When it was announced we will be trying cacao nibs, I remembered the bag I bought of amazon still taking up space in my over-crowded pantry. In my quest to be more health conscious and reading up about plant based sources of nutrition, I have definitely not been very conscious of my ecological footprint. Though I was trying to move towards a eating habit often associated with being environmentally friendly, capitalism had made it easier, cheaper, and more efficient for a college student like me to have amazon deliver these \u201chealth foods\u201d right to my door. However as I soon came to realise, cacao nibs are very bitter, and I didn\u2019t want to spend too much time trying to incorporate them into food and then not eating it. It was very easy to make that decision to buy them, and then valued my own time over figuring out how to use them, since services like amazon have given me so many \u201chealth food\u201d suppliers, all slashing their prices in competition over sales.<\/p>\n
The cacao video showed in lecture was set in the Ivory coast, and bares witness to the remnants of exploitation and the continuations of the European scramble for Africa. It was not too long ago that the Congo was under the control of Belgian King Leopold II, who\u2019s legacy echoes the era of brutalization, mutilation, and economic subjection, of the Congolese people in return for bringing the Belgian chocolate industry into fruition. Belgian chocolate is still notoriously popular around the world, while the labor of producing and preparing cacao beans continues to be delegated to farmers in the global south. I hastily ate the single particle of cacao that I had picked out, I wanted to get it over with. More importantly, I realize I should be more conscious making links between history of colonialism and current economies of production.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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