It Could Happen Here - The Secret History of Chocolate: Spooky Week #1

Episode Date: October 27, 2023

To begin spooky week we walk through the 500 years of unfathomable horror that produced the chocolate we eat todaySee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons?

Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast,

Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app

or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming. This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award. Submit your podcast for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards.

That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. It's spooky week. It could happen here. It's spooky Week, the week where things are spooky. I'm your host, Mio Wong, and with me is Garrison. Hello. And today... Hello! Fine, whatever, I did it.

Alright, alright, we've gotten the preliminary spooky out. And so, today we're going to be talking about one of the sort of key elements of Halloween and that is chocolate. And so on a very basic level we're going to ask, what is chocolate? And the answer, and it pains me to say

this as someone who really loves chocolate, is really, really bleak. Yeah. But before we get into exactly how bleak it is uh we're gonna look at sort of the early history of chocolate so most so okay there's there's a lot of disagreement about exactly how old chocolate is i've seen sources that say 3000 bc uh i've seen sources that say 1700 BC the 1700 BC is the one that's pretty consistent

it seems like the Olmecs had something like chocolate that's a sort of bitter drink that they sometimes put vanilla or red pepper in it was like a bitter slurry that you from what I hear not very enjoyable

but it got you like really high. Like not high like weed, but like kind of like cocaine. It was like, it was a massive stimulant. Yeah, yeah. From what I hear about these kind of early, gross, bitter chocolate slurries. Yeah, and you know, I mean, this is a thing that's, this is not a regular consumption drink.

Basically everyone who uses this and this and chocolate is consumed by a bunch of different civilizations like across like most of South America. There's some then sort of like the Mayans, obviously the Mayans and the Aztecs, too. There's a lot of places where this is being used and it's everyone seems to use it for ritual purposes yeah I think at some point the I think it was the the Olmecs at some point were doing these like they were they were making fermented alcohol

out of so so normally with with chocolate you're using the like the cocoa beans right but there's like a flesh in the flute fruit around the beans and they were making like a fermented thing out of that and I don't know i i leave as an exercise to the reader with you count that as chocolate but the sort of conventional story goes okay so like several thousand years after the olmecs the aztecs and the mayans using it for ritual purposes and the story basically is okay so herman cortez drinks chocolate with the Aztec King Moctezuma Cortez goes this is

bitter as shit and sucks ass but he brings it back to Europe anyways and in Europe they mix it with sugar also with honey but mostly with sugar and it becomes you know it becomes very very popular drink in Europe and at some point this is like the 1840s so like like takes them about like 300 years to figure out how to make cocoa powder but once you have cocoa powder you can it's not it ceases to be bitter like in the way that it sort of is naturally you can you can process it with like like a like basic solutions which which neutralizes some of the acidic and bitter bitter tastes which is why you should always buy dutch processed cocoa powder which is unfortunately hard to find these days but it is it is it is it is the shit yeah so that's that's actually yeah

so the that's that's dutch cocoa and then 20 years later someone figures out how to make that into a chocolate bar and, you know, sort of voila, you have chocolate. Now the conventional histories are missing something very, very important, which is something that defined has defined the production of chocolate.

Since Europeans got ahold of it and continues to define it today. And that thing is slavery. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. And, you know, this is slavery is, is a very sort of important part of the history of chocolate, because slavery is what transforms the older ritual chocolate used by a bunch of different indigenous societies for several thousand years into modern chocolate. And this is this is a point that I want to make, because most most histories of chocolate tend, you know, when they're trying to find the origin of modern chocolate they go oh it's a chocolate bar and I think they're wrong I think they're very wrong I think the distinct European innovation of chocolate is to

add sugar to it yes and this raises the very bleak question where does sugar come from and the answer of course is slavery sugar is one of the primary crops of slave economies in both the colonies and the west indies it is one of the key elements of the so-called triangle trade where you know you may have you probably have learned this in school i but you know for people who've been out of school for a long time so the triangle trade is europe sends manufactured goods to af. It trades that for enslaved people. Enslaved people are taken from Africa to the colonies and sometimes to America, sometimes to the colonies in the West Indies. And then they take, you know, the products of slavery from plantations back to Europe.

