The good news currently is the rehabilitation of chocolate. First the finding that it shares a psychoactive ingredient with cannabis. Then a paper in the Lancet that suggests its high phenol content helps keep arteries unclogged (like red wine, another reformed character). Chocolate – dark chocolate at least – which used to be fattening and bad for your skin, has become a health food. And a euphoriant. Soon, no doubt, we will learn that it clears the complexion, alleviates migraine and, if consumed in sufficient quantity, improves sexual function and cures the common cold.

It’s certainly a change from carob. Remember that? The grim stuff that organic food stores used to sell to masochists as a chocolate substitute? A visit to a health food store today reveals chocolate that is edible, ethically sound and environmentally-friendly – good for you, and for the earth and the farmers that farm it. Consumption of Green and Black’s Maya Gold shows your commitment to a better world – don’t mock! – albeit at the possible cost of increasing your rate of consumption. The Kekchi Maya of Belize, traditional cultivators of cacao trees, driven from their land by loggers and threatened with ruin by commodity speculation, have been rescued by the advent of Green and Black’s. Now, it says on the packet, they are guaranteed a fair price and a long-term contract, as long as they adhere to organic cultivation practices.

In this manner, we are told, Belizean cacao growers have re-established continuity with the ancient civilization of the Maya, which flourished just over a millennium ago, where cocoa beans were so important that they became the unit of currency. Meanwhile we, the consumers, have the benefit of ‘rich, full-flavoured chocolate with 70% cocoa solids, further enhanced with a blend of orange oil and spices, the traditional Mayan way.’ The thrill of transgression eating chocolate is gone, replaced by the subtler pleasure of self-righteousness.

The legend of Maya Gold

It turns out, however, that the legend on the wrapper is largely that – a legend. Michael and Sophie Coe, two specialists in Mesoamerican anthropology and archaeology, have pointed out telling errors in the company’s vision of Mayan history. Orange oil, they note, can hardly be described as a traditional ingredient for the Maya, since citrus fruits were unknown in pre-Columbian America. And Maya Gold is a misnomer too: it was the Aztecs who had the kingdom of gold; the Maya, for most of their history, didn’t know what gold was. Hence their use of cocoa beans for cash. And though contemporary Mayan husbandry may be beyond reproach, it is almost certain that around 800 ad their ancient civilization collapsed as a direct result of overpopulation, overcultivation and environmental degradation, thus making it a poor model for sustainable agriculture today. The motifs on the wrapper of Maya Gold, to cap it all, are not Mayan at all, but Mixtec and Teotihuacan.

There’s another criticism. This time it is a gastronomic point, one which excludes this eco-cocoa product from the Valhalla of chocolate aficionados. The proportions of cocoa solids and cocoa butter, are the crucial factors that differentiate proper chocolate from the mass-produced variety. Mass-produced chocolate is cut with sugar and cheap vegetable fat and may contain less than 40% cocoa solids. Connoisseurs would approve of the 70% in Maya Gold, but abhor the fact that it contains no cocoa butter, the most valuable product of the cocoa bean. In fine chocolate, cocoa butter is recombined with the solids to take the edge off the bitter after-taste. Not in Maya Gold.

So Aztec Gold might be a more accurate name, but you can see why they didn’t call it that. The associations are macabre: although the Aztecs were partial to chocolate (they drank it with chili) they also practised human sacrifice. In Aztec cosmology chocolate and blood are ritually linked, as wine and blood in the Christian eucharist. Sacrificial victims were fed chocolate on the eve of execution. The name ‘Aztec Gold’, furthermore, could be confused with ‘Acapulco Gold’, the celebrated strain of Cannabis sativa. Despite the new-found chemical link between chocolate and cannabis, it may be too early to promote it as a legal high.

Early ethical capitalists

In Britain until recently the chocolate industry was dominated by Quakers, the first ethical investors. In the early nineteenth century, the Fry family of Bristol, then the largest chocolate manufacturer in the world, declined to buy cacao from the Spanish plantations on the island of São Tomé because they considered the slave-like working conditions there to be unacceptable to enlightened consumers. Then, in the early twentieth century Fry’s was eaten up by Cadbury’s. In the 1970s, Fry’s Chocolate finally disappeared.

The 1970s were a time of speculation in West African cacao futures that played havoc with the lives of farmers in Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire. If modern ethical consumerism had been invented back then chocolate-lovers might have made a difference. So let us eat Green & Black’s Maya Gold chocolate now, despite any reservations we may have about the sales talk, and hope the company does not share the same fate as Fry’s. ★

Afterword

I suggested that Fry’s had been the victim of its own ethical principles: and had been brought to the brink of bankruptcy in the early twentieth century because it eschewed the speculation in cacao futures engaged in by other confectionery companies. But this does not seem to have been the case. The acquisition of Fry’s by Cadbury’s after the 1914–1918 war was uncontentious. In the case of Green & Black’s, following criticism of the packaging of Maya Gold, the company made some changes. Out went the Mixtec and Teotihuacan motifs. Out, too, went the promise of 70% cocoa solids (replaced by ‘high cocoa solids’). Maya Gold now comes with certification from the Fairtrade Association and the Soil Association. In the 1990s the market for high-end chocolate grew considerably, and in 2004 Green & Black’s, like Fry’s before it, was taken over and became part of the giant food conglomerate Cadbury-Schweppes. September 1996