Throughline - The Bitter History of Chocolate

Episode Date: December 4, 2025

What's better than holiday hot chocolate? If just thinking about it makes you feel all warm and fuzzy, well – that’s by design. Chocolate's big history sweeps across the globe, and today we’re going on that journey: from the pre–Columbus Americas, to an early 20th century reporter’s hunch about what cocoa production really takes, to a 21st century medical student’s story about his childhood on a farm that produces those holiday treats.Guests:Carla Martin, lecturer in African and African American Studies at Harvard University and President of the Board of the Institute for Cacao and Chocolate ResearchCatherine Higgs, professor of history at the University of British Columbia in CanadaShadrack Frimpong, founder of Cocoa360We’ve got a favor to ask: We know there are a lot of great NPR shows out there.. but we all know who's the best.  NPR is celebrating the best  podcasts of the year, and YOU get to crown the winner of the People’s Choice Award. Vote for Throughline at npr.org/peopleschoice. May the best pod win!To access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey there, it's Rund. Before we start the show today, I want to make sure you know it's a special week at NPR, because it was just giving Tuesday. NPR celebrates this global day of generosity every year. But we've never had a year quite like this one before. NPR is now operating without federal support for the first time in our history, more than 50 years. It's a big change. And at such an uncertain time, we can learn a lot from the past. And ThruLine works to bring you the stories that help us understand this moment. We're so grateful to the listeners who have already stepped up to donate, like Jessica from Arkansas, who says, ThroughLine is the greatest deep dive podcast ever. Thank you for all your reporting. Absolutely life-changing. Thank you, Jessica.

That really, really means a lot. And you all can be like Jessica, too. Please make your Giving Tuesday gift right now by signing up for NPR Plus. It's a simple recurring donation that gets you perks to NPR's podcasts and bonus episodes from through line. Join us at plus.npr.org.

Thanks again for your support. Now, let's get on to the show. A sip of Swiss Miss hot cocoa tastes so good and rich It makes me. Ruby, what are we about to do? About to make some hot chocolate, fan. It's full of real Wisconsin milk and rich imported cocoa. This is my son, Rumi.

Empty delicious cocoa into the mug. And this is us doing one of our favorite winter pastimes. How do you pour that one? Making hot chocolate. Classic. Just add hot water and delicious, rich and foamy Nestle hot chocolate takes the brr out of winter. This is the wine I made when I was a kid. What did you just pour in the cup?

What does it look like? Coco. What does it smell like? It smells like. Hot Street chocolate. Ah, yeah, that's a tough. Stir and sip. Like, you deserve it.

Do we deserve it? Yeah. Yeah. I think we deserve this hot chocolate. Ooh, I spilled some. The only thing better than the way it tastes is the way it makes you feel. Yeah, okay, so tell me what you feel like now. It just makes my, like, insides warm up.

And what else? What about the taste? The taste. I don't have to taste. It's hard to describe. It just makes you like happy and chocolatey and like warm and all fuzzy inside. Okay, gang, what do you do for a warm-up break? Yeah, you do we're going to be a lot.

Swiss Miss Instant Coco. You'll let it all. If you also felt warm and fuzzy inside listening to us to make and drink hot chocolate, it's not your fault. Hot chocolate has this kind of nostalgic. spot in our culture. It's a relatively cheap, sweet, warm drink that was accessible even for a working-class immigrant family like the one I grew up in. And now as a grown man, I'm basically passing this tradition on to the next generation. Would you run a mile for a cup of hot cocoa? I wouldn't run a mile, but I would run like... How many laps?

Wait, like, I'll run like two. Two laps for a hot chocolate. Three! If the hot Coke was fresh, it would be three. But this is the three. But this is the through line, and so you know we're going to ask the question, why? Why does chocolate have this place in our culture? Where did it come from? How is it produced? And who is producing it? Usually, this line of questioning would send us on a quest that leads into some kind of wormhole that eventually leads to a journal article or a lecturer or a book or something like that that puts it all together. Well, in this case, shockingly, there wasn't a ton of scholarship on chocolate history. Coco is considered an orphan crop in that it does not have the same research resources that we see for things like rice, potatoes, fish, etc.

