The inconvience of ethics

When I was kid there were two things I was not allowed to have.  A Tonka Truck and a Pound Puppy (which was made by Tonka).  My parents told me this is because Tonka moved their jobs out of Minnesota and to some where else, causing large layoffs.  I actually just learned more about it by using the google machine.  "In a major blow to Tonka's Minnesota workforce, steel truck manufacturing began to move from Mound to El Paso, Texas in 1982 with the transfer of equipment and production completed in 1983"  So because of my parents ethics I wasn't allowed to have either of these items and I some how survived.

It turns out that trait of following unique ethics has passed down another generation, to me, and poor Marcus is now impacted.  Here is the story.

I have said for a long time that if I could find a reason to be ethically opposed to sugar I would probably be able to easily avoid it.  Afterall- I have no struggle at all in not eating meat products because I have a strong belief behind it (I am not going to get into my veggie thoughts on this blog today).  Well it finally happened.

During my girl trip to San Francisco my friend Erin, pointed out some of the horrible ethics behind chocolate production, specifically the fact that child labor is a huge problem.   That is one thing that really don't sit well with me.  I know that there are also some environment problems as well but the big one to me really is child labor. 

When I got home I did some research and learned that this is absolutely happening but to be honest a lot of the details seems pretty foggy-  some articles say it is improving and other articles say the opposite.  The one that that is clear is that is still a problem.  Here are some interesting reads on the subject.


http://fortune.com/2016/03/25/easter-chocolate-child-labor/
http://www.greenamerica.org/programs/fairtrade/whatyoucando/BigChocolate.cfm

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/judith-lewis/e-is-for-easter-and-ethical-chocolate_b_9527918.html

There are also some great resource that rank chocolate and discuss how it is ethically produced (or not) and scores the manufactures.  One thing that is odd is that the rating were note always the same - although pretty much in all lists Nestle, Mars and Hershey have a lot of work to do.  Here are some links.

http://rankabrand.org/chocolate-brands/Ritter+Sport

http://www.thegoodshoppingguide.com/ethical-chocolate/

http://theartofsimple.net/chocolate/

Since I got back from San Fran I have not bought any chocolate from the big three and I am working on  passing that down to Marcus.  For Easter he didn't have any chocolates from those three either.  This is actually pretty hard to figure out but I am glad to put the effort into it.  The good news is that Marcus really hasn't noticed any of this.  I don't look forward to the day when I have to explain it all to him.

In the meanwhile I am going to continue my search for better resources that discuss the problem and better chocolates that are made in a fair manner.