Trade As One

Lucinda Kemp-Erisman stumbled across our website and offered to contribute her considerable writing talents to what we do. She both passionate and experienced in the world of fair trade, having launched her own fair trade fabrics business a while back. She offers a unique perspective on chocolate and its potential. Read on to discover her thoughts on how chocolate can affect us, and how it affects those in the developing world. If you’re interested in guest posting on our blog, email us at (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

We all know chocolate is a delicious and indulgent treat. But it turns out chocolate can be good for you too. Dark chocolate contains flavanoids, the heart healthy substances found in fruits, vegetables and beverages such as tea, red wine and grapes.  Flavanoids from plant derived foods have powerful antioxidant effects and protect the body from free radicals and oxidative damage. Dark chocolate contains an array of minerals and a large number of antioxidants - nearly 8 times the number found in strawberries! 

Several clinical studies have shown the effectiveness of dark chocolate in lowering blood pressure, reducing oxidation of bad ‘LDL’ cholesterol and favorably effecting blood clotting.

Dark chocolate also releases endorphins , the feel good hormones, lifting mood and increasing a sense of well being. (I can personally attest to this.) One drawback of chocolate is the high calories, but luckily all the health benefits were shown with only 3.5 oz a day - that’s about one regular size bar. Just remember to balance the calories - replace some of your other sweet treats with heart healthy dark chocolate. As the saying goes, everything in moderation.

When you are buying that healthy chocolate snack, think beyond your personal health benefits to the health of the people who worked long hours on the cocoa plantation, picked the cocoa beans and prepared that chocolate bar for you. Did they work in a healthy, beneficial fair trade environment or did they work in an exploitive free trade system using child labor and offering slave wages? Were they treated fairly, like human beings? Or were they treated as commodities, whose sole purpose is to provide cocoa beans at the lowest possible price.

It’s easy to choose fair trade and move beyond the boundary of self when we expand your vision to encompass the true worth of the products we use in your daily life. It’s not just the monetary cost, but the people and environmental cost. Replacing our existing ideas about buying and consuming connects us all.  The act of buying, in turn, can become a spiritual act, an act of faith. No more empty consumerism. That is the power of Fair Trade.

And of course, the delicious Divine fair trade chocolate is available here in just the right 3.5 oz serving size as used in the clinical studies.  Eat chocolate and do good. Sounds delicious.

This will not be news to many of you who read this blog and purchase on our site, but Divine Chocolate is really good. It’s some tasty chocolate. But as is the case with all of the products we carry, the story is even sweeter. You can read the whole story here, but the gist is that the farmers own the company, and are directly impacted by every purchase. They have banded together to bring transparency, democracy, gender equality, and fairness into an industry and region that desperately needs it.

You will notice that are prices on Divine are going up a bit. This is just a temporary measure, because in order to ship chocolate in the hot summer months we need to package it with some insulation. The prices will come back down when the weather gets cooler, we promise.

We’re proud to work with them. Here’s a video that encapsulates (in about 30 seconds, impressive, no?) what they do.

This weekend we’re going to be a part of an amazing event in Cincinnati called Unbound. It’s getting some cool press (check it out here) because it’s led by students. The event has its roots in a trip to Haiti, where one of the students saw the horrors of human slavery firsthand, and returned home with a passion to expose one of the world’s darkest secrets: that 27 million of trapped in slavery.
Trade as One will be there to talk about how the money we spend here in America directly affects those 27 million people. We’ll be featuring Hagar, Nightlight, Divine Chocolate, and Handmade Expressions and the work they do on this issue. If you’re in the Cincinnati area this weekend, come see us!