And as a result, it is less studied, it is less written about, it is less understood. This is Carla Martin. I am a lecturer in African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She's also president of the board of the Institute for Cacao and Chocolate Research. I think part of that is because we treat it as silly. You know, it's like the Willy Wonkafication of chocolate. And it is actually very serious business. And so I appreciate anyone who takes the time to think about it as seriously as we would any other part of our ethical or moral lives.

According to several different market research companies, the chocolate industry is currently worth about $150 billion. And as you might have guessed, it has a complex. complex, fascinating history. Chocolate's one of those things that kids love. And so I'm a big, big proponent of if we want people to be educated about this, we have to start as early as they get access to chocolate. This is produced on farms, basically, where sometimes kids, your age, sometimes younger, work. Would you give up chocolate if it meant those kids didn't have to work?

Of course. Okay, before you get all, oh my God, why are you ruining chocolate for your kid? First of all, he's used to it. His dad is a journalist. Second, in the course of doing research and calling up experts like Carla Martin, I learned an amazing fact. Most of the world's cocoa, or it's also called cacao, comes from two West African countries, Ghana and Cotevois, also known as Ivory Coast. Carla Martin was actually living off the coast of West Africa in Cabo Verde when she first became interested in cocoa production. And while I was living there, I met some people.

who had returned from that work and who had been disabled by how difficult the work was. I met many other people who had family members who had never returned. And as a longtime chocolate lover, this was eye-opening for me. It wasn't something I had been aware of. I wasn't at that time fully clued in to what it meant that my cocoa that I loved was coming from a supply chain that was fraught with these kinds of labor issues. So how did this happen? How did this troubled supply chain of chocolate come to exist?

The story takes us from the vast empires of the pre-Columbus Americas to the journey of an early 20th century investigative journalist determined to learn the truth about chocolate. And finally, we'll speak with a young medical scientist. student who grew up on a cocoa farm in Ghana. In this episode of ThruLine from NPR, we take a deeper, often bitter look at the history of one of the world's favorite sweet treats, chocolate. This is Rochelle from Vancouver, Washington, and you're listening to ThruLine from NPR.

Thank you all for what you do. Ella McKay, coming to theaters December 12th. Your father's here. Why? A heartwarming new comedy from James L. Brooks. I'm a different person. I have never been my life out this way about any other woman. Jesus!

I wasn't counting your mother! It's a perfect holiday comedy about an imperfect family. You can use a scream, Ella. Starring Emma Mackey. Janie Lee Curtis, Camel Nanjani, Iowa Debrie, with Albert Brooks and Woody Harrelson. You should do that every afternoon. Ella McKay. Part one, the money tree.

Cacao grows on a tree. It takes cocoa trees three to five years to begin to produce fruit regularly. the fruit goes on the thickest part of the tree, the trunk of the tree. These fruits take on the shape of roughly like a Nerf football. They come into different colors, yellow, red, greens. The cacao pods have a bumpy outer shell. And when you break into them, what's inside is 30 to 40 different seeds.

And those are what we know as cacao beans. They are the seeds of the cacao. cowfruit. Ceds that get processed and mixed with other ingredients to become what we know today as chocolate. Cacao originally kind of came out of the primordial ooze in the Amazon region. This is Carla Martin again. She's an African and African American Studies lecturer at Harvard University. And it then, over time, spread into what is today southern Ecuador. We have evidence of its consumption at least 5,000 years ago there. It also moved up the Americas into what is today's Central America and Southern Mexico.

And in that particular region, it took on a distinct cultural significance. It came to be used in four different ways. It was used as a food flavoring. It was used as a beverage. And there were thousands of recipes that used cow in beverage. form. It was then also used as a spiritual offering, so it took on an important social significance in these different groups of indigenous people. For example, cacao would be present at official meetings and marriage ceremonies and was even used as an offering when rulers passed away. And

it was used as a currency. And that is where the big interest initially came with European in conquest of Central America, because cacao was quite literally the money that grew on trees. By the early 1500s, the first Spanish conquistadors had arrived on the shores of the new world. It was here that they would come across cacao for the first time. The place in the world that produced the most cacao at this time was the Pacific coast of El Salvador, known as the Isalkos region, where the Papil people were producing enormous quantities of cacao, and the papil people were also producers of something that we today say every time we say the word, and that is chocolate.