And that's, you know, rice, indigo, tobacco, cotton, molasses, rum, and critically sugar back to europe actually wait did they teach you the triangle trade yeah yes i mean i i i i i did learn my my christian homeschooling curriculum wasn't the best but we did we did we didn't cover some basic things it's interesting because the the triangle trade as a model like isn't that old even though even though like this is the way that we all understand like how the sort of colonial trade work it's a kind of recent thing yeah so sugar sugar is a very very key part of this entire thing and there's a very very famous a sort of classic study of sugar and slavery is uh sydney w mitz's sweetness and power which is a fundamental tax in a lot of sort of uh i don't know a lot of the sort of fields around the study of slavery

and one of his arguments is that the british industrial proletariat is fueled by slave sugar because the sugar is a stimulant that you know they're putting it in tea which another stimulant they're putting it in whatever they drink and this is a thing that allows them to keep working for longer than they otherwise would have been able to yeah this also was the origin of britain's probably largest cultural trait bad teeth um yeah and you know so so this is this is this is a many aspects of British culture are descended from from slavery. And, you know, but the other the other important thing for our story is that sugar is what makes chocolate sort of palatable to Europeans. And and this is a sort of interesting thing that Europeans do. You know, they do this with tobacco, too.

You haven't you have something that you're only supposed to use in fairly small amounts for ritual purposes right and the europeans are like okay but what if we purified the shit out of it and they just ate it literally every day yeah have you ever tried like unsweetened 100 like chocolate liquor uh it fucking sucks i hate it it's not good you can certainly nibble it can be a fun novelty to nibble but you certainly wouldn't want to eat like a whole bar of it yeah it's it's some real oh boy yeah so like i mean it makes sense that they added sugar to it but the consequence of this is that we can ask we can finally ask the question right now now now that it's been

transformed by sugar into this object of sort of popular consumption we can ask, we can finally ask the question right now, now that it's been transformed by sugar into this object of sort of popular consumption. We can ask the question, what is chocolate? And the answer is that chocolate is colonialism plus slavery. It is a fusion of cocoa, which is an indigenous ritual drink seized as a part of the wages of colonialism by the European empires, and sugar, a slave crop that drove the colonial plantation economy. And, you know know you might say mia you're you know you're being harsh here right even if we accept your argument about chocolate the 1600s surely surely that's not true now wasn't wasn't wasn't slavery abolished in the 1800s and now i assume i assume nestle's farming practices are totally above board see and this this is i think the

interesting part of the story is i gare like our readers is assuming a thing i'm about to launch into here is the mars nestle child slavery lawsuit and we will because that is a critical element of of slavery and chocolate production but there is also still slavery and sugar production capitalism and and not only is there slavery and sugar production there still slavery and sugar production. Capitalism. And not only is there slavery and sugar production, there is slavery and sugar production in the exact same places there were slavery and sugar production 500 years ago. And this is one of the sort of stunning things about, you know, the myths of capitalism, right? Which is that, okay, capitalism has had 400, you know, I'm going to give them a bit of credit and be like, okay, I don't know, like, I'm going to give capitalism a little bit of credit

and give it only with being responsible for 400 years of this and not 500 years of this because, you know, whatever complicated arguments about whether the capitalist transition is in the 1500s or 1600s, but, you know know they have had 400 years to solve the problem of slavery on hispaniola has it done that no it is there is still slavery on the island of hispaniola 400 years later which we're going to be discussing in a second still the best possible thing here is that maybe and and and this is it is arguable maybe last year we there stop being slaves there now i don't even think that i don't think that's true and we're going to get into to that but you know before before we sort of launch into you know what like whether or not there are still slaves on trigger plantations in the Dominican Republic if you have had 400

years to solve a problem and you have not solved it you are never going to solve it hey hey let's not let's let's not pigeonhole ourselves here there's a lot of things that have been around for 400 years that ought not to be that's true but But if you're if you are an economic system and your economic system has been you are supposed to have you are supposed to have dealt with this at least 200 years ago. But, you know, we've arrived here and something we've talked about before in the show, at least a bit. here at one of the real weaknesses of both sort of liberal and radical accounts of of how the capitalist economy works because both sets of accounts take as their starting point the fact that capitalism is based on free labor that it's free people who enter into contracts to sell you their labor and that forced labor is this sort of like hold over from older economic systems no i actually just saw a thing today on the dying remains of Twitter

