POP A CHOCOLATE into your mouth. Let it melt slowly on your tongue. Savor its rich sweet taste. And then sit back and enjoy the story of chocolate. It has all the elements of the best tales: sacrifice and joy, philanthropy and exploitation, the darkness of slavery and the kindness of the human heart.



Chocolate has always given pleasure, but it has also had its bitter undertones.
The story begins deep in the forests of America, many thousands of years ago, where great civilizations used the cocoa bean as money and worshipped the cocoa tree. The Mayans called it 'God Food'. The Aztecs used their bitter drink to sustain those whose hearts failed while being sacrificed to the gods. Their Spanish conquerors, though repelled at first by its bitter taste, found that a draught of chocolate could sustain them for a whole day's hard marching.
The tale continues across the oceans, from the New World to the Old. The secret of chocolate, blended with sugar and spices, remained with Spanish monks and princes for 100 years until it gradually spread to other countries. Fuelled by their desire for its delicious taste, the rulers of Europe established plantations in countries of the Equator, where the tree thrives. They brought slaves to pick the crop under the burning sun, and ships to bring it back home.
In the slums of their cities, men and women of good heart wanted to build a better world, free from drunkenness and violence, where people could live comfortably and in peace with their children. The new emperors of chocolate, often trom poor families themselves, built their empires on the belief that their workers should be rewarded for their labors and their loyalty. They believed too that chocolate could replace the alcohol that they saw as such a destructive force in their society.
But chocolate has always been unequal fare. Cocoa is grown in poor countries by those who have never tasted chocolate and eaten by those in rich countries who have never known what it is like to be really poor. For the 10 million families in the South who depend on it for a living, the price of cocoa on the world market rides a roller-coaster. It is a vulnerable crop, difficult to grow and hard to harvest. And yet huge profits are made by the big multinational companies who process, market and sell chocolate, its end product.
The rich world, it seems, cannot do without the food of the gods. We eat 79 per cent of all chocolate. Look around you on a bus or in a crowded street and there is likely to be more than one person munching on a chocolate bar. The Swiss, at 22 pounds or 10 kilos per person per year, eat the most; in the United Kingdom it is over 17 pounds (nearly 8 kg), in Australia 13 (5.8 kg), in the United States nearly 12 (5.4 kg). Chocolate is also increasingly popular in countries like China and Japan where people do not traditionally have a sweet tooth.
So what is the secret of this popularity? 'Hershey's chocolate makes people happy,' says the current website for the American giant. Chocolate has been associated with love and sex since the Aztec emperor Montezuma used it as an aphrodisiac. There have long been extravagant claims about its health- giving properties. Chocolate, it seems, can cheer the fainthearted, comfort the afflicted - and boost your love life.
But increasingly we also want to eat our chocolate (and other foods) with a good conscience. Everywhere in the rich world, people are putting their money where their mouths are and buying chocolate that does not exploit other people. Sophi Tranchell, Managing Director of the Day Chocolate Company which produces fairly traded chocolate, says: 'If more people bought in a discerning way, giving priority to the fact that producers got a fair price, it would make a real difference.' The story of chocolate could end happily ever after. It is up to you, the consumer. So lick your fingers as you stir in these recipes. Enjoy, explore, taste - and feel good about it.

From "The BitterSweeter World of CHOCOLATE"
Troth Wells & Nikki van der Gagg, 2006 UK