So the first recipe for chocolate came from somewhere in this region. So they were roasting and deshelling cacao beans, grinding them into a paste, and then adding them with some kind of sweetener. It could be honey, it could be agave, and then also putting in, at times, some vanilla. And that is very, very similar to what people who are listening might know of as dark chocolate today. And when the Spanish brought cacao beans back to Europe,

they would be used as a kind of medicine for things like fatigue, digestion, bowel function, and so on. Meanwhile, back in Mesoamerica, the Spaniards wanted to stockpile cacao since it was used as currency there. Once the Spanish really began the conquest, they were granted what was called the Encomenda system by the Spanish crown.

That allowed them to effectively enslave indigenous people working on, they called them, you know, cacao orchards. They were a version of plantations. And to require, that those indigenous people would produce cacao beans for them in the form of tribute. They, you know, in a kind of cynical way,

they promised that they would protect these indigenous people, that they would bring them the Catholic faith. Of course, what resulted was utter destruction of their society's mass death, a great deal of violence. Many indigenous people died from infectious diseases that the Spanish brought with them. It was also during this time that Spain, along with other European powers,

began to invest heavily in another crop, sugar cane. Now, sugar plantations are notoriously brutal. Data that we see about enslaved Africans arriving, let's say, to the Caribbean, shows that when they would arrive during the colonial period, they might live anywhere from five to eight years working on that plantation because the work was so intense. Even today, for people who are working, on sugar plantations, they equate their energy expenditure to them running a half marathon six

days a week. And so this is incredibly difficult work to work on sugar. Now, if we then transfer to what it means to work on cacao, it is actually less overall labor intensive. And so growing Cacao was seen as a way to get more profit out of enslaved people on plantations. It became attractive as something that elderly people could do, that children could do, that could be done in a less intense system, that would be on the side of sugar production in lots of places. The work of growing cacao may not have been as difficult as sugar, but it was still very hard work. First, you would have to pick out the small beans from the cacao pods,

ferment them, then dry them for a few more days. And when you consider the conditions and hours people were doing this work, then it becomes even more evident that it was not easy. If you're doing it for 16, 18 hours a day, six or seven days a week, it is still an absolutely brutal system of labor. especially when one is enslaved, malnourished, etc. It was designed as essentially a complement to sugar production. And it was only the rich and noble class in Spain

that could afford to have cacao, which they often had in the form of a drink. Over time, cacao slowly spread from the Spanish royal court to other European kingdoms. There's a long tradition of, you know, kind of marrying a princess to a prince in one country, she would often bring with her a tradition of chocolate consumption and spread it to a new country.

But a new class of people was emerging. By the 1700s, there's a growing mercantile class in Europe, people who are getting wealthy off of the slave trade and off of the trade in these commodities that are beginning to move around the world. And by the 1800s, new technologies rapidly changed. how cacao is processed. Specifically, that comes from the development of the hydraulic press.

That's the tool that allows you to make cocoa powder and cocoa butter. It comes from larger scale grinding machines that will grind those roasted cocoa beans and allow you to turn them into a cocoa paste and then chocolate and a variety of other machinery. This allows cocoa chocolate to become cheaper as a whole. And all throughout the 1800s into the late 1800s, demand for the product, goes up in Europe. With the invention of the hydraulic press,

this chocolate drink could be made faster now, and in turn, could also be sold for less. If we think about Britain, for example, in the 1800s during the Industrial Revolution, people were encouraged to have tea with some sugar in it as a way of cutting hunger, and the same came to be true of promoting cocoa as something that kids would drink

during the Industrial Revolution, because it was a way of giving them a relatively cheap and energy boost via calories also creates a kind of sense of well-being in people who consume it, but it was cheaper than other foods at the time. But at the same time that more people in Europe were trying cacao or cocoa,

some of the European powers were losing their grip on their colonies where most of it was being produced. Latin American and Caribbean nations become independent from their European colonizers. And European powers had come to see these extractive colonies as their crown jewels. These were the places that were producing enormous amounts of resources and wealth for their populations. For the Portuguese, that was Brazil. The Portuguese were heavily invested in Brazil for its cacao plantations.

