I did not expect Hairy Bikers’ reality chocolate show on Channel 5 to be anything other than dire. It lived up to expectations.
Dire it was, gimmicky, dreadful presenters, dreadful contestants.
I endured five minutes then turned off in disgust. I tried again the next day. I managed ten minutes before giving up in disgust.
Set in the Nestlé factory in York, one of the worst corporations in the world. York where once upon a time Joseph Rowntree started.
Industrial chocolate.
I had hoped bean-to-bar chocolate, not fat and sugar.
The programme could have been set at York Cocoa Works. And at the very least, wander through the Shambles and look in Monk Bar Chocolatiers.
York, home of chocolate, and the viewers are insulted with corporate industrial chocolate.
Corporate chocolate makers lobbied in US to water down the definition of chocolate to include emulsifiers and other additives.
Over the last two decades we have seen shocking reports about the use of child labor, sometimes under hazardous conditions, on cacao farms in Ivory Coast and Ghana, and of widespread destruction of forests in cacao-growing regions worldwide.
Public outcry had prompted the major chocolate companies to pledge to end the worst forms of child labour in the cacao industry. But no laws were ever passed in America to require this (those same companies lobbied against the legislation and quashed it), little has changed.
We find a similar corporate story with environmental impact. In 2017, 34 chocolate companies agreed to end deforestation by their industry. But according to a 2018 report by the environmental group Mighty Earth, cacao production was still ravaging forests, and the animals living within them, at an alarming rate.
Direct trade, traceability, transparency bean-to-bar chocolate makers source the best beans, place emphasis on the growing conditions, the terroir, the working conditions, will include details on their chocolates or on their websites.
Cacao grown under the shade of trees helps to protect the natural habitat.
Across the country we have bean-to-bar chocolate makers, viewers could have been introduced to quality chocolate, instead industrial chocolate in a Nestlé factory.
According to the Fine Chocolate Industry Association, sales of premium chocolates grew in the US 19 percent in 2018, compared with 0.6 percent for mainstream chocolate like the classic Hershey bar. Over the past decade, the number of small American bean-to-bar chocolate producers — the kind with cacao percentages and places of origin printed on those hyper-chic labels — has jumped from about five to more than 250.
We could have visited a cacao grower in the Amazon, learnt of the sacred origins of cacao, learnt how cacao is replacing coca in Colombia, that quality attracts a higher price than that paid by Nestlé, direct trade not the FairTrade scam, seen the different cacao pods, fermentation, selecting the roast profile, the processing to turn the cacao nibs into a bar of chocolate.
Maybe a visit to Casa Cacao to see what experts can then do with bean-to-bar chocolate.
But no, a Nestlé factory churning out industrial chocolate for the masses.
At the very least set within Hotel Chocolat. Each person have an expert on hand to advise. Then go through the rigorous selection process. But at a guess no one would have passed, and that would have been the end of the series.
Begs the question: Is this Channel 5 series sponsored by Nestlé?
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