said, “Well, if you did drink cocoa for 99 years you’ll already have lived long”—that I got the joke. Becoming a humorist is equal parts nurture and nature.)