By about 1822, Brazil is becoming independent from the Portuguese crown. There has been an intensification of cocoa production, and the Portuguese king and queen are worried that they will lose their crown jewel. As they're planning to move away from Brazil, as they take cocoa trees, and they plant them in another Portuguese colony, that's Sao Tomé and Principe. Sao Tomé and Principe is an island nation today that consists of two main islands, off the coast of West Central Africa. It's volcanic and mountainous

with a humid climate, perfect for growing cacao. Historically, it was an enormously important place. In the late 1400s, early 1500s, the Portuguese experimented with what would become the model for sugar plantation agriculture all throughout the world

by bringing enslaved people as chattel to grow sugar there. So there's already this tradition and population of people, in Saoamé, who are enslaved and can be put to work, working on these new plantations for cocoa. They kept enslavement there until the 1870s, so they were enslaving people, and they were able to bring them quite simply to Saoamai in principle and forced them to work. These islands that paved the way for sugar production, would play a major role in the modern cocoa trade,

a trade that has historically relied on unfree labor. Coming up, rumors and murmurs bring a journalist to Sao Tomei. Hi, this is Heather from Charleston, South Carolina, and you've been listening to Thru Line on NPR. Part 2, Nevenson's Crusade. Bourneville, England, 1901. William Cadbury, whose family owned one of the largest, chocolate companies in the world, cracks open a sales catalog.

He looks closer and reads that... There are laborers listed for sale along with the property and the machinery on a cocoa estate. The workers from a cocoa plantation being sold like pieces of farming equipment. William Cadbury quickly realized that this sale was from Sao Tomei, one of the places where he sourced the cocoa that went into his company's candy bars. and famous chocolate eggs. And, you know, he's very disturbed by this because he's a Quaker, and Quakers are, you know, long history of anti-slavery.

Quakers. For more than a century, they'd fought to end slavery around the world. William Cadbury personally gave money to support anti-slavery causes. So this was not a good look. So he started to start to... making inquiries. He demands answers from the Portuguese government. The Portuguese basically make the argument that the laborers are freely recruited in Angola.

A nation in southwest Africa on the mainland that's also controlled by Portugal. They sign a five-year contract, and once they get to Santomé in Principae, they're housed, they're fed, they're closed, they're paid. therefore this is not slavery. William Cadbury knew that Sal Tomé was a major source of cheap, high-quality cocoa that he needed for his growing chocolate empire. But he also didn't want anything to do with slave labor. So he reported the Portuguese government's response to the board of directors and continued to push the British government to do something about it.

Then in 1904, a veteran investigative journalist named Henry Wood Nevinson reached out to him. And says, I'd like to try and figure out what's going on in Santomé and Principay. Also, before I forget, this is Catherine Higgs. I'm a professor of history at the University of British Columbia in Canada. She specializes in the history of commodities, my dream job. And she wrote a book called... Chocolate Islands, Cocoa Slavery, and Colonial Africa.

Catherine says that, as far as we know, William Cadbury was genuinely disturbed by the idea that as Coco was being produced by enslaved people. And he knew there were murmurs in the industry about this issue. So he decided to reply to Henry Nevinson. Neveson is aggressive, certainly in the way I've seen journalists be aggressive, absolutely, right? He asks for introductions to planters in Sal Tomé and offers to help investigate for Cadbury. And Cadbury basically tells him no. He rejects Neveson. He's very polite to him, right? He's a Quaker. He's a pacifist. Gives him a nice note, gives a couple of references in sent to Maine, Prince Bay, and sends him on his way.

This move would prove to be a mistake. Cadbury's concern is that Neveson goes into the investigation, assuming the worst, and he's being paid to produce long foreign journalism that, you know, it's not going to be nice. Henry Wood-Nevinson, being a dedicated muckraker, had already gotten a deal with Harper's magazine, one of the most successful periodicals in the U.S., to investigate whether slave labor was being used on cocoa farms in Sao Tomei. But he didn't go directly to the island.

He started in Angola, where workers were being recruited. Vast places with relatively low populations and lots of empty space. Nevinson followed the path of workers who were brought from the interior of Angola, where it's green and humid towards the highlands nearing the coast where it's very dry and arid, basically a desert. He wrote about everything he witnessed. He saw skeletons of people who dropped dead

along this recruiting route. You can die in a day in the desert if you're walking across Angola. That path is strewn with dead men's bones. You see the white thigh bones. lying in front of your feet, and at one side, among the undergrowth, you find the skull. These are the skeletons of slaves who've been unable to keep up with the march, and so were murdered or left to die.

