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Bitter Chocolate:Investigating the Dark Side Of the World's Most Seductive Sweet
[Paperback - 2007]
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Category: Business
Sub-category: Industries
Additional Category: Sociology
Publisher: Vintage Canada | ISBN: 9780679313205 | Pages: 336
Shipping Weight: .278 | Dimensions: 5.14 x .92 x 7.95 inches

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 Hallowe’en 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.

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.

Carol Off is a Canadian television and radio journalist, associated with CBC Television and CBC Radio. She has been a host of CBC Radio's As It Happens since 2006. Previously a documentary reporter for The National, Off also hosted the political debate series counterSpin on CBC Newsworld.She is the vice-president of Canadian Journalists for Free Expression. She was awarded ACTRA's John Drainie Award, for distinguished contributions to Canadian broadcasting, in 2008.Off has also written several books on the Canadian military, including 'The Lion, the Fox, and the Eagle' (2000) and 'The Ghosts of Medak Pocket: the Story of Canada's Secret War' (2005, ISBN 0-679-31294-3). In 2006, she released a book, 'Bitter Chocolate,' about the corruption and human rights abuses associated with the cocoa industry. She claimed that French-Canadian journalist Guy-André Kieffer, who was kidnapped in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire in 2004, had been murdered for exposing Ivorian government corruption in connection with cocoa.Off got her start in journalism as a staff writer for The Gazette, the student newspaper at The University of Western Ontario.She lives in Toronto with her husband, broadcaster and novelist Linden MacIntyre.

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