Some people are worried that in the not too distant future, chocolate could become much more rare and expensive... and it's not because of global warming (at least not for the most part). In fact, John Mason, of the Nature Conservation Research Council (based in Ghana), says that "in 20 years chocolate will be like caviar."

This terrible fate is possible mostly because of poor farming practices in Western Africa, where most of the world's chocolate is grown. According to this article from CNN online, farmers clear cut sections of rain forest and work that land to death. The problem with that method of farming is that it is not sustainable: cacao trees (from which chocolate is ultimately produced) on the clear cut land live about 30 years, compared to 75-100 years in the regular rain forest. The farmers would have to then clear another section of rain forest to grow trees on.

There may be hope, though. A handful of different groups have come together to try and solve this problem, including farmers, environmental groups and Cadbury, the British chocolate maker. The interests of each group intersect, and so they've created a scientific research unit to study ways to farm cacao trees sustainably. There may be hope for humanity (and chocolate) yet.

Yesterday, I brought you a story about a victory for Ferrero Rocher. Well today, here's a victory for the little guy.

There's been a five year court battle between Cadbury and an Australian chocolate maker, Darrell Lea. The international chocolate giant claims that it owns the color purple as far as packaging and marketing chocolate is concerned. Cadbury says that Darrell Lea, who uses purple for "its store signage, uniforms and products was too similar to its own and confused customers."

There are only so many colors, in all reality. There are far more people making chocolate products than there are colors to go around. As long as one isn't directly copying the look of another, I think that we can share a few colors.

Time to check in with our sister site GreenDaily for some environmental/food news:

• Water bottles: filters on the go; why we probably don't need as much water as everyone says we do

• Produce: not enough land to grow local stuff?; neighborhood gardening; cantaloupe salmonella scare; raw food safety tips; urban agriculture at its finest; try what one poster calls a "superfood berry"; how far has your fruit traveled?
  

• Milk: California might ban it; buy the best container; try organic; consumers fight back

• Chocolate is even better with when it comes complete with antioxidants and carbon offsets

• Junk Food: Cadbury goes green; organic ice cream; Sun Chips get sunnier
  

• Ball parks: all-you-can-eat seating; will the Nationals stadium be named after PETA?
  

Here's a synopsis of the latest food products and politics news being covered by our fellow bloggers over at Slashfood sister site, GreenDaily:

• Top British scientist predicts a severe food crisis if we continue to have babies, burn fossil fuels, and eat meat
• Headed to SXSW this year? Here's where to eat and drink
  
• Cadbury's commitment to using less plastic will make those chocolate eggs taste even sweeter
• Wish you could cook your hamburger while you drive? Your dreams have come true...
• Prepare yourself for Armageddon with Cheeseburger in a Can
• If you must buy your food from a big box store, at least go to one of these
• The green restaurant movement is picking up steam

Check out GD for tons of food-related info...it's amazing how often the topics of environment and food overlap, especially as farmers explore greener methods and more food goes organic.

I've been reading Nothing But Bonfires for awhile now. I stumbled across it a couple of years ago, when I read a comment that Holly had written over at another site. I liked her writing style (at least what I could glean of it from a two-sentence comment) and so followed the link over to her site. Most of the time she writes about The Bachelor, her international childhood or her sister's search for the perfect prom dress. However, once in a while, when the stars shift into alignment, she writes about food.

Today she wrote about the Chocolate Biscuit Cake she made for her work bake sale and they looked screen-licking good. Most of the ingredients are widely available in the UK and spottily available in the US. I think that in these parts I could probably track down most of them at Wegman's. Holly recommends checking out World Market (aka Cost Plus). This recipe calls for Lyle's Golden Syrup, which also happened to be a favorite of the late food writer Laurie Colwin (she always used it to make gingerbread). Anyway, enough digressing. Go check out her recipe and make yourself drool as I have been doing all day long.

Just over six months ago, Cadbury went through a major recall of some of their best selling products in the UK because the bars tested positive for traces of salmonella. In Canada, at about this time last year, the company had to recall some Cadbury Easter eggs because "pieces of hard plastic" were found in them. Now, the company is faced with yet another recall. This time, thousands of Easter eggs and chocolates were shipped out with no nut-allergy warning on the packaging, which puts those with such allergies at serious risk.

Since many of the chocolates have already been distributed, Cadbury is not only recalling them from stores, but chose to run ads in the newspapers to try to draw consumers' attention to the potential risk. A Cadbury spokesman could not give an estimate as to the exact number of products involved in the recall, but he speculated that the number of candies - primarily Easter-themed Cadbury Creme Eggs - would be in the thousands not the millions. The real danger for the company in this third recall comes from decreasing consumer confidence in their brand and whether the love of Creme Eggs (properly labeled ones) is enough to make consumers stay with them.

The season is a little off on this one, since we usually save our posts about giant Cadbury Creme Eggs for the weeks just before Easter, but the Creme de la Creme Egg that popped up on Pimp That Snack this month just can't wait that long. The giant Cadbury egg is simply the most impressive candy hack that we've seen - and the users of PTS clearly agree, since it's already the top-rated pimp on the site. Not only is it huge in size, but the level of detail that went in to its construction is hugely impressive. The milk chocolate candy shell was built up in layers to the proper thickness necessary to hold in the filling and the shell was carefully engraved with the same star design that is found on the standard eggs. Multiple batches of fondant were prepared before the gooey white center with a dyed yellow fondant "yolk" was poured into the prepared molds and sealed in. The "pimpers" even made a look-alike giant wrapper using acrylic paints on aluminum foil!