And he saw wooden shackles. Even as you come down to the river, you find slave shackles hanging on the bushes. So these would be a kind of yoke that went across your shoulders and held your hand. and sometimes your feet were shackled just enough so that you couldn't run away, but you could walk. You find shackles of various ages. Some quite new, with the marks of the axe fresh upon them. Some old and half eaten by ants. And he can't unsee what he's seen. I passed a procession of 43 men and women,

marching in file like carriers, but with no loads on their heads. Four natives in white coats and armed with guns accompanied them, ready to shoot down any runaway on their way to the ship for Sal Tomé. At this time, slavery was technically illegal in Portugal and all of its colonies. So Nevenson wanted to understand how these workers ended up in shackles. Some were desperate for work and entered into contracts they didn't understand. Others were forced into labor because they'd broken arbitrary laws like loitering. He even got to witness workers being taken into possession by their employers.

They are asked whether they go willingly as labourers to Sao Tomé. No attention of any kind is paid to their answer. In most cases, no answer is given. Not the slightest notice would be taken of a refusal. Henry Wood-Nevinson followed the workers on their journey across the sea to the island of Salto-May. By the time he gets there, he's extremely ill. Following that path nearly killed him, right? Disease, thirst, hunger.

But none of that stopped him from filing stories. The islands possess exactly the kind of climate that kills men and makes the cocoa tree flourish. It is a hot house, climate-burning heat and torrents of rain in the wet season. Stifling heat and clouds of dripping mist in the season that is called dry. He sees the people who had survived this labor recruitment process. He sees, you know, people are dressed kind of in identical clothing. Women have head scars and blouses and striped. cotton skirts and men have wraps made of the same material.

One early morning at Sao-May, I went out to visit a plantation. There were 400 slaves on the estate, not counting children. I saw them clearing the forest for further plantation, clearing the ground under the cocoa trees, gathering the great yellow pods, sorting the brown kernels, which already smelt like a chocolate box. One of Nevinson's biggest challenges was that he didn't speak Portuguese or any African languages so it was hard for him to conduct interviews.

But one day, he was able to have lunch with a plantation doctor and the plantation manager who spoke French. A language, Nevinson did speak. The death rate on this Rocha, he remarked casually during the meal, is 12 or 14% a year among the service A's. With the Portuguese called workers. And what is the chief cause? I asked. Anemia, he said. That is a vague sort of thing, I answered.

What brings on anemia? Unhappiness, he said. He visited multiple plantations all over the island. On one of the largest and best-managed plantations of Sao-May, the superintendent admits a children's death rate of 25%, or one-quarter of all the children, every year. It's not possible for him, objectively, to look at those people and not think these people have been enslaved.

Thus it is that the islands of Sao-Tomei and Princeep have been rendered about the most profitable bits of the earth's surface and England and America can get their chocolates and cocoa cheap. Henry Wood-Nevinson arrived back in England in 1905, a month before the Harper's series was published. He came back from this experience saying that unequivocally this was unfree labor. It was slavery by another name. This is Carla Martin again.

Where people were experiencing significant corporal punishment, that they were not receiving the basic kinds of shelter, medical care that they would need, that they were being pressed into these contracts in entirely unethical ways and that the work in conditions in which they spent their time were profoundly brutal. The following year, Nevinson put out a book

that was a collection of all the reports from his time in Angola and Saoamay. It was called a modern slavery. Outrage from the public towards the chocolate companies was immediate. At this point in time, the British people have decided largely as a group that they are anti-slavery.

And the Cadbury Company is a perfect example of a Quaker firm that is purportedly against labor abuses. It's part of how they've kind of made their name and won trust among the British people. So as British consumers are learning about this, they begin pressure campaigns against the Cadbury Company, things like consumer boycotts, letter writing, etc. This is where things get weirder.

