Chocolate Facts

As I became more serious about chocolate issues, and I started to ask questions about the established order of the chocolate business, I opened a can of worms. I felt that I had to offer a choice about the kind of chocolate people consumed and to give them the information they needed to make their choices. It is not that I want to dictate the kind of chocolate eaten, but I believe everyone should at least be able to taste the real thing and decide for themselves. In 1986, I started the Campaign for Real Chocolate, to counter the multinational chocolate makers argument that the addition of vegetable and other fats in chocolate was quite acceptable. At that time the EU was trying to have this type of chocolate confectionery renamed ‘vegelate’, which I found an apt description of the low-grade product masquerading as something else. The long-running battle was finally resolved with a fudge: this kind of bar may be sold into the European market as ‘Family Milk Chocolate’, the ingredients primarily sugar and fat, with a lot of milk and not very much cocoa or cocoa butter. What my campaign has been trying to establish is the minimum acceptable level of cocoa, that cocoa butter is the only legitimate fat in a chocolate bar, and that sugar shouldn’t be the primary ingredient.