Bitter Chocolate (44 page)

In early 2005, the multinational corporation Cadbury Schweppes bought controlling interest of Green & Blacks. William Kendall told the London's Financial Times that the company “stands to make a lot of money for our shareholder and plant a fertile seed in a larger company to carry on fair trade.” But he was quickly put on the defensive when customers bombarded Green & Blacks with complaints that the organization was selling out. Kendall issued a statement on the company's website: “We do not have time for prejudice at Green & Blacks and this includes a prejudice that all big companies are bad.”

For Gregor Hargrove, the jury is still out. When he heard the news of the take-over, the New Brunswicker thought of home, where the McCains were also very acquisitive, and Hargrove remembered “what happens when big companies take over little ones.” But his first experience of working for a large multinational is that he feels he has more room to manoeuvre. “There's a certain comfort in having a big company behind us,” says Hargrove, warily. But then again, he adds, maybe Cadbury has learned a few things over the past hundred years.

T
HE CHOCOLATE “CRUSADE” IN THE SPRING OF 1947 WAS
one of the strangest strikes of the twentieth century in Canada—or anywhere, really. It began as a proud outburst of youthful assertion, emblematic of new freedoms recently won on the battlefield, a call for justice and fairness. The enthusiasm of a handful of children on Vancouver Island quickly spread from one end of the country to the other. Parades of young people snaked their way through city streets in Regina, Ottawa and Quebec City; crowds of youngsters carried homemade placards throughout the Maritimes; and a large, noisy mob stormed the provincial legislature in Victoria.

The campaign was a demand that the world be a fairer place for children—at least for those privileged enough to enjoy chocolate. The big chocolate bar companies had jacked up their prices to eight cents for a bar of candy. Young people throughout Canada thought it should remain at five cents, as Milton Hershey in the United States and the Ganong Brothers of New Brunswick had done in Canada. The kids took to the streets to protest what they regarded as unfair.

Crispy Crunch, Jersey Milk, Aero Bar, Coffee Crisp, O Henry!, Sweet Marie, Burnt Almond and Malted Milk were among the delights one could buy for a nickel in Canada and the United States during the 1930s and early '40s. But according to manufacturers, the price was artificially low. The end of wartime wage and price controls meant chocolate bar companies would have to pay more than twice the price for their cocoa beans and substantially more for labour—wages had almost doubled since the 1930s. Those added expenses would have to be passed on to the customer. Everything was now increasing in price and—with the exception of a very few outspoken housewives' consumer groups—people grudgingly accepted inflation as the side effect of a normalizing economy. But the children didn't see it that way.

The crusade started in sleepy Ladysmith and neighbouring Chemainus on Vancouver Island where young Bruce Saunders, Parker Williams, Bert Gisborne and Gerald Williams rallied their friends to picket a local ice cream parlour called the Wigwam, their common source of penny candy and chocolate bars. News of the protest inspired other children on the island to launch their own campaign, and within days dozens of them swarmed the British Columbia Legislature, shouting “Bring Back Our Nickel Bar” and shutting down House business for part of the day.

The movement soon caught on in Regina and Weyburn, Saskatchewan; then on to Winnipeg, St. John and Halifax. More than three thousand young people marched down Toronto's Bloor Street after school and picketed a candy store on Lippincott Avenue. In Ottawa, they mobbed Parliament Hill and chanted that they would rather eat worms than eight-cent bars.

A forest of homemade protest signs sprouted up across the country. “Don't be a Sucker! Don't Buy 8-Cent Bars!” “Eight-Cent Chocolate Bars—Phooey,” “Candy's Dandy but Eight Cents Isn't Handy,” “Knuckle Down for Nickel Bars,” and the most emblematic of them all, “What This Country Needs Is a Good Five-Cent Candy Bar.”

The crusade quickly captured the imaginations of adults, who resented the price increases on all consumer goods but had thought it unpatriotic to complain. Now the movement had enormous support from the media and even politicians, all of whom were fed up with the rising cost of living.

Initially, the candy manufacturers tried to reason with the children. As Canadian chocolate bar sales dived by eighty per cent in a period of weeks, Rowntree, now a large multinational corporation with production in Canada, published open letters to its consumers, explaining things from its point of view. The open letters lamented the increased cost of cocoa beans purchased from faraway lands in equatorial Africa and Central America. There was also the ballooning price of cane sugar imported from the Caribbean, and finally the problem that post-war full employment meant the company needed to compete for labourers, unlike in the days of the Great Depression.

Rowntree published newspaper appeals that ended with its advertising slogan: “Rowntree's Chocolate Bars Are a Nourishing and Pleasurable Form of Supplementary Food: Buy Some Today.” Chocolate company spin doctors hit the radio waves to talk to the boys and girls about the hard reality of market forces and the global pressures on commodity prices. But the children would have none of it. They had Big Chocolate on the ropes, and they weren't going to relent.

But a confluence of interests suddenly turned against the strikers, effectively shutting the protest down and blackballing its juvenile leaders. Following several weeks of effective protest, the right-wing
Toronto Evening Telegram
wagged a paternalistic finger at the kids and their supporters, warning ominously that “candy [was] a dandy weapon.” Almost instantly priests, police officers, youth clubs, school principals and parents mobilized to stop what had suddenly been characterized as a threat to national security.