Okay, so what the general public might not have known at this point is that William Cadbury had already started his own investigation into slave labor on cocoa plantations. Remember back in 1904 when he'd rejected Henry Wood Nevinson? He shuts the door and thinks, oh gosh, darned, I better find somebody else to do this. So he starts looking earnestly for his own representative to send. He finds a private investigator that was not like Nevinson. From William Cadbury's perspective, he felt that Neveson went into the project

determined to prove it was slavery, rather than to consider other options. So he gives him financial support and asks him to go to Africa and look into this. But Cadbury's investigator takes the opposite route as Nevenson. He starts in Sao Tamei and eventually makes his way to Angola. Initially, he didn't know if what he was seeing was slavery, but by the time he finished his journey in 1907, he basically agrees with Nevisin completely. This is a quote from the investigator's report.

If this is not slavery, I know of no word in the English language that correctly characterized it. For Cadbury, it was a personal affront. This notion that his cocoa might have been produced by slave labor. He was also a businessman, and he needed a free source of cocoa. Henry Wood-Nevinson's reporting created an international scandal, an absolute PR nightmare for the Cadbury company. People were wondering, how can this Quaker company with these progressive values be using

slave labor. But the thing was, William Cadbury already knew through his own investigator that slavery was happening in Saoamay, and he'd privately been pushing both the British and Portuguese governments to end it. Yet, publicly, he went on the offensive. The Cadbury's actually sue a newspaper based on what they consider libel. The newspaper is the standard. A conservative paper. And they accused Cadbury of lying. An article was published by the standard, arguing that the Cadbury Company had known for years that there was slave labor in Sao Tomei, but did nothing to intervene. So they actually go through a very public court case where they're saying, you know, you can't

say this about us. Cadbury basically argued that they've been fighting to end slavery in Sao Tomei, and so the implication that they've been hiding it from the public intentionally was liable. The jury found the standard guilty, the newspaper, the standard newspaper, guilty of law, The court essentially finds, okay, yes, maybe there was some libel here, but we're only going to award you. One farthing, which is one quarter of one penny. As a way of showing that we actually agree that you've done something wrong and you need to take action on this problem. So they're basically saying you are hiding this information.

And so for the Cadbury's, this immediately becomes a kind of ideological problem. It does not suit the way that they see themselves or interact. interact with the world, but it also, over time, becomes a public relations problem. Cadbury genuinely did not want his chocolate to be produced by forced labor. So his motivation was, and this is a pun on Cadbury Pure Chocolate, his motivation was pure. So obviously he had corporate interests, but he also had religious interests. So as they're determining what to to leave Sao Tamay, they are also investing heavily in the Gold Coast, a British colony, which goes on to become Ghana, to make sure that they will have a backup plan for their cocoa.

How do I employ free farmers who freely produce cocoa and make a more substantial profit for their cocoa? How do I make Cadbury cocoa pure again from a business perspective and from a Quaker perspective? And so rather than relying on these contracted, indentured, unfree laborers, they're relying on free entire families working on small-scale farms, where children, parents, adults, you know, older adults are all part of producing cocoa. In 1909, the Cadbury Chocolate Company announced they would no longer source their cocoa from Sal Tomé. Instead, they would begin working with small-scale free farmers in West Africa, where the weather's suited cocoa production.

It is actually what has now become the tradition throughout the world of cocoa production. It is small-scale family farming. Sao Tomei would go on to lose its place as the largest producer of cocoa in the world. The Cadbury name eventually recovered from the scandal. Henry Wood-Nevinson became a correspondent during World War I and is today considered one of England's most legendary journalists. The new system used by the Cadbury's

for cocoa production in West Africa last until today, but not without its own set of problems. Coming up, we see. speak with the son of a cocoa farmer from Ghana about the reality of child labor and chocolate. Hi, this is Megan from Newport, Rhode Island, and you're listening to ThruLine by NPR. Part 3. Amazing Grace There are today 5 to 6 million cocoa farmers around the world. About 2 million of them are in Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire. This is Carla Martin again.

