The Bitter History of Chocolate

What's better than holiday hot chocolate? If just thinking about it makes you feel all warm and fuzzy, well – that’s by design. Chocolate's big history sweeps across the globe, and today we’re going on that journey: from the pre–Columbus Americas, to an early 20th century reporter’s hunch about what cocoa production really takes, to a 21st century medical student’s story about his childhood on a farm that produces those holiday treats. Guests: Carla Martin, lecturer in African and African American Studies at Harvard University and President of the Board of the Institute for Cacao and Chocolate Research Catherine Higgs, professor of history at the University of British Columbia in Canada Shadrack Frimpong, founder of Cocoa360 https://cocoa360.org/ We’ve got a favor to ask: We know there are a lot of great NPR shows out there.. but we all know who's the best. NPR is celebrating the best podcasts of the year, and YOU get to crown the winner of the People’s Choice Award. Vote for Throughline at npr.org/peopleschoice. May the best pod win! To access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This message comes from the Southern Environmental Law Center. No one voted for dirty air and water. That's why S E L C is fighting back to defend the healthy environment everyone depends on, because it's not political, it's fundamental. Learn more at selc.org.

• 0:17Rund Abdelfatah?

  Hey there, it's Rand. Before we start the show today, I want to make sure you know it's a special week at NPR, because it was just Giving Tuesday. NPR celebrates this global day of generosity every year, but we've never had a year quite like this one before. NPR is now operating without federal support for the first time in our history, more than 50 years. It's a big change, and at such an uncertain time, we can learn a lot from the past. And Throughline works to bring you the stories that help us understand this moment. We're so grateful to the listeners who have already stepped up to donate, like Jessica

• 0:57Rund Abdelfatah?

  from Arkansas, who says, "Throughline is the greatest deep dive podcast ever. Thank you for all your reporting. Absolutely life changing." Thank you, Jessica. That really, really means a lot. And you all can be like Jessica, too. Please make your Giving Tuesday gift right now by signing up for NPR+. It's a simple recurring donation that gets you perks to NPR's podcasts and bonus episodes from Throughline. Join us at plus.npr.org. Thanks again for your support. Now, let's get on to the show.

• 1:42Speaker 02

  A sip of Swiss Miss hot cocoa tastes so good and rich, it makes me...

• 1:49Speaker 03

  Ruby, what are we about to do?

• 1:51Speaker 04

  About to make some hot chocolate, man.

• 1:59Speaker 02

  It's full of real Wisconsin milk and rich imported cocoa.

• 2:03Speaker 03

  This is my son, Rumi.

• 2:04Speaker 04

  Empty delicious cocoa into the mug.

• 2:09Speaker 03

  And this is us doing one of our favorite winter pastimes.

• 2:15Speaker 03

  How do you pour that one?

• 2:18Speaker 03

  Making hot chocolate.

• 2:21Speaker 03

  Classic.

• 2:24Speaker 02

  Just add hot water and delicious, rich and foamy Nestle hot chocolate takes the out of winter.

• 2:33Speaker 03

  This is the one I made when I was a kid.

• 2:38Speaker 03

  What did you just pour in the cup? What does it look like?

• 2:41Speaker 04

  Cocoa.

• 2:42Speaker 03

  What does it smell like?

• 2:44Speaker 04

  It smells like choc- straight chocolate. Ah, yeah, that's a good one. Dirt and sip, like you deserve it.

• 2:52Speaker 03

  Do we deserve it?

• 2:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:55Speaker 03

  I think we deserve this hot chocolate. Ooh, it spilled some.

• 2:58Speaker 02

  The only thing better than the way it tastes is the way it makes you feel.

• 3:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, okay, so tell me what you feel like now.

• 3:06Speaker 04

  Um, it just makes my, like, insides warm up.

• 3:11Speaker 03

  And what else? What about the taste?

• 3:13Speaker 04

  The taste? No, the taste. It's hard to describe. It just makes you, like, happy and chocolatey and, like, warm and all fuzzy inside. Okay, gang, what do you do for a warm-up break?

• 3:29Speaker 04

  Swiss Miss Instant Cocoa, your lady ho.

• 3:34Speaker 03

  If you also felt warm and fuzzy inside, listening to us make and drink hot chocolate, it's not your fault. Hot chocolate has this kind of nostalgic spot in our culture. It's a relatively cheap, sweet, warm drink that was accessible even for a working-class immigrant family like the one I grew up in. And now, as a grown man, I'm basically passing this tradition on to the next generation. Would you run a mile for a cup of hot cocoa?

• 4:00Speaker 04

  I wouldn't run a mile, but I would run, like...

• 4:02Speaker 03

  How many laps?

• 4:03Speaker 04

  Wait, later. I'll run, like, two.

• 4:06Speaker 03

  Two laps for a hot choc-

• 4:08Speaker 04

  Three! If the hot cocoa was fresh until the 3.

• 4:13Speaker 03

  But this is through line, and so you know we're gonna ask the question, why? Why does chocolate have this place in our culture? Where did it come from? How is it produced? And who is producing it? Usually, this line of questioning would send us on a quest that leads into some kind of wormhole that eventually leads to a journal article, or a lecture, or a book, or something like that, that puts it all together. Well, in this case, shockingly, there wasn't a ton of scholarship on chocolate history.

• 4:42Speaker 05

  Cocoa is considered an orphan crop in that it does not have the same research resources that we see for things like rice, potatoes, fish, etc. And as a result, it is less studied, it is less written about, it is less understood.

• 5:00Speaker 03

  This is Carla Martin.

• 5:02Speaker 05

  I am a lecturer in African and African American Studies at Harvard University.