about how capitalism is the only economic system that's not based on exploitation or violence. It's based on free trade between markets. And it's like, people really believe this shit. It's like, I don't know, like, I don't know. At some point, I'm going to do an episode about, there's this really good book whose name i'm forgetting right now because i didn't look this up beforehand but there's a really

good book on these sort of dueling forced labor systems driving the tea economy in the late 1800s so that there's there's one forced labor system in china and a different forced labor system in india that are both warring at each other to control the tea market it is certainly interesting how much tea has impacted like geopolitics oh yeah yeah we'll we'll do an episode on that one day yeah tea's not that great guys i'm sorry it's fine not tea rips tea rips i would not we just don't have good tea here i would not do as much killing as people have done for oh no absolutely it's not worth killing anyone over the number of people who've been killed over it is...

An Earl Grey is fine on a rainy afternoon, but come on. Yeah, it's not worth conquering continents for. But okay, so back to the sort of main plot that is not tea, that is in fact chocolate.

So one of the things that we can learn, that we learn from this is that, you know, forced labor is not just a holdover. It's been a it's been a central part of capitalism for as long as capitalism has existed. And given its current track record, it will be a part of capitalism for as long as it exists. And, you know, so there's always been a racial component to this, right? And this is like trivially obvious, right?

Like there's a racial component to slavery, like, holy shit, it's mostly about race. But I think, you know, we can expand this a little bit and it gets you to a, some sort of interesting things, which is that race is one of, you know, so like obviously

capitalism is supposed to be based on wage labor, but race is what mediates your access to wage labor in the first place. So, you know, white, like if you're an American, right, like white Americans have basically always been able to get access to wage labor, you know, and as shitty as wage labor is, it's it's not as bad as the other things you can get forced black like you know you get a successive forms of slavery if you're indigenous they tried to enslave you and then either sort of kept doing it or gave up and just killed just did the genocide uh asian people like on who came to this continent and also sort of the west indies largely get debt p and indian indentured servitude and you know you can you can sort of work this out

so on and so forth there's there's different like modes of stuff that are the normal sort of work this out and so on and so forth. There's different modes of stuff that are the normal sort of like what you by default have access to if you are X race, right? Yeah. And obviously, this sort of racial access to wage labor is spread across the world. Your access to wage labor is dependent on sort of your subject position as colonizer or colonized as well as your sort of global and also your, like, local racial hierarchies, because, oh boy, can that shit be really fucked up. But the upshot of this is that many of the

descendants of enslaved Haitian people are still effectively enslaved today on sugar plantations in the Dominican Republic. And so we're gonna tell that story, but first, we're... Oh're oh god do you know what does no i cannot guarantee that our products and services are slave free like i wish i could but well do you know what is also here for a spooky time this halloween

that's right These products and services. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters

to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know it. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast,

and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible.

Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly.

I am talking to a felon right now and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting

if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head,

search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. Okay, we are back. I'm drinking my not-mocha coffee, drinking my regular unsweetened coffees. Therefore, totally fine no yeah yeah i'm sure there's nothing everything's all nothing bad nothing bad has ever happened

in the history of coffee no i'm here no tea no chocolate i'm safe i'm good anyway so unfortunately the people who are not safe is Haitians in the Dominican Republic. So we are not going to do an entire history of slavery in the Dominican Republic because. Because this is a chocolate episode and we only have so much time. Yeah, you know, for many reasons. But one of the things that happened in in. So we're going to we're going to at sort of the like the modern history of this and by modern i'm starting it and i'm starting in the 80s because i have to pick a place

now one of the things that happens in the 1980s is that the dominican army effectively so goes into haiti or just recruits haitian people who are in the dominican republic and are like hey you're gonna okay we have like jobs for you like come like do this work and so a bunch of people get in like these like army vans and then they get there and they get washed out of the van a bunch of guys point guns at them and go you're gonna

work for free or we're gonna kill you so this is really bad and this is this is how a lot of like through the 80s and kind of early this is this is how a lot of like through the 80s and early 90s, this is how a lot of sugar production worked in the Dominican Republic. And, you know, it's very notable here that Dominican Republic produces a lot of sugar and it produces a lot of sugar that specifically the U.S. uses. Now, this is like state run slavery, right? On sort of like state run plantations.

So then we had neoliberalism. And so the state-run plantations get privatized. However, comma, they still run on slave labor. So there's a very good Mother Jones report about this. I'm going to read some of it here. Kakata is one of about a hundred, according to a local missionary's estimate. Isolated camps scattered around Central Romana, Central Romana is a giant sugar plantation, Central Romana's 160,000 acres of sugarcane, a tract almost as big as New York City.

