Carol Off
Carol Off is a Canadian television and radio journalist, and is the vice-president of Canadian Journalists for Free Expression.
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Bitter Chocolate
Investigating the dark side of the world's most seductive sweet
In Bitter Chocolate award-winning author and broadcaster Carol Off reveals the fascinating - and often horrifying - stories behind our desire for all things chocolate.
Whether it’s part of a Halloween haul, the contents of a heart-shaped box or just a candy bar stashed in a desk drawer, chocolate is synonymous with pleasures both simple and indulgent. But behind the sweet image is a long history of exploitation. In the eighteenth century the European aristocracy went wild for the Aztec delicacy. In later years, colonial territories were ravaged and slaves imported in droves as native populations died out under the strain of feeding the world’s appetite for chocolate.
Carol Off traces the origins of the cocoa craze and follows chocolate’s evolution under such overseers as Hershey, Cadbury and Mars. In Côte d’Ivoire, the West African nation that produces nearly half of the world’s cocoa beans, she follows a dark and dangerous seam of greed. Against a backdrop of civil war and corruption, desperately poor farmers engage in appalling practices such as the indentured servitude of young boys - children who don’t even know what chocolate tastes like.
Along the way she introduces us to the strange characters that inhabit the world of chocolate, including infamous figures such as the Aztecs' Montezuma II and Spain's Hernán Cortés, Quaker/Mennonite chocolatiers John and George Cadbury, Joseph Rowntree and the Milton Hershey, as well as investigative journalists like Henry Wood Nevinson, one of the first to sink his teeth into chocolate's involvement in slavery.
Off shows that, with the complicity of Western governments and corporations, unethical practices continue to thrive. Bitter Chocolate is a social history, a passionate investigative account and an eye-opening exposé of the workings of a multi-billion dollar industry that has institutionalized misery as it served our pleasures.
150 x 227 mm, 326 pages, paperback.
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