She's a lecturer at Harvard University. And the vast majority, 90 to 95 percent of them, are small-scale farmers. Working on a plot of land that you could walk around in a matter. of minutes. These farmers are the ones who make the cocoa that goes into most of the chocolate products we love. If you buy hot cocoa, a chocolate bar, a chocolate bunny, and it does not explicitly say on the package what country it came from, the chances are that that is a blend of cocos from different parts of the world. The majority of that blend will be sourced from West Africa. Okay. So what's the big deal? Chocolate production was moved to West Africa and put into

the hands of independent small-scale farmers in order to avoid slave labor. That is true. But as the 20th century went on, demand for chocolate increased. So basic market economics here, pressure was put on farmers to keep up with that demand by creating more supply. But as they did that, prices either couldn't keep up with inflation or went down, which meant doing more work for less money. They were not being paid for their labor, but rather for the weight of the commodity that they produced. And so that's at least part of that kind of calculus that was being made strategically about why to, in many ways, push for small-scale farm production of cocoa. And as the pressure went up to produce more cocoa,

farmers had to do whatever they had to do to increase that production, even having their children work. Child labor could be something like my mom, when I was a kid, telling me to take out the trash, which was beneficial to my maturity, a way of me being involved in household chores. There are, however, other kinds of child labor that people have agreed upon internationally should be eradicated.

Because it is labor that is seen, as morally or physically injurious to children. There are cases where these worst forms of child labor take place, and they take place in a couple of different ways. In a small number of cases, these are taking place via the trafficking of children, from one country to another or one region to another, where they are forced to work as unfree laborers on cocoa farms.

And these are often vulnerable children who don't have any other recourse or way to kind of escape this system of labor. According to Walkfrey's Global Slavery Index, about 16,000 children a year are trafficked in Ghana and Ivory Coast to work on cocoa farms. They're usually forced to work for free

on farms that don't belong to their own families. But this is not the majority of child labor cases. The majority of cases where children are working on their family farms. And they are experiencing injury because they might be carrying something that's too heavy for their developing musculoskeletal systems. They might be exposed to pesticides. They have developing lungs. And this is the most common form of child labor that exists in cocoa. When I was a kid, I knew my siblings and I, six of us, we had a job cut out for us. All we knew was just at that time is, you know, you work hard if you only make more and, you know, you can have a good harvest and you can get some good sales, yeah.

This is Shadrach Frimpong. I am one of six children of cocoa farmers. I grew up on the farm, saw the electricity one that was maybe like in my teens. Shadrack is from a village in the western part of Ghana, where there are a lot of cocoa farms. It's insane. If you have over 3,600 communities, right? And almost 850,000 cocoa farmers in a country that has a little over 30 million people. And that's a lot of the population. He has fond memories of growing up in the cocoa farming village.

A simple, peaceful life, a lot of discipline and structure, because it's about survival in those settings. There's not much luxury. One thing I appreciated growing up, the sense of communalism is interesting. Like over there, I can go into anybody's house and eat. I could go into people and then somebody can see me, hey, what are you walking around? Come help me out of my cocoa farm. Let's go. Coco farming has actually been in Shadrach's family for generations.

We were told as young people that you have to continue the legacy. It's a spiritual thing. There's blessings and all of that attached to it. So it goes beyond just food and revenue to, you know, a spiritual thing where, you know, keeps blessing the family life. Shadrach might have just stayed in Ghana and been a cocoa farmer himself. But something happened to him when he was a kid, something that happens to lots of kids who work on cocoa farms, that altered his life's path.

When I was a kid, I one time I had infection on my legs, and unfortunately the year I got the infections and things were getting really horrible and my legs were getting swollen. That was the same year my family had a bad harvest. Ex-family, like many other cocoa farmers in Ghana, despite working very hard, didn't really have any rainy day funds. They were forced to leverage everything they had to pay for his medical care in a hospital hours away. That's what they did. They put a family land as collateral, got me to the nearest health facility when we went there, like, you came so close to getting it amputated.

He was lucky. They saved his leg. He was about nine or ten. but he realized just how shaky his family's financial situation was. I mean, it just dawned on me, like, seeing how helpless my parents were, you know, the rest of my siblings were going to struggle to feed and, you know, and I became acutely aware how vulnerable families like mine and where, because at the time my father started taking of, you know, maybe my older brother may have to go, you know, work on other people's farm. to help the family so you see the childly body effect begin to kick him.

And so for me, the thing it gave me at that time was, man, if a family member is sick and their implications are insane. That led a fire under my belly to just, I remember going to school. I think I just went from like the, you know, not caring, I went super chill, to just being like a beast. I went to school, took it super serious. I became Uber competitive. At night, he would stay up late studying, using the family's lantern.