Most of the workers and their families live in these batalles, rising in the morning to work the cane in the punishing heat, clearing weeds like the military slavery program in the 90s. And so he went back like a couple of years ago. So he's talking about some of the people were trafficked back to the military slavery program. Others were born and live stateless and others came from Haiti more recently paying, paying smugglers to sneak them across the border for years. The government has resisted providing legal status to people of Haitian

heritage in the country. Even those born there, an estimated 200,000 people who for generations have been demeaned by race and class, are stateless. For the men in the camps, Centra Romana is the state. Their villages are patrolled by armed company police, empowered to evict. Centra Romana owns the land where the Haitians work, the rail cars where they weigh and load the cane and stocks, and the dwellings where they sleep. They miles from the nearest dominican town not controlled by the company so things going great here um yeah and the conditions you know okay so so the the the sort of the capitalist reforms that neoliberalism has

brought to this system are the number of child slaves has decreased dramatically because that was a big thing when the first reporting went out everyone was like holy shit there's a bunch of child slaves this is a terrible thing yeah so we have less child slaves right we did it and you know so instead of of the child slaves right it's now mostly adults um but the conditions here are still effectively slavery, even after the sort of child slavery stuff, like, is driven under. On a good day, these workers make $3 a day, and they are effectively

and sometimes literally unable to leave. Now, there are a lot of reasons for this. One of the big ones is that most of the workers there, most, like, basically all most like basically all like you you might find a worker somewhere who isn't stuck in this but they're caught in these debt traps uh by central romana who and these these are like classic company but they're not they're worse than than like a you know the classic american company town because at least in american company town you can go to another town that is not controlled by the company whereas these people like cannot

and so they're caught in these debt traps by uh central romana not controlled by the company whereas these people like cannot and so they're caught in these debt traps by central romana which is the company that owns these plantations and because they're so in debt they're constantly forced to work for the company in order to pay off their debt but you know they never actually make enough money to pay the debt off and so they have to take on more debt to survive until, you know, and largely what happens is these people work there in debt until they die. This is classic debt P&N, where sort of debt transforms people into the effective property of the debt holder who exacerbate the debt by denying them the ability to live without taking on more debt. A very common way this happens is with medical debt,

which is something I, you know, I think we're familiar with to some extent here but is egregiously worse and the other thing that i was realizing about this is that this is actually really eerily similar to the way that cortez and the conquistadors enslaved indigenous people during the genocide yeah they would do the same thing of like well okay now you're in debt to me and because you can't pay the debt you have 500 interest interest per week, so that just accumulates, and now you work for me for the rest of your lives. And this is one of the sort of ways in which the long shadow of Spanish imperialism looms over the Dominican Republic,

even in what has really been about 200 years of uh the age of the american empire you know and and as you know obviously like as much of an effect as the spanish empire has had here and oh god it's not good today it is the american empire that lines the pockets of the slavers of the dominican republic so central romana is owned by this this called the Fanjul family, who are these Cuban expats who run this like enormous resort and shit where they live in Florida and are handed. And this is really fun. One hundred and fifty million dollars for the American state every year in the form of price supports for sugar. So like you're an american right like obviously your your tax money very obviously goes to support slavery because we have prisons

and so your your taxes are paying to enslave people but your taxes are also paying for slavery in other countries it's incredible really really great stuff from the from the american political system here. And, you know, and the way this has been maintained is through like two, I think in the last 20 years, Mother Jones reported they've spent, the sugar lobbyists spent $220 million on campaign contributions and lobbying. And it works really well. They've been able to influence the system for a very, very long time. The other funny thing about the Fanjul family is that they've created the perfect political trap, which is so one of one of the brothers is like a Trump guy and the other person is a Hillary supporter. And they're both like incredibly enmeshed in both of the circles. So it's great. And things are going very good. So after so the Mother Jones investigation was like in the last, I think it was like last year, the year before.

