Bitter, Dark, Milk and White Dilemma

This last pastry block really kills.

No, seriously.

We were working with gelatin, which in itself is disgusting enough on multiple levels, but I finally got around to trying to find the parent company for Cacao Noel (not so easy - they're French).

Through the distributor site, I was able to at least determine the country of origin of the beans. Cacao Noel proudly states they have a factory in equatorial Cote d'Ivoire. A previous roommate did her peace-corp service there, and aside from the stories of men being turned into chickens, the idea that the boxes of chocolate that we're blasting through are all the result of a likely chance of child slave labor (a 10-year old sold for $30?) hurts my very soul:

Following international media reports in 2000 and 2001 of widespread child labor abuses in West African cocoa farms, which produce 70 percent of the world's cocoa, the international human rights community investigated the problem. A 2002 joint study published by the ILO and the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture found that an estimated 284,000 children on cocoa farms in West Africa were "either involved in hazardous work, unprotected or unfree, or have been trafficked." Most of the children were on cocoa farms in Cote d'Ivoire, the world's largest cocoa producer. The remaining children labored on farms in Ghana, the world's second-largest producer, and in Cameroon and Nigeria. (Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000: Trafficking in Persons Report 2007, US State Department, http://www.state.gov/g/tip/rls/tiprpt/2007/)

The industry stepped up rather quickly and forged an allegiance stating they would make the farms slave-labor free by 2005 (Harkin-Engel Protocol). Right. I can't find any follow-up report on statistics (although the one linked above is from 2007) stating what the current child labor statistics are, there is still no ban on child-slave-labor produced chocolate to the US, and knowing industry, this product we use hasn't suffered any harm from the aforementioned slap-on-the-hand industry self-regulated policy, if in fact they were using slave labor, which is probably the case since I can't find anything that says they aren't.

So what do I do? (Other than crosspost, of course)

Lovely Vacation

The last few weeks have been spent stressing out about all the things that are going on this month. Ironically, two days after the N&D and I had the cops called on us for being on a public park during a public fireworks presentation (it was a construction zone, but there were no "no trespassing" or "no admittance" signs to be seen), I blathered on about how we really didn't want to have a huge police force in our neighborhood to a city representative. I hope it came across more as "if they'd just treat us like we're humans and we'll respect what they do" than "they do such a sucky job, keep them out." Granted, this was on top of the city's incredibly slow response to a beating that caused a man's death just a mile or so south of our neighborhood.

Great.

Anyway. Back to the routine of taking evening baking classes, trying to keep up with editing, researching my ARG (yay, ARG!), and stressing about not making enough money to keep the N&D from complaining about not having any money. Granted, every time I turn around he wants a drill press, a welding set, a new controller for the Ghia, a new multi-media computer, a trip to Maine, a blah blah blah (smile).

And if you're reading this, DON'T FEEL GUILTY! And don't start justifying all of your wants. I know, I know. You NEED them. You've got grandparents who are getting old and you promised. I'm complaining about the clunkiness of the current one. I know ... I know. I just find it funny that we're both feeling guilt about the same thing from different ends, okay?

But on a lighter note, I found the absolutely best carrot cake recipe I've made in a long, long time. And it was on the Wilton site. It's not as light as the carrot torte I tried first, but for a wedding cake, it's fabulous. And I'm having fun playing with different white chocolates. So far, Callebaut is still my favorite.