• 5:06Speaker 03

  She's also president of the Board of the Institute for Cocoa and Chocolate Research.

• 5:11Speaker 05

  I think part of that is because we treat it as silly. You know, it's like the Willy Wonkification of chocolate. And it is actually very serious business. And so I appreciate anyone who takes the time to think about it as seriously as we would any other part of our ethical or moral lives.

• 5:31Speaker 03

  According to several different market research companies, the chocolate industry is currently worth about $150 billion. And as you might have guessed, it has a complex, fascinating history.

• 5:44Speaker 05

  Chocolate's one of those things that kids love. And so I'm a big, big proponent of if we want people to be educated about this, we have to start as early as they get access to chocolate.

• 5:54Speaker 03

  This is produced on farms, basically, where sometimes kids your age, sometimes younger, work. Would you give up chocolate if it meant those kids didn't have to work? Of course. OK, before you get all, oh, my God, why are you ruining chocolate for your kid? First of all, he's used to it. His dad is a journalist. Second, in the course of doing research and calling up experts like Carla Martin, I learned an amazing fact. Most of the world's cocoa, or it's also called cacao, comes from two West African countries, Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire, also known as Ivory Coast. Carla Martin was actually living off the coast of West Africa, in Cabo Verde, when she first became interested in cocoa production.

• 6:39Speaker 05

  And while I was living there, I met some people who had returned from that work and who had been disabled by how difficult the work was. I met many other people who had family members who had never returned. And as a longtime chocolate lover, this was eye-opening for me. It wasn't something I had been aware of. I wasn't, at that time, fully clued in to what it meant that my cocoa that I loved was coming from a supply chain that was fraught with these kinds of labor issues.

• 7:21Rund Abdelfatah?

  So how did this happen? How did this troubled supply chain of chocolate come to exist? The story takes us from the vast empires of the pre-Columbus Americas to the journey of an early 20th century investigative journalist determined to learn the truth about chocolate. And finally, we'll speak with a young medical student who grew up on a cocoa farm in Ghana. In this episode of Throughline from NPR, we take a deeper, often bitter, look at the history of one of the world's favorite sweet treats: chocolate.

• 8:10Speaker 06

  Hello, this is Rochelle from Vancouver, Washington. And you're listening to Through Mine from NPR. Thank you all for what you do.

• 8:22Speaker 07

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from Thumbtack. Recommendations can be great. Maybe someone recommended this podcast and here you are. But home projects are different. If a podcast isn't your thing, you lose a few minutes. If you hire your cousin's neighbor to mount your TV, you might end up with a lopsided screen and wall damage. That's why Thumbtack works. It matches people with top-rated local pros with photos, reviews, and credentials all in one place. For your next home project, try Thumbtack. Hire the right pro today.

• 8:57Speaker 00

  This message comes from the podcast Morrison Mysteries. Dateline's Keith Morrison brings his signature storytelling to the haunting works of Edgar Allan Poe. Search Morrison Mysteries to follow now.

• 9:09Speaker 08

  This week on the NPR Politics Podcast, the midterm elections are wrapping up and millions of people have already voted. We're taking one final check of the electoral pulse with a new NPR PBS News Marist Poll. It shows Democrats still poised to make gains, but also with some warning signs for just how many. We'll explain on the NPR Politics Podcast.

• 9:36Speaker 09

  Part One, The Money Tree.

• 9:42Speaker 05

  Kakao grows on a tree. It takes cocoa trees three to five years to begin to produce fruit regularly. The fruit goes on the thickest part of the tree, the trunk of the tree. These fruits take on the shape of roughly like a Nerf football. They come in different colors, yellow, red, greens.

• 10:05Rund Abdelfatah?

  The cacao pods have a bumpy outer shell. And when you break into them...

• 10:12Speaker 05

  What's inside is 30 to 40 different seeds. And those are what we know as cacao beans. They're the seeds of the cacao fruit.

• 10:22Rund Abdelfatah?

  Seeds that get processed and mixed with other ingredients to become what we know today as chocolate.

• 10:33Speaker 05

  Cacao originally kind of came out of the primordial ooze in the Amazon region.

• 10:39Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is Carla Martin again. She's an African and African American Studies lecturer at Harvard University.

• 10:45Speaker 05

  And it then, over time, spread into what is today southern Ecuador. We have evidence of its consumption at least 5,000 years ago there. It also moved up the Americas into what is today Central America and southern Mexico. And in that particular region, it took on a distinct cultural significance. It came to be used in four different ways.

• 11:13Speaker 05

  It was used as a food flavoring. It was used as a beverage. And there were thousands of recipes that used cacao in beverage form. It was then also used as a spiritual offering. So it took on an important social significance in these different groups of indigenous people.

• 11:30Rund Abdelfatah?

  For example, cacao would be present at official meetings and marriage ceremonies, and was even used as an offering when rulers passed away. And?

• 11:41Speaker 05

  It was used as a currency.

• 11:45Speaker 05

  And that is where the big interest initially came with European conquest of Central America, because cacao was quite literally the money that grew on trees.

• 11:59Rund Abdelfatah?

  By the early 1500s, the first Spanish conquistadors had arrived on the shores of the New World. It was here that they would come across cacao for the first time.

• 12:11Speaker 05

  The place in the world that produced the most cacao at this time was the Pacific coast of El Salvador, known as the Izalcos region, where the Papil people were producing enormous quantities of cacao. And the Papil people were also producers of something that we today say every time we say the word, and that is chocolate. So the first recipe for chocolate came from somewhere in this region.

• 12:41Speaker 05

  So they were roasting and de-shelling cacao beans,

• 12:46Speaker 05

  grinding them into a paste, and then adding them with some kind of sweetener. It could be honey, it could be agave, and then also putting in at times some vanilla. And that is very, very similar to what people who are listening might know of as dark chocolate today.

• 13:03Rund Abdelfatah?

  And when the Spanish brought cacao beans back to Europe, they would be used as a kind of medicine for things like fatigue, digestion, bowel function, and so on. Meanwhile, back in Mesoamerica, the Spaniards wanted to stockpile cacao since it was used as currency there.

• 13:24Speaker 05

  Once the Spanish really began the conquest, they were granted what was called the encomienda system by the Spanish crown. That allowed them to effectively enslave indigenous people working on, they called them, you know, cacao orchards. They were a version of plantations. And to require that those indigenous people would produce cacao beans for them in the form of tribute. They, you know, in a kind of cynical way, they promised that they would protect these indigenous people, that they would bring them the Catholic faith. Of course, what resulted was utter destruction of their societies, mass death, great deal of violence.

• 14:05Rund Abdelfatah?

  Many indigenous people died from infectious diseases that the Spanish brought with them. It was also during this time that Spain, along with other European powers, began to invest heavily in another crop: sugar cane.

• 14:21Speaker 05

  Now, sugar plantations are notoriously brutal. Data that we see about enslaved Africans arriving, let's say, to the Caribbean shows that when they would arrive during the colonial period, they might live anywhere from five to eight years working on that plantation because the work was so intense.

• 14:42Speaker 05

  Even today, for people who are working on sugar plantations, they equate their energy expenditure to them running a half marathon six days a week. And so this is incredibly difficult work to work on sugar. Now, if we then transfer to what it means to work on cacao, it is actually less overall labor intensive.

• 15:07Rund Abdelfatah?

  And so growing cacao was seen as a way to get more profit out of enslaved people on plantations.

• 15:13Speaker 05

  It became attractive as something that elderly people could do, that children could do, that could be done in a less intense system that would be on the side of sugar production in lots of places.

• 15:30Rund Abdelfatah?

  The work of growing cacao may not have been as difficult as sugar, but it was still very hard work. First, you would have to pick out the small beans from the cacao pods, ferment them, then dry them for a few more days. And when you consider the conditions and hours people were doing this work, then it becomes even more evident that it was not easy.

• 15:58Speaker 05

  If you're doing it for 16, 18 hours a day, six or seven days a week, it is still an absolutely brutal system of labor, especially when one is enslaved, malnourished, et cetera.

• 16:13Speaker 05

  It was designed as essentially a complement to sugar production.

• 16:18Rund Abdelfatah?

  And it was only the rich and noble class in Spain that could afford to have cacao, which they often had in the form of a drink. Over time, cacao slowly spread from the Spanish royal court to other European kingdoms.

• 16:33Speaker 05

  There's a long tradition of marrying a princess to a prince in one country. She would often bring with her a tradition of chocolate consumption and spread it to a new country.

• 16:45Rund Abdelfatah?

  But a new class of people was emerging.

• 16:48Speaker 05

  By the 1700s, there's a growing mercantile class in Europe. People who are getting wealthy off of the slave trade and off of the trade in these commodities that are beginning to move around the world.

• 17:01Rund Abdelfatah?

  And by the 1800s, new technologies rapidly change how cacao is processed.

• 17:07Speaker 05

  Specifically, that comes from the development of the hydraulic press. That's the tool that allows you to make cocoa powder and cocoa butter. It comes from larger scale grinding machines that will grind those roasted cocoa beans and allow you to turn them into a cocoa paste and then chocolate and a variety of other machinery. This allows cocoa chocolate to become cheaper as a whole. And all throughout the 1800s into the late 1800s, demand for the product goes up in Europe.

• 17:37Rund Abdelfatah?

  With the invention of the hydraulic press, this chocolate drink could be made faster now and in turn, could also be sold for less.

• 17:46Speaker 05

  If we think about Britain, for example, in the 1800s during the Industrial Revolution, people were encouraged to have tea with some sugar in it as a way of cutting hunger. And the same came to be true of promoting cocoa as something that kids would drink during the Industrial Revolution because it was a way of giving them a relatively cheap and energy boost via calories. Also creates a kind of sense of well-being in people who consume it. But it was cheaper than other foods at the time.

• 18:18Rund Abdelfatah?

  But at the same time that more people in Europe were trying cacao or cocoa, some of the European powers were losing their grip on their colonies where most of it was being produced.

• 18:30Speaker 05

  Latin American and Caribbean nations become independent from their European colonizers. And European powers had come to see these extractive colonies as their crown jewels. These were the places that were producing enormous amounts of resources and wealth for their populations. For the Portuguese, that was Brazil.

• 18:53Rund Abdelfatah?

  The Portuguese were heavily invested in Brazil for its cacao plantations, but...

• 18:58Speaker 05

  By about 1822, Brazil is becoming independent from the Portuguese crown. There has been an intensification of cocoa production. And the Portuguese king and queen are worried that they will lose their crown jewel. As they're planning to move away from Brazil, as they take cocoa trees and they plant them in another Portuguese colony, that's Sao Tome and Principe.

• 19:26Rund Abdelfatah?

  Sao Tome and Principe is an island nation today that consists of two main islands off the coast of west Central Africa. It's volcanic and mountainous with a humid climate, perfect for growing cacao.

• 19:40Speaker 05

  Historically, it was an enormously important place. In the late 1400s, early 1500s, the Portuguese experimented with what would become the model for sugar plantation agriculture all throughout the world by bringing enslaved people as chattel to grow sugar there. So there's already this tradition and population of people in Sao Tome who are enslaved and can be put to work, working on these new plantations for cocoa.

• 20:14Speaker 05

  They kept enslavement there until the 1870s. So they were enslaving people, and they were able to bring them, quite simply, to Sao Tome and Principe and force them to work.

• 20:30Rund Abdelfatah?

  These islands that paved the way for sugar production would play a major role in the modern cocoa trade, a trade that has historically relied on unfree labor.

• 20:43Rund Abdelfatah?

  Coming up, rumors and murmurs bring a journalist to Sao Tome.

• 20:52Speaker 10

  Hi, this is Heather from Charleston, South Carolina. And you've been listening to Throughline on NPR.

• 21:03Speaker 00

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from the podcast Morrison Mysteries. Dateline's Keith Morrison brings his signature storytelling to the haunting works of Edgar Allan Poe. Search Morrison Mysteries to follow now.

• 21:19Speaker 08

  The 2026 midterm elections are upon us. On November 3rd, voters will determine what the next two years of their local leadership and the balance of national government will look like. Listen to the NPR News Now podcast for all the updates you need ahead of and after November 3rd from NPR News.

• 21:42Speaker 11

  The day's top headlines, local stories from your community, your next podcast binge listen. You can have it all in one place, your pocket. Download the NPR app today.

• 21:59Speaker 03

  Part two. Nevinson's Crusade.

• 22:11Speaker 03

  Bourneville, England, 1901.

• 22:23Speaker 03

  William Cadbury, whose family owned one of the largest chocolate companies in the world, cracks open a sales catalog. He looks closer and reads that.

• 22:34Speaker 12

  There are laborers listed for sale along with the property and the machinery on a cocoa estate.

• 22:42Speaker 03

  The workers from a cocoa plantation being sold like pieces of farming equipment. William Cadbury quickly realized that this sale was from Sao Tome, one of the places where he sourced the cocoa that went into his company's candy bars and famous chocolate eggs.

• 23:00Speaker 12

  And, you know, he's very disturbed by this because he's a Quaker and Quakers are, you know, a long history of anti-slavery.

• 23:07Speaker 03

  Quakers. For more than a century, they'd fought to end slavery around the world. William Cadbury personally gave money to support anti-slavery causes. So this was not a good look.

• 23:26Speaker 12

  So he starts making inquiries.

• 23:29Speaker 03

  He demands answers from the Portuguese government.

• 23:32Speaker 12

  The Portuguese basically make the argument that the laborers are freely recruited in Angola.

• 23:41Speaker 03

  A nation in southwest Africa on their mainland that's also controlled by Portugal.

• 23:46Speaker 12

  They sign a five-year contract. And once they get to Sao Tome and Principe, they're housed, they're fed, they're clothed, they're paid.

• 23:56Speaker 12

  Therefore, this is not slavery.

• 23:58Speaker 03

  William Cadbury knew that Sao Tome was a major source of cheap, high-quality cocoa that he needed for his growing chocolate empire. But he also didn't want anything to do with slave labor. So he reported the Portuguese government's response to the Board of Directors and continued to push the British government to do something about it. Then, in 1904, a veteran investigative journalist named Henry Wood Nevinson reached out to him.

• 24:24Speaker 12

  And says, hey, I'd like to try and figure out what's going on in Sao Tome and Principe.

• 24:30Speaker 03

  Also, before I forget, this is Catherine Higgs.

• 24:33Speaker 12

  I'm a professor of history at the University of British Columbia in Canada.

• 24:38Speaker 03

  She specializes in the history of commodities, my dream job. And she wrote a book called

• 24:44Speaker 12

  Chocolate Islands: Cocoa Slavery in Colonial Africa.

• 24:48Speaker 03

  Catherine says that, as far as we know, William Cadbury was genuinely disturbed by the idea that his cocoa was being produced by enslaved people. And he knew there were murmurs in the industry about this issue. So he decided to reply to Henry Nevinson.

• 25:04Speaker 12

  Nevinson is aggressive, certainly in the way I've seen journalists be aggressive, absolutely, right?

• 25:09Speaker 03

  He asks for introductions to planters in Sao Tome and offers to help investigate for Cadbury. And Cadbury basically tells him, no.

• 25:19Speaker 12

  He rejects Nevinson. He's very polite to him, right? He's a Quaker. He's a pacifist. Gives him a nice note, gives him a couple of references in Sao Tome and Principe, and sends him on his way.

• 25:28Speaker 03

  This move would prove to be a mistake.

• 25:32Speaker 12

  Cadbury's concern is that Nevinson goes into the investigation assuming the worst. And he's being paid to produce long-form journalism that, you know, is not going to be nice.

• 25:45Speaker 03

  Henry Wood Nevinson, being a dedicated muckraker, had already gotten a deal with Harper's Magazine, one of the most successful periodicals in the US, to investigate whether slave labor was being used on cocoa farms in Sao Tome. But he didn't go directly to the island. He started in Angola, where workers were being recruited.

• 26:06Speaker 12

  Vast places with relatively low populations and lots of empty space.

• 26:19Speaker 03

  Nevinson followed the path of workers who were brought from the interior of Angola, where it's green and humid, towards the highlands nearing the coast where it's very dry and arid, basically a desert. He wrote about everything he witnessed.

• 26:35Speaker 12

  He saw skeletons of people who dropped dead along this recruiting route. You can die in a day in the desert if you're walking across Angola.

• 26:48Speaker 13

  That path is strewn with dead men's bones. You see the white thigh bones lying in front of your feet, and at one side, among the undergrowth, you find the skull.

• 27:00Speaker 13

  These are the skeletons of slaves who've been unable to keep up with the march and so were murdered or left to die.

• 27:09Speaker 12

  And he saw wooden shackles.

• 27:13Speaker 13

  Even as you come down to the river, you find slave shackles hanging on the bushes.

• 27:17Speaker 12

  So these would be a kind of yoke that went across your shoulders and held your hands, and sometimes your feet were shackled just enough so that you couldn't run away, but you could walk.

• 27:29Speaker 13

  You find shackles of various ages, some quite new with the marks of the axe fresh upon them, some old and half eaten by ants.

• 27:41Speaker 12

  And he can't unsee what he's seen.

• 28:00Speaker 13

  I passed a procession of forty-three men and women, marching in file like carriers, but with no loads on their heads.

• 28:12Speaker 13

  Four natives in white coats and armed with guns accompanied them, ready to shoot down any runaway on their way to the ship for Salto Me.

• 28:22Speaker 03

  At this time, slavery was technically illegal in Portugal and all of its colonies. So Nevinson wanted to understand how these workers ended up in shackles. Some were desperate for work and entered into contracts they didn't understand. Others were forced into labor because they'd broken arbitrary laws like loitering. He even got to witness workers being taken into possession by their employers.

• 28:49Speaker 13

  They are asked whether they go willingly as laborers to Salto Me.

• 28:54Speaker 13

  No attention of any kind is paid to their answer. In most cases, no answer is given. Not the slightest notice would be taken of a refusal.

• 29:25Speaker 03

  Henry Wood Nevinson followed the workers on their journey across the sea to the island of Salto Me. By the time he gets there, he's extremely ill.

• 29:36Speaker 12

  Following that path nearly killed him, right? Disease, thirst, hunger.

• 29:41Speaker 03

  But none of that stopped him from filing stories.

• 29:47Speaker 13

  The islands possess exactly the kind of climate that kills men and makes the cocoa tree flourish.

• 29:55Speaker 13

  It is a hothouse, climate-burning heat and torrents of rain in the wet season,

• 30:01Speaker 13

  stifling heat and clouds of dripping mist in the season that is called dry.

• 30:05Speaker 12

  He sees the people who had survived this labor recruitment process. He sees, you know, people are dressed kind of in identical clothing. Women have headscarves and blouses and striped cotton skirts and men have wraps made of the same material.

• 30:25Speaker 13

  One early morning at Sao Tome, I went out to visit a plantation. There were 400 slaves on the estate, not counting children.

• 30:34Speaker 13

  I saw them clearing the forest for further plantation. Clearing the ground under the cocoa trees, gathering the great yellow pods. Sorting the brown kernels, which already smelt like a chocolate box.

• 30:55Speaker 03

  One of Nevinson's biggest challenges was that he didn't speak Portuguese or any African languages, so it was hard for him to conduct interviews. But one day, he was able to have lunch with a plantation doctor and the plantation manager, who spoke French, a language Nevinson did speak.

• 31:16Speaker 13

  "The death rate on this rosha," he remarked casually during the meal, "is 12 or 14% a year among the surveyors."

• 31:23Speaker 03

  With the Portuguese called "workers."

• 31:26Speaker 13

  "And what is the chief cause?" I asked.

• 31:30Speaker 13

  "Anemia," he said.

• 31:33Speaker 13

  "That is a vague sort of thing," I answered. "What brings on anemia?" "Unhappiness," he said.

• 31:46Speaker 03

  He visited multiple plantations all over the island.

• 31:50Speaker 13

  "On one of the largest and best managed plantations of Sao Tome, the superintendent admits a children's death rate of 25%, or one quarter of all the children every year."

• 32:02Speaker 12

  It's not possible, for him objectively, to look at those people and not think, "These people have been enslaved."

• 32:09Speaker 13

  "Thus it is that the islands of Sao Tome and Principe have been rendered about the most profitable bits of the Earth's surface, and England and America can get their chocolates and cocoa cheap."

• 32:43Speaker 03

  Henry Wood Nevinson arrived back in England in 1905, a month before The Harper's Series was published.

• 32:52Speaker 05

  He came back from this experience, saying that unequivocally, this was unfree labor. It was slavery by another name.

• 32:59Speaker 03

  This is Carla Martin again.

• 33:01Speaker 05

  Where people were experiencing significant corporal punishment, that they were not receiving the basic kinds of shelter, medical care that they would need, that they were being pressed into these contracts in entirely unethical ways, and that the working conditions in which they spent their time were profoundly brutal.

• 33:23Speaker 03

  The following year, Nevinson put out a book that was a collection of all the reports from his time in Angola and Sao Tome. It was called A Modern Slavery: Outrage from the Public Towards the Chocolate Companies Was Immediate.

• 33:38Speaker 05

  At this point in time, the British people have decided, largely as a group, that they are anti-slavery. And the Cadbury Company is a perfect example of a Quaker firm that is purportedly against labor abuses. It's part of how they've kind of made their name and won trust among the British people. So as British consumers are learning about this, they begin pressure campaigns against the Cadbury Company, things like consumer boycotts, letter writing, et cetera.

• 34:16Speaker 03

  This is where things get weirder. Okay, so what the general public might not have known at this point is that William Cadbury had already started his own investigation into slave labor on cocoa plantations. Remember back in 1904, when he'd rejected Henry Wood Nevinson?

• 34:34Speaker 12

  He shuts the door and thinks, oh, gosh darn, I better find somebody else to do this. So he starts looking earnestly for his own representative to send.

• 34:45Speaker 03

  He finds a private investigator that was not like Nevinson.

• 34:49Speaker 12

  From William Cadbury's perspective, he felt that Nevinson went into the project determined to prove it was slavery, rather than to consider other options.

• 35:00Speaker 03

  So he gives him financial support and asks him to go to Africa and look into this. But Cadbury's investigator takes the opposite route as Nevinson. He starts in Sao Tome and eventually makes his way to Angola. Initially, he didn't know if what he was seeing was slavery. But by the time he finished his journey in 1907.

• 35:21Speaker 12

  He basically agrees with Nevinson completely.

• 35:24Speaker 03

  This is a quote from the investigator's report. "If this is not slavery, I know of no word in the English language that correctly characterized it."

• 35:40Speaker 12

  For Cadbury, it was a personal affront.

• 35:45Speaker 12

  This notion that his cocoa might have been produced by slave labor. He was also a businessman and he needed a free source of cocoa.

• 35:56Speaker 03

  Henry Wood Nevinson's reporting created an international scandal, an absolute PR nightmare for the Cadbury Company. People were wondering, how can this Quaker company with these progressive values be using slave labor? But the thing was, William Cadbury already knew through his own investigator that slavery was happening in Sao Tome and he'd privately been pushing both the British and Portuguese governments to end it. Yet publicly, he went on the offensive.

• 36:26Speaker 05

  The Cadbury's actually sue a newspaper based on what they consider libel.

• 36:31Speaker 12

  The newspaper is The Standard.

• 36:33Speaker 03

  A conservative paper.

• 36:34Speaker 12

  And they accuse Cadbury of lying.

• 36:37Speaker 03

  An article was published by The Standard arguing that the Cadbury Company had known for years that there was slave labor in Sao Tome, but did nothing to intervene.

• 36:46Speaker 05

  So they actually go through a very public court case where they're saying, you know, you can't say this about us.

• 36:52Speaker 03

  Cadbury basically argued that they'd been fighting to end slavery in Sao Tome. And so the implication that they'd been hiding it from the public intentionally was libel.

• 37:01Speaker 12

  The jury found The Standard guilty, the newspaper, The Standard newspaper, guilty of libel against Cadbury Company.

• 37:10Speaker 05

  The court essentially finds, okay, yes, maybe there was some libel here, but we're only going to award you.

• 37:16Speaker 12

  One farthing, which is one quarter of one penny.

• 37:19Speaker 05

  As a way of showing that we actually agree, that you've done something wrong and you need to take action on this problem.

• 37:26Speaker 12

  So they're basically saying. You were hiding this information.

• 37:30Speaker 05

  And so for the Cadbury's, this immediately becomes a kind of ideological problem. It does not suit the way that they see themselves or interact with the world. But it also, over time, becomes a public relations problem.

• 37:48Speaker 12

  Cadbury genuinely did not want his chocolate to be produced by forced labor. So his motivation was, and this is a pun on Cadbury Pure Chocolate, his motivation was pure. So obviously, he had corporate interests, but he also had religious interests.

• 38:06Speaker 05

  So as they're determining what to do to leave Sao Tome, they are also investing heavily in the Gold Coast, a British colony, which goes on to become Ghana, to make sure that they will have a backup plan for their cocoa.

• 38:19Speaker 12

  How do I employ free farmers who freely produce cocoa and make a more substantial profit for their cocoa? How do I make Cadbury cocoa pure, again, from a business perspective and from a Quaker perspective?

• 38:37Speaker 05

  And so rather than relying on these contracted indentured unfree laborers, they're relying on free entire families working on small-scale farms, where children, parents, adults, you know, older adults are all part of producing cocoa.

• 38:56Speaker 03

  In 1909, the Cadbury Chocolate Company announced they would no longer source their cocoa from Sao Tome. Instead, they would begin working with small-scale free farmers in West Africa, where the weather suited cocoa production.

• 39:11Speaker 05

  It is actually what has now become the tradition throughout the world of cocoa production. It is small-scale family farming.

• 39:27Speaker 03

  Sao Tome would go on to lose its place as the largest producer of cocoa in the world. The Cadbury name eventually recovered from the scandal. Henry Wood Nevinson became a correspondent during World War I and is today considered one of England's most legendary journalists. The new system used by the Cadburys for cocoa production in West Africa lasts until today, but not without its own set of problems. Coming up, we speak with the son of a cocoa farmer from Ghana about the reality of child labor in chocolate.

• 40:27Speaker 14

  Hi, this is Megan from Newport, Rhode Island, and you're listening to Through Line by NPR.

• 40:35Speaker 07

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.

• 40:39Speaker 15

  I'm Kevin Roos. And I'm Casey Newton. And together, we've been tech journalists for decades. Now, we're your hosts of Machine Gods, a new podcast from NPR that makes sense of what AI means for your work, your life, and all of our futures. Twice a week, we'll be exploring the biggest moves in tech and give you unmatched access to the real titans of industry. Listen to Machine Gods from NPR on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 41:04Speaker 16

  On the latest episode of Sources and Methods, in Israel this week, an election with no clear winner. Next week, in the US, an election that could shift the balance of power in Washington. And in both countries, a defining issue for voters: the war in Iran. We look at where things could be headed in that conflict. Listen this week to Sources and Methods, the national security podcast from NPR.

• 41:28Speaker 08

  This midterm election season, the NPR app is your single stop for clear, independent coverage. Stay on top of national and local storylines with news, stories, podcasts, and political analysis on demand. Download the NPR app and check out the Elections 2026 tab today.

• 41:52Speaker 09

  Part three.

• 41:55Speaker 09

  Amazing Grace.

• 41:58Speaker 05

  There are today five to six million cocoa farmers around the world. About 2 million of them are in Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire.

• 42:07Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is Carla Martin again. She's a lecturer at Harvard University.

• 42:11Speaker 05

  And the vast majority, 90 to 95% of them, are small-scale farmers, working on a plot of land that you could walk around in a matter of minutes.

• 42:22Rund Abdelfatah?

  These farmers are the ones who make the cocoa that goes into most of the chocolate products we love.

• 42:28Speaker 05

  If you buy hot cocoa, a chocolate bar, a chocolate bunny, and it does not explicitly say on the package what country it came from, the chances are that that is a blend of cocos from different parts of the world. The majority of that blend will be sourced from West Africa.

• 42:50Rund Abdelfatah?

  Okay. So what's the big deal? Chocolate production was moved to West Africa and put into the hands of independent, small-scale farmers in order to avoid slave labor. That is true. But as the 20th century went on, demand for chocolate increased. So, basic market economics here, pressure was put on farmers to keep up with that demand by creating more supply. But as they did that, prices either couldn't keep up with inflation or went down, which meant doing more work for less money.

• 43:23Speaker 05

  They were not being paid for their labor, but rather for the weight of the commodity that they produced. And so that's at least part of that kind of calculus that was being made strategically about why to, in many ways, push for small-scale farm production of cocoa.

• 43:47Rund Abdelfatah?

  And as the pressure went up to produce more cocoa, farmers had to do whatever they had to do to increase that production, even having their children work.

• 43:58Speaker 05

  Child labor could be something like my mom, when I was a kid, telling me to take out the trash, which was beneficial to my maturity, a way of me being involved in household chores. There are, however, other kinds of child labor that people have agreed upon internationally should be eradicated because it is labor that is seen as morally or physically injurious to children. There are cases where these worst forms of child labor take place, and they take place in a couple of different ways. In a small number of cases, these are taking place via the trafficking of children from one country to another or one region to another

• 44:39Speaker 05

  where they are forced to work as unfree laborers on cocoa farms. And these are often vulnerable children who don't have any other recourse or way to escape this system of labor.

• 44:51Rund Abdelfatah?

  According to Wachfree's Global Slavery Index, about 16,000 children a year are trafficked in Ghana and Ivory Coast to work on cocoa farms. They're usually forced to work for free on farms that don't belong to their own families. But this is not the majority of child labor cases.

• 45:12Speaker 05

  The majority of cases where children are working on their family farms, and they are experiencing injury because they might be carrying something that's too heavy for their developing musculoskeletal systems. They might be exposed to pesticides. They have developing lungs. And this is the most common form of child labor that exists in cocoa.

• 45:46Speaker 17

  When I was a kid, I knew, my siblings and I, six of us, we had our job cut out for us. All we knew was just, at that time, you know, you work hard if you wanna make more and, you know, you can have a good harvest and you can get some good sales, yeah.

• 45:59Speaker 03

  This is Shadrack Frimpong.

• 46:01Speaker 17

  I am one of six children of cocoa farmers. I grew up on the farm, saw electricity when I was maybe like in my teens.

• 46:10Speaker 03

  Shadrack is from a village in the western part of Ghana, where there are a lot of cocoa farms.

• 46:15Speaker 17

  It's insane, if you have over 3,600 communities, right?

• 46:20Speaker 03

  And almost 850,000 cocoa farmers in a country that has a little over 30 million people.

• 46:27Speaker 17

  And that's a lot of the population.

• 46:29Speaker 03

  He has fond memories of growing up in the cocoa farming village.

• 46:33Speaker 17

  A simple peaceful life, a lot of discipline and structure, because it's about survival in those settings. There's not much luxury. One thing I appreciated growing up, the sense of colonialism is insane. Over there, I could go into anybody's house and eat. I could go into people's, and then somebody can see me, "Hey, what are you walking around? Come help me out of my cocoa farm, let's go."

• 46:55Speaker 03

  Cocoa farming has actually been in Shadrack's family for generations.

• 46:59Speaker 17

  We were told as young people that you have to continue the legacy, it's a spiritual thing. There's blessings and all of that attached to it. So it goes beyond just food and revenue to, you know, a spiritual thing where, you know, it keeps blessing the family life.

• 47:14Speaker 03

  Shadrack might have just stayed in Ghana and been a cocoa farmer himself. But something happened to him when he was a kid, something that happens to lots of kids who work on cocoa farms, that altered his life's path.

• 47:32Speaker 17

  When I was a kid, I had, one time I had infection on my legs. And unfortunately, the year I got the infections and things were getting really horrible and my legs were getting swollen, that was the same year my family had a bad harvest.

• 47:43Speaker 03

  Shadrack's family, like many other cocoa farmers in Ghana, despite working very hard, didn't really have any rainy day funds. They were forced to leverage everything they had to pay for his medical care in a hospital hours away.

• 47:58Speaker 17

  That's what they did. They put a family land as collateral. Um, got me to the nearest health facility. When we went, they were like, you came so close to getting it amputated.

• 48:07Speaker 03

  He was lucky. They saved his leg. He was about nine or 10, but he realized just how shaky his family's financial situation was.

• 48:17Speaker 17

  I mean, it just dawned on me, like, seeing how helpless my parents were. You know, the rest of my siblings were going to struggle to feed and, you know. And I became acutely aware how vulnerable families like mine were. Because at the time, my father started thinking of, you know, maybe my older brother may have to go, you know, work on other people's farms to help the family. So you see the child labour effect begin to kick in. And so for me, the thing it gave me at that time was, man, if a family member is sick, and the implications are insane.

• 49:03Speaker 17

  That lit a fire under my belly to just, I remember going to school. I was, I think I just went from like the, you know, not caring to super chill to just being like a beast. I went to school, took it super serious. I became uber competitive.

• 49:18Rund Abdelfatah?

  At night, he would stay up late studying, using the family's lantern.

• 49:22Speaker 17

  Just like do my homework, study. When I went to high school, same fire.

• 49:27Rund Abdelfatah?

  He did so well that he won a scholarship to study at a prestigious boarding school in Ghana. After high school, he moved to the United States and studied biology at UPenn.

• 49:38Speaker 17

  At the University of Pennsylvania, we had one class. And the professor, he gives a lecture on the biology of food. And then he talks about cocoa and how chocolate and everything. And then he pulls up a slide and he's like, well, you ask now, Ghana is the second leading exporter of cocoa. You know, the country makes like billions of dollars. I'm sitting there like, hold on, buddy. What are you talking about? If cocoa farmers are that crucial, how come we're so poor?

• 50:07Rund Abdelfatah?

  Shadrack was able to bring his father to Pennsylvania to see him graduate.

• 50:12Speaker 17

  This guy has worked so hard all his life. And his first time leaving the city, he gets out, gets on the, and then he's on a flight all the way to the US. He comes over and I'm like, buddy, Hershey is down there.

• 50:23Rund Abdelfatah?

  Hershey, Pennsylvania, home of the headquarters of Hershey Chocolate. It's not far from U Penn.

• 50:30Speaker 17

  He's a chocolate man for the first time. He's seen how all his hard work and sweat literally translates into this bar. He goes like, man, I had no idea. And then he tastes chocolate and gives me that look, oh, that is different than the seed that we plant.

• 50:48Speaker 03

  Today, Shadrack is finishing his medical degree at Yale. And he also started a nonprofit aimed at improving the conditions for people on cocoa farms in Ghana. He wants to help end child labor in the cocoa industry once and for all. And he told me his story from his childhood that he still uses as motivation.

• 51:09Speaker 17

  When I was in elementary school, one of my classmates, my own cousin, she was called Grace, and she was the brightest student in the class. Well, one time, apparently, we had my uncle is sick. And my uncle, you know, is a cocoa farmer. Gets sick, never had any health coverage, nothing, back crop year. Guess what happens? Grace gets pulled out of school and then she goes to work on the farm, never came back. And so years later, I'm at an Ivy League institution. I call my parents and I'm like, where is Grace? You know, she at Harvard, maybe give me her number. I'm at Penn. If I'm at Penn, she should go to Harvard. Give me her number so I can call her. My mom said, what are you smoking? Are you all right? Like, she has kids.

• 51:53Speaker 17

  Is working on some cocoa farms, still working on the farms and you know, she's still struggling to live on less than a dollar a day and that hit me so hard.

• 52:01Speaker 03

  He thought, well, if I'm here having this chance to make a difference in medicine, what would Grace have been able to do? She was smarter than me. And when children like Grace have their chance at education taken away because they have to work, it hurts more than just them or their communities.

• 52:19Speaker 17

  And I bet my last dollar that chances are that the cure for cancer is in the mind of the child of a cocoa farmer's kid sitting somewhere. But because they never get opportunity and the injustices they face, kick them into child labor and all of these situations, all of us, we miss out.

• 52:48Speaker 03

  I, I said, what a powerful way to put it. Do you want people, when they hear your story, to think about that? About that potential and about the hard work people have put in to create ultimately this product, chocolate?

• 53:04Speaker 17

  I hope that especially in these very tumultuous times, as a world, we can see that, you know, we can all, we are one people, we can come together and great things can happen. And most importantly, we can make great things happen for the very few people, for the very people who make sure we get our chocolate and stuff, you know, and we, we, we all love, it's, it's getting winter, it's coming, everyone's going to get hot chocolate. Every time they sip hot chocolate, hopefully they can remember my parents. But I keep saying, you know, these cocoa farmers, they have the same vision and dreams, like the CEO of Hershey and Nestle, and we should never forget that.

• 53:39Rund Abdelfatah?

  Over the last several decades, the chocolate industry, including companies like Cadbury, Nestle and Hershey, have worked with nonprofits and the Ghanaian government to reduce child labor. And they support a company called the International Cocoa Initiative that has the goal of reducing child labor in the cocoa supply chain. They have had some success, but despite these efforts, hazardous child labor is still a fixture of West African cocoa farming.

• 54:29Rund Abdelfatah?

  That's it for this week's show. I'm Rund Abdelfatah.

• 54:32Speaker 03

  I'm Ramtin Arablouei, and you've been listening to Throughline from NPR.

• 54:37Rund Abdelfatah?

  This episode was produced by me.

• 54:39Speaker 03

  And me, and.

• 54:41Speaker 16

  Lawrence Wu.

• 54:42Rund Abdelfatah?

  Julie Kane. Anya Steinberg. Casey Minor. Christina Kim.

• 54:47Speaker 03

  Devon Katayama.

• 54:48Rund Abdelfatah?

  Irene Noguchi. Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel.

• 54:54Speaker 03

  Passages from Henry Wood Nevinson's writing were read by Sebastian Walker, another amazing British journalist. Also, thank you to Johannes Dergi, Beth Donovan, and Tommy Evans.

• 55:07Rund Abdelfatah?

  This episode was mixed by Robert Rodriguez. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes.

• 55:16Speaker 16

  Navid Marvi. Cho Fujiwara.

• 55:18Speaker 00

  Anya Mizani.

• 55:21Speaker 03

  And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at [email protected]. And make sure to rate us and leave us a comment on Apple or Spotify. It really helps other people find the show.

• 55:36Rund Abdelfatah?

  Thanks for listening.

• 55:53Rund Abdelfatah?

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.