And when the Mother Jones investigation about the fact that like all of this shit was still happening came out, there was a giant uproar about it. And a couple of things happened. One is that, so the village that the journalists had visited, Central central romana like they didn't even bulldoze the villages they blew everyone's houses down with like sledgehammers and forcibly moved them to like other villages and separated people's families so that's that's great and then so in late 2022 under under pressure from this reporting the u.s government like banned imports from that specific company and okay it's unclear what is going to happen with it if you know if they're going to get unbanned eventually uh if it's going to stick if they're just going to like i don't know like transfer the assets to another company or

something and use that instead as so as of right now this specific set of plantations is not able to export sugar to the u.s so this is this is as much of a victory over slavery as we're going to get in this episode and And this victory is incredibly. That's not reassuring. No, it's only going to get worse. This is this is the peak of of anti-slavery stuff we're going to see here. Yeah. So enjoy it while you can.

And do you know what else you should enjoy? Oh, these products and services that support this podcast. That's good. Yes. This is the real peak of the episode, folks. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter?

Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Son enter. Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters

to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network. Available on the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts. Or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast.

And we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex Elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge

and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world

as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head,

So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. All right. I am rejuvenated by the advertising industrial complex. I feel ready to hear other tales of great progress. Woo! Okay, so now we're going to turn to the type of slavery that everyone, I think, expected this episode to mostly be about, which is the fact that Cocoa Bean production

is also largely produced by slave labor. So, okay, I'm going gonna read a bit from a report by the food empowerment project which has done some very good work on most but like specifically slavery in west africa they're also one of the only media people i've ever seen talk about the fact that a lot of this stuff it's not exactly the same but a lot of the sort of slavery stuff also seems to be happening on plantations in brazil but there's effectively no coverage of it that's not in portuguese i don't know so like eventually eventually one day i guess like the fact that other places other than west africa have slavery will hit the the anglophone media class or whatever. But until then, I'm going to read this section.

In West Africa, cocoa is a commodity crop grown primarily for export. Cocoa is the Ivory Coast primary export and makes up about half the country's agricultural export in volume. Most cocoa farmers earn less than $1 a day and income below the extreme poverty line. As a result, they often resort to the use of child labor to keep their prices competitive in many cases yeah yeah this is one of the things that happens when you

when you're reading about child slavery stuff is even people who like are trying to you know draw attention to how bad this is you get stuff stuff like that. That's like, Jesus Christ. Yeah, so they're making sub $1 a day. They're using child labor. In many cases, this includes what the International Labor Organization calls, quote, the worst form of child labor. Okay. These are defined as practices, quote, likely to harm the health, safety, or morals of children.

Approximately 2.1 million children in ivory coast and ghana work on cocoa farms most of whom are likely exposed to the worst form of child labor which is also really good that like we've we've we've kept capitalism has finally reached the you know the apex of its control of the commanding heights of the world economy which means that we're talking about we're trying to make tier lists of how bad child labor is well yeah i mean a whole bunch of child labor laws just got like rolled back across many uh many states here yeah it's really good country so it's very exciting the children for the minds it's yeah it's it's it's it's great you know so so obviously a lot of the the the child slavery on cocoa farms are from sort of like larger i mean i guess they are corporate but from sort of like larger plantations but also lest you think that it's better on family farms. No, family farms. I mean, I guess it is technically better than like being kidnapped and enslaved is merely doing child labor on your family's like cocoa farm.

Just being born into these pretty, pretty not great labor practices that you really have no say in or any agency whatsoever. Yeah. Yeah. you really have no say in or any agency whatsoever yeah yeah and like you know this is one of these things where like the the economic conditions are so bad that people are people are facing impossible choices and and i think we can say that they make the wrong choice which is a lot of okay so like there are there are sort of different ways that children get trafficked into slavery work um a lot of them are sold by their own families who do not have enough resources to take care of them and are like okay we'll we'll basically sell

these people so they can go do this job and these families don't know that like their child was about to be enslaved right they're just like okay well they're gonna go off and do work but the other way that this happens is that kids from like villages in other countries like there's a lot of focus on mali as one of the places this happens from but yeah so there's a lot of these effect what are effectively raids into into mali from the ivory coast to like steal children and it also happens in bikini fallaso you know and this gets to the point where you know I'm going to read a quote from one of these

from this report again in one village in Burkina Faso almost every mother in the village has had a child trafficked onto cocaine farms traffickers will then sell children to cocaine farmers so this is like the worst paranoid fantasies of every