By weight, the jumbo chocolate is 56 times larger than the original. It has approximately 10,000 calories and probably contains enough sugar to make your head spin for a month.

As you may have heard, Cadbury has recalled more than 1 million chocolate bars for fear of salmonella contamination. Today, the BBC featured a nifty little graphic (right) to help readers wrap their minds around the proportions of 1 million bars of chocolate. As you can see, that's 250 tons, or 55 elephants worth of sweet, possibly harmful goodness that Cadbury now has to dispose of. One option that's been brought up is to remove the wrappers and bury the bars at a landfill. Cadbury responded, rather ominously, to that idea, saying: "We have plans but that is all we are prepared to say." Other possibilities for getting rid of the chocolate include incinerating or composting it, both of which would render the chocolate useful as an energy source or sterilized animal feed. You could also probably also use it to put several rockets in orbit.

 Although not available in the US, Cadbury has recently released a chocolate bar that is a play on the Cadbury Creme egg. it's called the Dairy Milk with Creme Egg Bar - or simply the Creme Egg Bar. My first visions were of a Snickers-shaped bar with a huge amount of fondant filling, but the bars are divided up into filled squares in the same manner as other Cadbury filled bars. All reports make them sound as though they have a similar chocolate: fondant ratio as the mini Cadbury Eggs. For me, this is a good thing, since I prefer to have more chocolate to balance the intensely sugary filling, though there are many people who even want their full-sized eggs to contain more fondant.

Taste aside, I can't help by wonder if Cadbury Cremes are meant to be egg-shaped. At least half the fun of eating a Creme Egg is that it is an egg. And besides, the fondant is supposed to look like the inside of an egg, so what's the point of having a spot of orange "yolk" in the center of a chocolate bar?

[Image Chocablog]

In the world of food advertising, it sometimes seems like the ads go from bad to worse, though there will be the occasional good one thrown in to keep the audience - that would be us - on our toes. I heard about this billboard at AdJab and when I first saw it, I had to do a double take: it is a giant, fake Cadbury bar being ripped apart by fake people. The giant-sized candy may be fake, but it looks absolutely delicious and the enthusiasm of the little, artificial people is quite funny. The ad is definitely more compelling than a simply picture of the chocolate bar would be. The billboard is in Canada, but if I have to look at billboards while I'm driving, I don't think that I'd mind seeing one of these once in a while.

Cadbury Giant Fingers, a chocolate confection, have recently been under scrutiny for deceptive packaging, having been brought to court in England by an irate customer. He claimed that it was "fraudulent to suggest is bigger than it actually is." And, even more astonishingly, the court agreed and the company producing these candies (under license from Cadbury) was fined a total of £5,000, plus an additional £2,000 in costs.

If this guy thinks that the packaging for the Cadbury candies is bad, I have a couple of bags of potato chips that I think he should see. If he was shocked by the size of the Giant Fingers' packaging, clearly he doesn't spend much time at the grocery store. 

[Image Telegraph.co.uk]

How long does the flavor in your gum last? OR, for that matter, what type of gum do you chew? Lately, I've been chewing quite a bit of Orbitz and I'm pretty satisfied with how long the flavor lasts. I also chew Extra and have found that some of their flavors seem to last longer than others (the mints verses the fruits). Gum is one of the most popular "foods" items in the US, but it is probably also the most complained about. According to the vice president of Cadbury Schweppes, 66% of people feel that their gum looses flavor too quickly. So, to try to give customers what they want, Cadbury has developed a new gum, called Stride. The gum is formulated to remain soft and chewy longer, as well as to release its flavor more slowly, thus increasing the amount to time that customers are willing to chew it. An unofficial taste test in the New York Times found that it did last longer than regular gum, averaging about 20 minutes of good chewing time. The new product will hit the shelves later this month, as will a $50 million advertising campaign, so the release - just like the longer, time-release flavor of the gum itself - will probably be hard to miss.

Today, the American Beverage Association and its members agreed to voluntarily remove sugary sodas from public schools across the country. Companies including Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Cadbury Schweppes are all members of the ABA. Public high schools that still permit diet sodas will still be able to buy them for their campuses, and they will also be sold drinks that are considered have some nutritional value, juice, sports drinks and low-fat milk, though whole milk will no longer be offered because of its calorie content. Elementary and middle schools will only be sold unsweetened juice, low-fat milk and water. Part of the reason that the soda companies have agreed to this deal, which was made in conjunction with the William J. Clinton Foundation, is that on-campus soda sales make up a very small percentage of their overall sales, not to mention that a voluntary withdrawal looks better, from a PR perspective, than being banned.

 

Continuing with the trend of bloggers doing strange things with Cadbury eggs, here's a LiveJournal user named shmivejournal who recently baked a cake with Cadbury eggs instead of regular eggs. This inventive young man's hypothesis: "THIS IS GOING TO BE SO AWESOME." His conclusion: "For some reason, this cake tastes vaguely like Novocaine." I'm not sure what it is about Easter candy that brings out the mad scientist in people, but I'm glad it'll be over soon.

[Photo: shmivejournal]

As if eating Cadbury eggs, chocolate bunnies and marshmallow peeps in the same day wasn't excessive enough, a blog called Asteroid has a step-by-step guide to making a turducken-style creation that combines all three of these Easter sweets. It begins by making incisions in several peeps and stuffing mini Cadbury eggs inside. The newly fortified marshmallow critters are then stuffed into a hollow chocolate bunny whose base has been removed (above). The whole deal then gets sealed up again; chocolate welding is optional, apparently. Take that, giant Cadbury egg.

[Photo: Asteroid]