Gifts of flowers and chocolate were added to Valentine’s Day in the mid-20th century. Given the mid-winter date, Valentine’s Day is not the easiest time of year to grow flowers sustainably.
Chocolate is another matter. It’s not exactly health food, but Certified Fair Trade and local options are more sustainable choices than mass-market candy.
The three principal ingredients in any dark chocolate bar are cocoa liquor, cocoa butter, and sugar. The big difference between mass-market and Fair Trade chocolate is the source of these inputs.
Fair Trade chocolates get the cocoa beans and sugar cane from organic sources. Fair Trade certification means that cocoa bean and cane farms practice sustainable methods, employ safe working conditions, and pay living wages.
The Fair Trade ingredients are supplied by small cooperatively owned farms in Latin America, West Africa, and Southeast Asia. As co-ops, these farms have democratic collective decision-making by the workers, who hold a controlling financial interest in the operations.
MOON Co-op carries three brands of Fair Trade chocolate. The founders of two of these three brands started their careers volunteering in Southeast Asia, and the founders of the third came out of the U.S. food cooperative movement.
Alter Eco was founded in France in 1998 and expanded to the United States in 2005. Co-founder and co-CEO Mathieu Senard started his career running an orphanage for refugee children in Cambodia, and the other co-CEO, Tristan Lecomte, was one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world for his leadership in getting 60 fair trade cooperatives in 30 countries to reduce their carbon footprints.
Chocolove founder and owner Timothy Moley started the company in Boulder, Colo., after a stint working as a USAID volunteer in an Indonesia cocoa field. The company’s website describes Moley as “tall and slightly eccentric” like Willy Wonka, and a consumer of two chocolate bars a day, which evidently hasn’t expand his waistline as it would for the rest of us.
Equal Exchange is a worker-owned cooperative founded by three managers of New England food co-ops. The company has been especially active in fostering the formation of coops in the principal cocoa bean and sugar cane growing regions.
An Oxford-area source of local chocolate is Jan Wolterman, who was grocery manager at MOON Co-op, when the store opened two years ago. Wolterman’s chocolates include chia seeds, goji berries, and organic pistachio nuts.
Why not show your love to both your dear ones and your environment with locally or sustainably produced chocolate this Valentine’s Day — and all year long.
Local, Fair Trade, and organic chocolates are available at MOON Co-op Grocery, Oxford's consumer-owned full-service grocery featuring natural, local, organic, sustainable, and Earth-friendly products. MOON Co-op, 512 S. Locust St. in Oxford, is open to the public every day. Learn more at www.mooncoop.coop.
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