American right winger except it's you know this is like the worst paranoid fantasies of every American right winger, except it's, you know, this is just how chocolate is made. Yeah. This is, you know, all of,

all of the sound of freedom guys, uh, with all of, you know, the whole uproar around that movie earlier this year versus all of them. Uh, yeah. Enjoying their little M&Ms and kit kats and hey i i like the occasional kit kats too this is this is uh a massive problem i i don't know i really

love chocolate i have not eaten any chocolate since i started researching this and i like and it's but it sucks because it's like you can't you can't i mean we're going to get into more of this in a second but like you can't like ethically consume your way out of this right like because the conditions of free trade cocoa exists oh boy yeah we're going to get into that but yeah like there's there's no there's no actual systemic like there's no way that you can... You can't change this stuff with your individual consumption habits. And that's something that's just really fucking bleak about this.

Because these conditions are as bad as you can possibly imagine. But the Food Empowerment Project describes children as young as 5 are forced to work up to 14 hours a day, like chopping down cocoa pods and then chopping them open with machetes. And sometimes these people get sometimes these kids are using chainsaws to like clear wood, like clear down like forests. Yeah. And, you know, OK, so this goes exactly how you expect it to go, which is a bunch of these kids just have a bunch of fucking scars from when they've been slashed by machetes. Because again, you are handing machetes to children, some of whom are as young as five, and then they have to carry a hundred pound bags of cocoa beans through the jungle. And this is the thing that's also happening in the Dominican

Republic. And this happens a lot in a lot of places is that they just get, you know, when companies want to spray like their farms with pesticides right they don't even bother even like clearing people out which might you know help like a tiny bit to make them not like die from fucking poison but no like these fucking dipshits just like spray them with toxic chemicals as just like spray them with pesticides like a lot of whom are christinogens um a lot of this is happening in the dominican the sugarcane fields in the dominican republic too and a lot of those people just fucking died because you know they were straight with these chemicals there was

a really terrible story of a guy who was trying to sue central romana and just fucking died from the like he wasn't able to get a payout for the lawsuit because he died in 2020 before the lawsuit could like finish so here's another great quote from the food empowerment project the farm owners using child labor usually provide the children with the cheapest food available such as corn paste or the cassava and bananas that grow in the surrounding forest in some cases the children sleep on wooden planks and small windowless buildings without access to clean water or sanitary bathrooms. And, you know, another key part of this, right, is like, okay, so the conditions are obviously unbearably bad, but, you know, a key part of this, like any system of slavery, is the physical violence against the enslaved people who are repeatedly and often beaten and abused and tortured in ways that are very reminiscent of

sort of like older epochs of slavery. If they try to escape now, this is the companies care about this to the extent that it's bad PR. Yes. And the chocolate companies repeated like the chocolate companies. Okay. They, they signed a thing

in the year 2000 where they said we're going to eliminate child's the worst forms of child slavery by 2005 yeah like this is this has been a known issue for like yeah over two decades now garrison yes what year is it right now? The year of our Lord, 2023. Yeah, they have been promising to end child slavery in these... No, no, no, no. The worst forms of child slavery. Originally, they were supposed to be ending child slavery, and then they scaled it down to the worst forms. Only the worst.

But they have been promising to do this for longer than you have been alive. Yes, correct. Which is terrifying now yes and and as we'll get into later right the number of child slaves is higher than it was when they started doing these child slave reduction efforts so quote-unquote reduction efforts which are just sort of pr bullshit so industry lobbying groups are also very very powerful and this is part of part of how this stuff persists so the university of chicago has a center called norac which is like a public research center um i don't know i went to that fucking school i don't trust any of these motherfuckers and neither should you because it turns out there was so okay. So they released this report on how bad child

slavery is, right? But there was a leak of the original version of the report that was supposed to come out. And the original version of the report has the number of child slaves at like 2.2 million. Now, when the report actually comes out with no justification whatsoever and using a bunch of numbers for child slavery that are from before coven 19 the norac report was like ah there's only like 1.6 million child slaves so 600,000 child slaves just sort of vanished in an editorial process after they got they came under fire from uh the they came under fire from the chocolate lobby yeah yeah let's uh let's round that down it makes it make makes it easier to palace and and the other thing that it hides is that there's been a 10 to 15 increase in the

number of of child slaves working in like in the coat and in cocoa since COVID started because COVID has been a giant sort of, you know, the economic damage that COVID caused forced a bunch of people into, into, you know, increasingly desperate things. And,