Just do my homework steady when I went to high school, same fire. He did so well that he won a scholarship to study at a prestigious boarding school in Ghana. After high school, he moved to the United States and studied biology at UPenn. At the University of Pennsylvania, we had one class. and the professor, he gives a lecture on the biology of food. And then he talks about cocoa and how chocolate and everything. And then he pulls up a slide and he's like, well, you ask now. Ghana is the second leading as part of cocoa.

You know, the country makes like billions of dollars. I'm sitting there like, hold on, buddy. What are you talking about? If cocoa farmers are that crucial, how come we're so poor? Shadrach was able to bring his father to Pennsylvania. to see him graduate. This guy has wept so hard all his life. His first time living the city gets out,

get to the, and then he saw the flight all the way to the U.S. He comes over, and I'm like, buddy, Hershey is down there. Hershey, Pennsylvania, home of the headquarters of Hershey Chocolate. It's not far from UPenn. He's a chocolate bar for the first time.

He's seen how all his hardware can sweat literally translates into this bar. He goes like, man, I had no idea. And then he tastes chocolate and gives me that look. Oh, that is different than the seed that we plant. Today, Shadrach is finishing his medical degree at Yale. And he also started a nonprofit aimed at improving the conditions for people on cocoa farms in Ghana. He wants to help end child labor in the cocoa industry once and for all.

And he told me his story from his childhood that he still uses as motivation. When I was in elementary school, one of my classmates, my own cousin, she was called Grace, and she was the brightest student in the class. Well, on time, apparently we had my uncle sick. My uncle, you know, is a co-co farmer, get sick, never had any health coverage, nothing, bad crop here, guess what happens? Grace gets pulled out of school, and then she goes to work on the farm. Never came back.

And so years later, I'm at an Ivy League. I call my parents and I'm like, where is Grace? You know, she at Harvard, maybe give me her number. I'm at Penn. If I'm a pen, she should go to Harvard. Give me her number so I can coin. My mom said, what are you smoking? Are you all right?

Like, she has kids, is working on some cocoa farms, still working on the farms, and, you know, she's still struggling to live on less than a dollar a day. And that hit me so hard. He thought, well, if I'm here having this chance to make a difference in medicine, what would Grace have been able to do? She was smarter than me. And when children like Grace have their chance at education taken away because they have to work, it hurts more than just them or their communities.

And I bet my last dollar, the chances are that the cure for cancer is in the mind of the child of a cocoa farmer's kid sitting somewhere. But because they never get opportunity and the injustice is they face, kick them into child labor and all of these situations all of us we miss out I said

I said what a powerful way to put it do you want people when they hear your story to think about that about that potential

and about the hard work people have put in to create ultimately this product chocolate I hope that especially in these very tumultuous times. As a world, we can see that, you know, we can all, we all want people,

we can come together and great things can happen. And most importantly, we can make great things happen for the very few people, for the very people who make sure we get our chocolate and stuff, you know, and we all love, it's getting winter, it's coming. Everyone's going to get hot chocolate. Every time they sip hot chocolate, hopefully they can remember my parents. But I keep saying, you know, these cocoa farmers, they have the same vision and dreams, like the CEO of Hershey and Nestle.

And we should never forget that. Over the last several decades, the chocolate industry, including companies like Cadbury, Nestle, and Hershey, have worked with nonprofits and the Ghanaian government to reduce child labor. And they support a company called the International Cocoa Initiative that has the goal of reducing child labor in the cocoa supply chain. They have had some success.

But despite these efforts, hazardous child labor is still a fixture of West African cocoa farming. That's it for this week's show. I'm Randaberd Fattah. I'm Ramda Abdel-Fattah. I'm Ramtin-Ara. Louie, and you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR. This episode was produced by me. And me? And Lawrence Wu.

Julie Kane. Anya Steinberg. Casey Minor. Christina Kim. Devin Katayama. Irene Noguchi. Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel. Passages from Henry Wood-Nevinson's writing were read by Sebastian Walker,

another amazing British journalist. Also, thank you to Yohanna. Derge, Beth Donovan, and Tommy Evans. This episode was mixed by Robert Rodriguez. Music for this episode was composed by Ramteen and his band, Drop Electric, which includes Navid Marvie, Show Fujiwara, Anya Mizani. And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at Thuline at NPR.org.

And make sure to rate us and leave us a comment on Apple or Spotify. It really helps other people find the show. Thanks for listening.