I still try to buy fair trade coffee. When I buy coffee. Which, since I broke myself of my addiction to caffeine I really haven't felt a huge need for, not in seven years. For six years, as consolation I bought fair trade cocoa. I would use it to make cocoa every single morning. An innocent and expensive pleasure which gained me a good forty or fifty pounds.
This was not just any old sissy cocoa, it was chocolate with legs. Every morning while listening to the Mozart Requiem I would read over my twenty-eight affirmations of wellness and recovery that are taped on my kitchen cupboard while waiting for the butter to melt. Yes I said butter. Roughly one or two teaspoons of butter in each batch. As soon as it was melted, always at a high heat, I would remove the saucepan from the element and measure in two heaping tablespoons of light brown sugar followed by two heaping tablespoons of unsweetened cocoa. I would stir them together in the melted butter then add enough milk for two to three mugs, return the saucepan to the heat and stir rapidly to the music. I would usually want it to be ready and finished in time for the beginning of the Sanctus of Mozart's Requiem then using a ladle pour it into my favourite mug.
This is a Google image of my mug, design by Laurel Burch. I just located on Uncle Google Laurel's obituary. It turns out that she died in 2007 from complications due to osteoporosis. She was sixty-one.
A woman who lived in pain, she said her goal was to pass on her joy. Ms. Burch described herself this way on her Web site:
“I live within the vivid colors of my imagination ... soaring with rainbow feathered birds, racing the desert winds on horseback, wrapped in ancient tribal jewels, dancing with mythical tigers in steamy jungles.”
I must say that that beautiful mug that she designed has long inspired me as an artist and as a human being. The mug was a Christmas present back in, I think, 1991 by the two women I lived with in Christian community. I have long treasured this mug. When I was homeless I was unable to carry it with me and for a while some friends kindly kept it for me. The cocoa, already rich and beautiful, tasted all the richer and all the more beautiful in this beautiful mug, especially as the Mozart Requiem ended and Charpentier's Te Deum would begin. The opening bars to this baroque masterpiece was intensely even more beautiful while sipping this cocoa from this lovely mug. Here, I will ask Uncle Google again and see if I can come up with a couple of lovely Youtube links for you. First Charpentier: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rh1Oi596MDs
And now, the Mozart Requiem https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPlhKP0nZII
Both these breathtaking, sublime works of music I have on one CD that I bought quite spontaneously one day in 2006 at a shop in Vancouver's historical Gastown, while I was out with one of my mental health clients. For six years I played this CD every single morning until just over a year ago when the fifty extra pounds that my morning cocoa ritual packed on my body and the doctor found that my blood pressure was up along with my cholesterol. It was also during this time that I stopped reading the Globe and Mail. I mentioned in an earlier post, Goodbye Globe and Mail, that the increasing targeting as its audience the hideously wealthy One Percent made the very idea of buying this paper, no matter how great the journalism for me absolutely unconscionable.
Simultaneously, I no longer needed to spend two to three hours in the early morning, lounging around reading from cover to cover the Globe and Mail while sipping on decadently rich, but fair trade, cocoa and listening to the strains of Mozart and Charpentier's music of the French High Baroque. The need was to completely change my diet to facilitate weight loss. There went the cocoa. I no longer wanted to contribute to the wealthy largess of the Globe and Mail. There went my morning newspaper (the Province and the Sun, which I never read anyway, don't count). There went the lovely music, since there was no longer any reason or excuse to stay around in my apartment so late into the morning. Besides which, my work day was starting earlier, I needed the hours and the income and also the discipline of working a regular professional day.
I began getting my news sources primarily from CBC Radio One, in the evenings, while resting in my apartment from my hard day at work, making and having dinner, doing professional paperwork, painting, reading, writing this blog and later shutting it off in order to watch documentaries and videos and films in Spanish online.
In order to facilitate weight loss with a tolerable change of diet I began to munch on semi-sweet chocolate chips, no more than three, often just two modest handfuls. With a couple of small glasses of one percent milk following dessert of fresh fruit, usually strawberries. The chocolate chips are like methadone. They are the only sweet treat I usually allow myself and they are not that sweet really. I cannot do this with fair trade chocolate which is hideously expensive and to my palate a little bit horrid.
This is my difficulty with buying fair trade, and with participating in product boycotts. I am on a low income. I also enjoy foreign travel, particularly in Hispanic countries where I can hugely improve my Spanish by spending a month or longer there. I have found that in order to do this I have to make personal sacrifices, even at the expense of my conscience. Yes, I did love the fact that by buying Fair Trade cocoa I could help send the children of the campesinos in Peru and Honduras growing and harvesting the product to university. Never mind that no one did anything really to help me make it through university and indeed I had to drop out before finishing my second year because none of that kind of support was available to me and I did have to pay the rent as well as put food on the table.
I live on a tight and sometimes unforgiving budget. Giving up my daily cocoa and the Globe and mail helps me save up to one hundred dollars a month. I cannot forget either about the child labourers in cacao plantations in Africa who are underpaid, mistreated and abused by their unforgiving task masters and with every mouthful of chocolate I consume I hope that they will find it in themselves to forgive me. Neither can I use this as a justification for my own chronic self-indulgence.
Writing this piece and making this concern known to you, my readers, does challenge me and I think eventually will help me find a better way of doing this. In the meantime I have already lost more than thirty pounds and I'm still reducing weight. Pray for me.
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