African cocoa farmer tastes chocolate for the first time...

[Skidmore]

[polichick]

1. Fascinating! k&r

[Arugula Latte]

2. "White people are addicted to it"

Guilty as charged ...

[roguevalley]

3. I think its important to know this stuff. What a great bunch of people. I want to buy a brick or

ten and mail it to them. God bless the workers of this world and these people. Graceful even in adversity.

[dickthegrouch]

4. I was 35 and on my third trip to Thailand

Before I realized I had no idea what a rice plant looked like, or which part of the plant I was actually eating. The locals were similarly incredulous that I would be so uneducated.

If only their supposition at the end of the clip had been true, Michael Jackson could have saved a bundle

[Brickbat]

5. "What a privilege to taste it."

I will try to feel the same way from now on.

[malaise]

6. Hard to believe

What a planet

[freshwest]

33. Beautiful land, good people, great things! I wish I could visit it.

[madokie]

7. I reckon their lives will never be the same again

Thanks for the video

[grasswire]

8. beautiful

I wonder how many other crops have the same sort of situation, never tasted by the growers.

[jmowreader]

51. Not all that many

Cacao takes a lot of processing to make it come out as chocolate. Most foods you can just eat, often with a little cooking.

[Lobo27]

9. Puts a great many things into perspective.

I know a lot of folks have it rough here, but in other parts of the world they would think we were kings with the little some of us have.

[CrispyQ]

13. I'm lower middle class in America. Probably in the 1% globally.

It makes you pause & be thankful.

[Uncle Joe]

10. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, Skidmore.

[azurnoir]

11. Thank you for the lovely video

and the reminder of just how much we take granted

[Rozlee]

12. LOL. "This is why white people are so healthy."

I don't see much obesity in the video. I wonder what percentage of their population has diabetes? They might die from other problems related to lack of available clean water or poverty, but it's evident that they're not dying of the excesses of the Western diet.

[LanternWaste]

14. This is a perfect illustration of why I believe that a person...

This is a perfect illustration of why I believe that a person who lives in an air-conditioned apartment with cable and internet and a microwave and gaming consoles criticizing another person for owning a closet bigger than their apartment is little more than a pharisee, a dissembler and a phony.

For as long as the over-worked, the subsistence farmer and the actual impoverished exists, their complaints about others living the high life are, at best, mere ignorance...

[A Little Weird]

22. Wow

I've seen that argument on Fox News - our poor aren't really poor because they have a refrigerator, AC, TVs, etc. I disagree. I think income inequality is a very real problem in this country. Complaining about the very unequal system we have does not make someone a "pharisee, dissembler, or phony".

Obviously there are people worse off than we are and that is also a problem that should be addressed, but I don't think we have to ignore problems here until those in more impoverished places are solved.

[Skidmore]

26. That is apples and oranges you have lined up there.

There recently was a discussion over when rich people speak scornfully of the less well off who must seek assistance but own a couple luxury items or a car. The idea that one is impoverished is certainly different in a First World industrialized society than it is a Third World agrarian one. Poverty is poverty either way. Whether you own a beater of a car or a used television, or a goat, for that matter, is irrelevant. If you are living paycheck to paycheck, whatever the scale, poverty is the same.

[LanternWaste]

38. poverty is indeed the same, the degrees of poverty however, are not.

Yes... poverty is indeed the same, the degrees of poverty however, are not.

[JDPriestly]

44. These Aricans live in a warm climate.

Yesterday i went to my doctor's office here in Los Angeles. You should have seen the homeless people sleeping right around the corner. We have terrible poverty in the US, at least in Los Angeles where the homeless can sleep in the open most of the year.

Subsistence farmers are better off than our homeless people.

[fujiyama]

54. I think part of it also has to do with the family structure

Subsistence farmers are typically going to pool resources with other family members and others in the village. So while there is great poverty, they will look after each other for basic necessities.

In western countries, we live much more fragmented and individualistic lives.

[Ed Suspicious]

15. I'm delighted to see their reaction to a food that I can enjoy on a whim. I love it,

but sort of take it for granted. It makes me so sad that these people have probably worked their whole lives harvesting and drying the beans while never knowing what the end product is let alone tasting it.

[WillowTree]

28. Or, another way to look at it.......

.......is that those gentlemen probably got more pleasure from that one small taste of chocolate than any of us have ever gotten or ever will get from the most decadent hot fudge sundae. It's a matter of proportion. As sad as their circumstances are, they likely appreciate anything at all that they do get more than we appreciate everything at all that we have.

God bless them.

[narnian60]

46. Well said.

[Laffy Kat]

16. Thank you so much for sharing this.

I am going to think about this video, these workers, every time I eat chocolate. We take so much for granted.

[Enthusiast]

17. How incredible!

[lovemydog]

18. That made my day.

Thanks for the chocolate, Alfonse!

[freshwest]

34. Same here! Thanks to Alfonse and his crew. Truly good people.

[eggplant]

19. What would be really great would be to teach them to make chocolate themselves. n/t

[Neoma]

21. They'd have to have a source of sugar.

[KamaAina]

23. That could probably be arranged.

Sugarcane also grows in the tropics.

[eggplant]

25. And they would need other resources and money...

...and enterprising organizations that provide microloans could probably do a lot to get them going. Fair trade is a good thing.

[KamaAina]

30. Hell yeah!

There's already fair-trade chocolate, but that's just the cacao.

[Grammy23]

20. We take so much for granted. This was fun to watch to see the expression

on their faces as they tasted the sweet treat many of us enjoy whenever we want to. They work hard, have low pay and cannot imagine what is done with the product that they harvest. The instant smiles and the bigger smiles when they were told that there was more to share was a joy to watch. I had to laugh when one of the men commented that "white people are addicted to it". Yep. there are plenty of folks around the world that readily admit that. In fact, that is how they would characterize their love of chocolate.

[xfundy]

24. If they could

Repigs would make all workers ignorant of anything but backbreaking, repetitious work.

I too hope they learn how to make it. Surely they have some form of sugar/sweetener. I'd much rather buy a product from the person who made it.

[d_r]

27. I was so entranced I clicked through

and found some more interesting videos from the same show.

Here they give Dutch people the unshucked (?) cocoa bean and ask them what it is:

?list=UUpnazGScKQfGauk7YNyI21w

Here they interview a lady in Mexico about how the ancient cultures there used it:

And here are some farmers in Tanzania who are doing better economically because of fair trade chocolate:

[awoke_in_2003]

29. Can't see video at work...

but I hope they gave him some good stuff, and not the junk Hershey's chunks out.

[FourScore]

31. Amazing. I even posted it on facebook. n/t

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

32. "Mmmmm, c'est doux" (it's sweet)

Amazing that they never realized chocolate tasted sweet. This is a cool clip, and I love their Ivory Coast French accents.

[freshwest]

35. Strange, I don't see them as 'being in poverty.' Being close to nature is priceless.

They also seem to feel in control of their lives and are not subject to the clock, pollution and the stressed out, sterile and discontented lives many in the west are trapped in.

There may some things going on in their lives that are bad we don't see, but our standards of living the 'good life' largely consists of the accumulation of dead things made to occupy our time as we are removed from nature, the true creator of wealth.

It seems they have connections with the Dutch or others to buy their product and both benefit.

This operation does not appear to be like cocoa producers who use children as slave labor. They don't have a chance to escape or change their lives, which is a great evil.

That's not what I see with Alfonse there. The rural life isn't for everyone, but the people in urban areas are dependent on rural people. We need them.

Just a few thoughts. I loved this video, it made me smile so much to see their life and their satisfaction from their work and then they got to have the chocolate made by others with their cocoa.

But the idea that eating chocolate makes 'the whites' healthy is an error IMO. Sugar causes health problems. I've eaten raw organic cocoa; it isn't sweet but supposed to be good for you in that more natural state.

Nice to end the day with. TY, Skidmore.

[XemaSab]

50. Poverty isn't cool

n/t

[Surya Gayatri]

36. Thank you so much for posting this most human of videos, Skidmore!

I was smiling and laughing with them all the way through.
How beautiful, hard-working and humble they are.
Imagine the joy of tasting glorious chocolate for the first time ever!
What a contrast with our privileged, self-indulgent western ways.

[narnian60]

47. Well said.

[Skinner]

37. That was fantastic.

Thank you for posting.

[littlemissmartypants]

40. ^eom

[packman]

41. Soyant Green - reminder

When I saw that video, It struck a chord with me about that eating scene in Soyant Green:

[jmowreader]

52. That scene has a neat history

The writer put "have dinner" or something like that in the script. The crew set up two cameras, put Edward G. Robinson and Charlton Heston on set, and caught the whole scene in one continuous shot.

[ErikJ]

42. He should have given them toothbrushes afterward

Africans exposed to the western diet (photos on right) lose a lot of teeth.

FIG. 44. Wherever the Africans have aidopted the foods of modern commerce, dental caries was active, thus destroying large numbers of the teeth and causing great suffering. The cases shown here are typical of workers on plantations which largely use imported foods.

[Hassin Bin Sober]

43. That was cute.

Anybody know what languages are spoken?

The workers sounded sort of like French.

I assume the narrator is Dutch?

[JDPriestly]

49. Yes. French and Dutch.

Someone else posted videos in Dutch and one with Spanish and Dutch.

Dutch was the first "foreign" language I heard as a small child. If you listen carefully, I think it is easy to understand. It is sort of a cross between English and German with occasional French creeping in. I just love the language. It has such a happy sound.

[narnian60]

48. Very sweet when one of the gentleman said

that he would take the paper home to show his children.

[senseandsensibility]

53. That was sweet. It reminded me of when

the elementary students I teach will cut a shape out of construction paper for an art project and want to keep the remaining paper surrounding the cut. Of course I teach in an economically disadvantaged area, but it always gives me pause when they do that. It is a gift to find joy in small things, although poverty is not something to be romanticized.