you know, okay. So we, we, we, we tease this a little bit and you might be thinking, well, I can eat fair trade chocolate,

right? I can pay $10 for a chocolate bar. So bars as fair trade on it and it will and that will make sure that i'm only eating chocolate produced by free labor nope the certifications for the chocolate are fucking bullshit you're still eating slave chocolate um the follow is an excerpt from a study conducted by the corporate accountability lab on the failure of initiatives in the chocolate industry like certifications? Quote, in order to understand the gap between consumer perception and farmer impact better, we brought certified chocolate bars to villages where some or all of the farmers were certified. We held up the bar with the label and explained to the farmers what consumers expected out of the label. Primarily that farmers were paid a fair price, earned a decent living, and certain practices like child labor

and deforestation were not present. We also explained the difference in retail price between fair trade and uncertified chocolate. The overwhelming response from farmers to this information was shock and outrage. One farmer pulled out his worn shirt in front of him and asked if it looked like he earned a decent living. A woman in one village said she can hardly afford to send her children to school, so how could anyone think she earned a fair price? Our farmer consultations revealed virtually imperceptible differences between certified and uncertified farms in terms of living incomes, poverty, education, access to healthcare,

farmer bargaining, power, or access to information. So yeah, the, the, all the people who are telling you they're doing some fair trade shit, they're keeping your money and the places are getting it from are as

fucked as the, as Hershey's. Yeah. So this is bad. Now you, you might also think, okay, we can get out of this by buying from coco

cooperatives except except and this is a wonderful thing that capitalism has brought on the world i most coco collectives aren't actually like workers collect like aren't actually co-ops no they're just sort of people's republic of chocolate farmers i'm sure they're all People's Republic of Chocolate Farmers. I'm sure they're all reciting the Little Red Book. This is something actually, this is something that China actually pioneered because there's a bunch of firms in China that are also tech. I talked about this in my,

did an episode, a Bastards episode a long time ago about this milk company that poisoned 300,000 babies. And that company was technically a co-op, but like it was a co-op in the sense that there was a small group of workers who were basically managers who owned shares and then they just hired every sourced everything out to independent contractors so it functioned like a normal company yeah and this is a thing a lot this the coco trade stuff is actually worse because most of these things that are called co-ops aren't even co-ops at all they're just set up by cocoa growers as like fake co-ops and there are there are like a very very small number of of these

cocoa farms that are actually workers cooperatives but there's no way to tell which one is which unless you spend a bunch of time like actually going and tracking the cooperatives down so there's no sort of like ethically way out of this, right? You're just kind of, you're, you know, like you can't,

you can't eat your way out of this problem. And of course, everything across the board, all of these conditions have gotten worse since the pandemic. So, you know, it's, it's not only is capitalism not making things better every,

like things are in fact, getting worse. Now, alright, I promised you the lawsuits. We're going to talk a bit about the lawsuits. There were actually two big lawsuits. There were eight people from Mali who were enslaved by cocoa plantations after being trafficked from Mali, sued Nestle, Cargill, Berry,

Calabar, I don't know, some French shit. Mars, Olam, Hershey's and Modela's to try to get compensation from the companies by virtue of the fact that the companies sold products made by their child slave labor. Yeah. Now, there's also a separate

lawsuit against slightly different companies. A lot of the same company is slightly different. That's using a different set of legal arguments. Both of the lawsuits have been slightly different, that's using a different set of legal arguments. Both of the lawsuits have been thrown out. And I want to take a second to look at the reasoning here, both of which are sort of just amazing. So, I think the most famous one is the Supreme Court's

8-1 decision that said, well, so, like, all this stuff happened, but it happened outside the U.S., so you can't sue companies for it here. Which is an amazing piece of logic, which is just like, oh yeah, no,

actually like corporations, like American corporations could just go everywhere else and do crimes. And this is, and the American legal system is specifically written in such a way that like if, if, if an American corporation enslaves you in like the ivory coast, there's nothing you can do about it in the U S and then then a judge in dc threw out the other case because you know their argument was well you can't

prove that the companies knew you were being enslaved on those farms there's no quote traceable connection between the people who enslaved you in the company so there's nothing we can do and the reason both these arguments work is the reason for the structure of the chocolate market, right? The reason cocoa plantations in the Ivory Coast and also Brazil can get away with this, you know, well, the reason that those plantations are in the Ivory Coast or Brazil or other places, the reason they're happening there and not in the U.S. is because these are places where you can get away with that level of exploitation and corporate violence that, you know, in the U.S. would be a lot more difficult. And this shields them from legal liability. Furthermore, instead of just, you know, jumping, instead of just running the cocoa plantations themselves, which these companies could easily do, right?