According to the community leaders, principally led by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who feared the children were
delinquents threatening civic order, the protest was not so innocent. The boycott was a part of the Red Menace, cooked up in Moscow under Stalin's direction. And it could not be tolerated. The strike was rebranded in the
Telegraph
the “Communist Crusade,” along with charges that subversives lurked in the shadows, manipulating the country's youth. “Chocolate bars and world revolution may seem poles apart but to the devious Communist mind there's a close relationship,” wrote the
Telegram
. “The indignant students parading their placards and demanding the five-cent candy bar have become another instrument in the grand strategy of the creation of chaos.

Winston Churchill had just declared that an “iron curtain” had descended over Europe. Cold War jitters would soon become hysteria around the world. Senator Joe McCarthy was revving up a potent conspiracy theory that would darken discourse in the United States for much of the 1950s. Ottawa had been the epicentre of an international uproar in 1945 with the sensational disclosures of the existence of a Soviet defector named Igor Gouzenko and also that the Soviets had an active network of espionage here and in the U.S.; the Communists were everywhere, stirring up dissent, even it seemed over eight-cent chocolate bars.

It didn't help when it was discovered that there was, in fact, an active socialist influence in the “Communist Crusade” for candy justice. The National Federation of Labour Youth, affiliated with the Canadian Communist Party, helped organize many of the larger rallies while socialist youth groups were among the more vociferous protesters. But any objective reading of the contemporary newspaper accounts and CBC interviews of the time reveals the essential spontaneity of the movement. It was an honest expression of a childish desire to have some control in their small part of a complex chocolate universe.

Gradually, the hysteria subsided. The tone of the response to the children moderated but was no less stern.

In May 1947 the
Telegram
wrote, “No one is more anxious than this newspaper to see the return of the five cent chocolate bar; in fact, the return of the five-cent soft drink and the nickel cigar. They are all eminently typical symbols of that strange way of life we call democracy. There is, in fact, little evidence that such commodities are available for the equivalent price in Moscow.” But the item concludes that there are more important values at stake. Children in a democracy just have to understand the real cost of candy, which presumably is to support capitalism.

In 1947, Canadian children were told that the democracy their fathers and grandfathers had just fought to secure included the privilege of paying the market price for their chocolate. The children lost what, from the start was probably a hopeless battle. The price went up in spite of their actions. It wasn't fair, but they went on buying chocolate bars.

The story of chocolate has a lot to do with what is fair. Bartolomé de las Casas, Henry Woodd Nevinson, Guy-André Kieffer, Marx Aristide, and many others, were driven by an intuitive sense of fairness. Each man in his time was offended by what he saw in the cocoa groves of equatorial colonies and post-colonies. They provoked the disapproval of the powerful to make their controversial points. Fairness or its grown-up sibling, justice, demanded a better deal for the people who produced the raw material for luxuries like chocolate. But they were ignored or vanquished by powers greater than their moral recititude. They were up against elites and the ethical insensitivity of the marketplace. The greatest impediment of all was the moral ambiguity of a consuming public that has always been quick to decry injustice, but also determined to enjoy the fruits of the earth at the lowest prices possible. The right to do so is still considered, by many consumers, to be only fair.

After the candy crusade, prices rose steadily to where they are today. An eight-cent chocolate bar is now as unimaginable as gasoline at forty cents a gallon. And yet, with a few exceptions, the people who toil to produce the raw material for chocolate bars remain excluded from the benefits of higher prices and unprecedented demand.

In the spring, when the snow melts and the detritus of an entire winter is left clinging to the fences and shrubs of my Toronto neighbourhood, the most ubiquitous garbage is the chocolate bar wrapper. Hundreds of the brightly coloured paper and foil packages tangle themselves in bare bushes, looking like tinsel clinging to dead Christmas trees thrown out with the January trash. Mars Bars, Snickers, Mr. Big, Kit Kat, Almond Joy, Mounds, Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, and Caramilk decorate the dull spring cityscape with their cheerful promises of sensory delight.

I watch the young people as they leave a nearby 7-Eleven convenience store clutching bars of chocolate, soon to be devoured in seconds. Each one costs a dollar, a small sum for most teenagers in our world of privilege. In supermarkets, mothers hand candy bars to restless children to buy their silence during shopping expeditions. Chocolate milk, chocolate cake, ice cream, Halloween treats and cocoa cookies are all abundant and cheap. Teams of youth canvass city neighbourhoods selling boxes of chocolate-covered almonds to raise funds for school trips and sports equipment. All of this seems fair and reasonable. Chocolate has become a universal luxury, blindly crossing ethnic, religious and national divisions—a reasonably priced frivolity for everyone, except those who've never heard of it or can't afford to buy it. Ironically, that unenviable group includes the people who produce its most essential ingredient.

The young Malian boys I met who went off to find work and adventure in Côte d'Ivoire and spent a part of their lives in forced labour growing cocoa, learned the hard way about the true price of a chocolate bar, even though they've never seen one. Now they know it was a price that included the incalculable cost of the enslavement of hundreds of children like themselves, kids who would have never known and will never know what chocolate tastes like; now they know that the true history of chocolate was written in blood and sweat of countless generations of people more or less like them. For as far as anyone can see into the future, there is little likelihood that this ancient and enduring injustice will be corrected.