PhD student Carla Martin turns a culinary passion into a scholarly analysis, exploring the complex cultural, socioeconomic, and sustainability issues of chocolate — and celebrating it, too.
In the Department of African and African American Studies — in between writing her dissertation on Cape Verde and finishing a secondary field in ethnomusicology — PhD student Carla Martin has launched a successful blog that cultivates a personal and scholarly passion in what at first seems an entirely unrelated (and far sweeter) subject: chocolate.
“Chocolate is my truest dessert love, and I’ve had a hopeless sweet tooth for as long as I can remember,” Martin says. “I can only blame my hippie parents, who, in an attempt to wean me from my beloved pacifier at the ripe old age of four, bribed me with a candy bar. I gave up the pacifier cold turkey.”
Martin developed her blog not only to celebrate “the beauty and creativity of chocolate making,” but also to explore issues of “racial and socioeconomic injustice, responsible ecological development, (and) honesty in production and marketing.” Since creating the blog in February, Martin quickly realized that others shared her lifelong fascination.
“Chocolate seems to get our imaginations running,” Martin says. “Once I really focused in on research, chocolate started showing up on my radar at every turn. It’s constantly referenced in books, TV, and movies; there’s an onslaught of advertisement from large chocolate companies; we spend billions of dollars on it every year; and there’s a busy world of chocolate and candy review blogs that highlight our collective obsession.
“We imbue chocolate with many different meanings and powers,” she continues. “It’s an aphrodisiac; it inspires creativity and romance; it’s comforting; it’s celebratory, it’s a healing food, and so on. Its many flavors, scents, and appearances are wonderfully rich and diverse.”
As a scholar, Martin’s obsession with chocolate goes far beyond what’s on the dessert plate. “Unfortunately, by the time chocolate arrives in our hands, it is vastly transformed and consumers have very little information about its origins,” she says. “Many industry experts state that only about 1% of the chocolate that we consume in the U.S. is produced under ethical labor practices. Workers on many cacao plantations put in long hours for very little pay and receive inadequate health care. There is also the grave problem of child labor, sometimes even forced child labor, especially in the West African cocoa sector.” Martin also notes that chocolate production has an even grimmer backstory, as “historically, the cocoa industry relied heavily on slave labor.”
While her dissertation focuses on the politics of language and music in Cape Verde and the Cape Verdean diaspora, Martin hopes that “my work on chocolate will become my next big research project. Interestingly, many of the prominent themes in my dissertation — race, gender, postcolonialism, popular media, notions of purity vs. hybridity, the politics of representation, and anthropological ethics — are equally important to understanding the story of chocolate.”
Standards and norms for chocolate vary widely from one part of the world to another, Martin says. “In Europe, there is a greater appreciation for fine, dark chocolate than here in the US; in Latin America and the Caribbean, many enjoy delicious chocolate drinks made with spices. In South Asia, chocolate has only recently become a popular treat, informed by local flavor preferences — chocolate bonbons with rose water or curry added, for example.”
In Africa, home to “the world’s largest-scale cacao cultivation,” Martin says, almost all available chocolate is imported, sold by large companies like Kraft Foods or Mars. Martin notes the irony, adding that “many cacao plantation workers have never even tasted the chocolate that eventually results from their labor.”
Martin’s fascination with chocolate even led her to train as a chocolatier at Ecole Chocolat, which offers an innovative online curriculum for professional chocolate makers. “Studying as a chocolatier helped me to gain greater confidence when working with chocolate in the kitchen, and also opened my eyes to how very much more I have to learn.” Martin says. “The making of chocolate requires the thoughtful sourcing of high-quality ingredients, a fine understanding of the physiology of taste, and a mastery of technique and production. Chocolatiers marry science and art in their craft. They also have to consider branding and profitability, which is far from easy in today’s saturated marketplace.”
Next, Martin would like to take on an even greater challenge: learning how to produce chocolate from bean to bar. “That’s a whole other ballgame, with seemingly countless variables to consider,” she says. “But with the proper training and skill, it allows for a great deal more control over the final product. Chocolate makers producing directly from the bean can take the important step of cultivating relationships with cacao farmers that are founded on mutual respect.”
Story Credit: Jennifer Doody