This is a very, very large trade. They could just sort of like they could invert vertically, not even vertically integrate. They could just actually make chocolate like they could just vertically, not even vertically integrate. They could just actually make chocolate. Like they could just run the process. And they very specifically choose not to do it. And the reason they choose not to do it, this is a $100 billion industry, right? But instead, what they choose to do is to just buy cocoa from the chocolate market where all these sort of nebulous producers sell, which allows the chocolate companies to go, oh, well, these people don't work for us. We just buy chocolate from the chocolate market where all these sort of nebulous producers sell which allows the chocolate companies to go oh well these people don't work for us we just buy chocolate from the market how are we supposed to know uh which of these plantations use slave labor so it

puts like one degree of separation yeah well it's actually two degrees it's an additional degree of separation from the way something like walmart works right where walmart has a bunch of independent contractors this isn't even contractors. They're just buying finished products from things they're completely unaffiliated with. And this gives them like, it gives them like two degrees of legal separation because it's not just that their contractors

are doing something that they didn't know about. It's that they're just buying it, right? And this fucking sucks um and you know since laws exist to protect the ruling class judges and courts can just wave their hands and go well these companies definitely enslaved you but uh we we have no choice but to let them off completely scot-free so sorry about that and i want to end today with something that has been running through my mind every since i fucking started researching this which is that the bourgeoisie must pay for their crimes the state has failed the court has failed the ngos have failed and if anything is

ever going to fucking happen that forces these companies to be in any way if there's to be like a single iota of justice for the fact that all of these companies have been fucking gorging themselves on the profits of slave labor at all, we are going to do it or no one is. So congratulations you, the American

worker, it is unfortunately incumbent on you to deal with these fucking corporations that have been destroying the entire world so yeah happy spooky week everyone yes this is very scary yeah well thank you for that lovely uh depressing presentation uh mia um i mean i guess is is there is, is there a sort of takeaway besides there's no ethical consumption under capitalism? I mean, like... I mean, capitalism will never abolish slavery.

I know there is one U.S. state where they grow chocolate, which is Hawaii, which has its own problems of colonization. So even if you try to buy from a place that arguably has less chocolate slavery, it's generally better produced. You're still implicating yourself in all of the problems relating to the independence of that island and the US's colonization. So we're really just really just kind of

trapped on all sides here uh is what it feels like i mean this is a this halloween chocolate problem yeah i mean and i i think i think the the way to think about this right is that this this is an actual systemic issue right this is a systemic thing capitalism has been doing for about 400 years like since its entire existence and if you want to if you want to end it we have to you have to actually you it's not it's not even enough to destroy these companies right because even if you brought down every single one of these chocolate companies right there would just be another round of chocolate companies it would be doing exactly the same shit so you have to you have to destroy the system of property by which these things are allowed to exist and at that point maybe you can start on being able to eat food that isn't produced by slave labor it turns out willy wonka was the

villain the whole time you know i i was trying to think about the amount of slave labor that we see from him versus the amount of slave labor and actual chocolate. We see a lot of slave labor from Willy Wonka. It's, it's, it's, I think Wonka is using more slave labor, but not by as much as it should be.

I don't know. I don't know. It's, it's, it's hard to say. I think, I, I think it's pretty clear that Wonka's use of slave labor is just an

accurate representation of the real life chocolate industry. Yes. So, yeah, go go go enjoy your weekend and then go enjoy that new fucking Twink Wonka movie that looks, I have to say, dog shit. Oh, yeah. Bad, terrible, bad idea. Bad idea anyone's had since capitalism. Twink Wonka. I'm sorry. It doesn't slap. You're out of 10. Anyway, well, tune in in the next few days for two more Spooky Week episodes for you. We only got three this week because there's a lot of other news happening.

But we at least have two other Spooky Week episodes that I am about to finish working on. So stay tuned for that. Goodbye. the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of right an anthology podcast of modern day

horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America listen to Nocturnal

on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast curious about queer sexuality cruising and expanding your horizons?

Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead,

now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming. This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award. Submit your podcast for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards.