Confesstions of a Chocoholic

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There are four basic food groups: milk chocolate, dark chocolate, white chocolate, and chocolate truffles.
--Anonymous

My love affair with chocolate has stood the test of time. True, I recently broke up with the milk variety to go over, literally, to the dark side, but we’ve both recovered and moved on. Depending on the circumstances, I can go high—La Madeleine au Truffle at $250—or I can go low—Twix au CVS at $1.59 (with a coupon). I can eat chocolate for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, justifying this behavior on the premise that “A balanced diet is chocolate in two hands.”

Nor am I alone in this belief. Demand for cacao beans, the raw stuff of chocolate, has soared by double digits since 2008 and continues to grow while the supply diminishes. Americans eat an average of 11 pounds of chocolate a year and Europeans eat even more. Snickers is the world’s best-selling candy bar. Last year 400 million Snickers were consumed around the globe, half of them by me.

As addictions go, this one seems harmless enough, right? Unfortunately, like so much else today, chocolate has become a fraught proposition. And I don’t mean only because of the sugar, calories, and saturated fats that go into it, as if they weren’t enough. No, it’s a problem for the environment because the raw materials suck up so much water. In fact, the water footprint of a pound of chocolate is four times larger than that of beef!

Who knew? Florencia Ramirez, the author of “Don’t Eat Your Water,” that’s who. Ms. Ramirez did extensive research on the topic and the results aren’t pretty. Cacao trees require between 50 and 80 inches of water per year, which was fine for 2,000 years when they grew under the rainforest canopy. Then, in the 20 th century, cacao farmers were told they could get higher yields if they brought the trees into the light. That led them to destroy rainforest to plant in sunlight, but eventually those trees succumbed to disease and rodents. Today, cacao is raised in semi-shade, but the damage was already done. Rainforests used to cover over 14% of the globe’s landmass. Today, thanks in part to cacao culture, they are down to 7%. This has led to the vicious cycle of less rainforest, less water—and, less cacao.

Enlightened retailers and growers are fighting back, promoting Fair Trade and organically certified cacao grown with sustainable practices, such as minimum pesticide use, reduction of greenhouse gases, and treated water disposal.

As for me, although I’ve had my eyes opened to the negative impacts of cacao on the environment, I cling to chocolate. I’ve tried cookies without chocolate chips, See’s Candies that imitate chocolate, and other attempts to slip in substitutes for the real thing. As far as I’m concerned, they don’t cut it. Besides, aren’t the Girl Scouts’ Thin Mints a national institution? If they were good enough for founder Juliette Low, they’re good enough for me.