Bitter Chocolate Quotes

“Kieffer's Network began to assemble a picture that was as accurate as is possible in an African country where truth must be, at best, approximated from a shifting assemblage of fact, innuendo, rumour, theory and wild speculation.”
― Carol Off, Bitter Chocolate: Investigating the Dark Side of the World's Most Seductive Sweet

“In 1992, Senator Harkin had first introduced the Child Labor Deterrence Act, which proposed a U.S. ban on importing products made with child labour. The legislation ultimately failed to pass congress but even the threat of such a boycott sent a chill through industry worldwide and had devastating consequences, particularly in Bangladesh, where the country's garment manufacturers abruptly dismissed about fifty thousand child workers. Most of the children had been supporting their families and were subsequently forced to turn to other more dangerous and less lucrative employment - some in rock crushing and many others in prostitution. It was perhaps a well-motivated gesture on the part of the senator, but it demonstrated some of the unintended consequences of benevolence.”
― Carol Off, Bitter Chocolate: Investigating the Dark Side of the World's Most Seductive Sweet

“Low prices are what consumers consider fair, even if their affordable goods create injustice elsewhere.”
― Carol Off, Bitter Chocolate: Investigating the Dark Side of the World's Most Seductive Sweet

“High-quality pet food is a curious sideline of many chocolate companies.”
― Carol Off, Bitter Chocolate: Investigating the Dark Side of the World's Most Seductive Sweet

“As I look at the young faces, the questions in their eyes are the measure of a vast gulf between the children who eat chocolate on their way to school in North America and those who have no school at all, who must, from childhood, work to survive. An I feel the profound irony before me: the children who struggle to produce the small delights of life in the world I come from have never known such pleasure, and most likely, they never will.

It's a measure of the separation in our worlds, a distance now so staggeringly vast...the distance between the hand that picks the cocoa and the hand that reaches for the chocolate bar.”
― Carol Off, Bitter Chocolate: Investigating the Dark Side of the World's Most Seductive Sweet