Bitter Chocolate

Book excerpt: 'You'll never look at chocolate the same way again.' Quill & Quire (Canada) Chocolate is synonymous with pleasure, but the real story of chocolate is often far from sweet. Bitter Chocolate begins by tracing the fascinating origins and lore of the cocoa craze while showing that exploitation and inequity have always been closely tied to chocolate production throughout its long history. The modern heart of Bitter Chocolate is Carol Off's inside look at the situation in the Ivory Coast in West Africa, which produces nearly half of the world's cocoa beans. Ground-breaking and eye-opening, Bitter Chocolate is a social history, a passionate, personal investigative account and a brave exposé of the workings of a multi-billion-dollar industry that has institutionalised misery as it has served our pleasures.