Our Pollution Is Ruining Chocolate
Our Pollution Is Ruining Chocolate
But there might be a silver lining…
Like many of you, I love chocolate. I grew up down the road from the Cadbury factory, and it shows! Crunchie bars, Lindt sea salt chocolate, or just straight-up dark chocolate are my go-to treats. So, my heart sank when I read a recent study which found dangerous levels of toxic heavy metals in an alarming amount of dark chocolate. These levels are so bad that the authors even recommend limiting their intake to one ounce per day! What’s worse, it seems we are to blame for this toxicity. However, there is one tiny silver lining here.
This study came from George Washington University. The researchers analysed 72 consumer cocoa products, including dark chocolate, every other year for contamination with lead, cadmium, and arsenic over an eight-year period. These are all toxic heavy metals that can cause horrific health problems, from birth defects to cancer and straight-up poisoning, if we digest too much. They also have an annoying habit of building up in an ecosystem and sneakily finding their way into our food unnoticed.
As such, there are guidelines on how much of these metals our food can contain before they are deemed unsafe. Sadly, this study found that a whopping 43% of the products tested exceeded the maximum allowable dose level for lead, and 35% exceeded the maximum allowable dose level for cadmium! Even worse, organic products showed higher levels of lead and cadmium than non-organic products.
Now, our bodies can cope with a certain amount of lead and cadmium, which is why the authors suggested that chocoholics like myself cut down, as this will take our daily intake of these metals down to safe levels.
But that is only a bandage on the problem. The question that has to be asked is, what is causing this, and can we solve it?
Cacao, the plant whose beans are used to make chocolate, is predominantly grown in developing topical countries. These are also countries that have significant and poorly regulated mining industries. For example, Côte d’Ivoire, the world’s largest cacao producer, has over 200 active semi-industrialised mines. Such mines leach minerals into the local water table, spreading these previously locked-away heavy metals into the environment.
But, even the most polluted environment around a mine has a relatively low amount of these heavy metals. The issue is that Cacao plants are bioaccumulators of heavy metals. Bioaccumulation occurs when an organism absorbs a substance faster than it can be lost or eliminated by catabolism and excretion. As such, Cacao plants absorb water that contains trace amounts of these heavy metals, and over time, the levels of these metals build up in their bodies and fruit to a dangerous level.
As many Cacao farms are located near these less-than-ideally operated mines, it is suspected that pollution from these mines has caused the higher levels of heavy metals in chocolate.
This situation becomes even worse when you realise why these mines are located in these countries. Many of the minerals these mines extract are not unique to the area and can be found in developed nations, and the vast majority of them export their minerals to said developed nations. As such, the only reason these mines exist is for developed countries to exploit cheap labour and loose environmental regulations to source cheaper materials.
So, in short, we can thank capitalism and neocolonialism for our chocolate being mildly poisonous…
But there is a silver lining here. Sort of.
Bioaccumulation is a useful thing. These cacao plants are cleaning the environment they are in. In fact, many scientists are looking into using bioaccumulator plants and animals to clean up some of the most polluted environments on Earth. What’s more, others are even looking to use bioaccumulators to replace mines. For example, a species of Caledonia tree has green latex sap that is 25% nickel, a crucial metal for batteries! If we can find a way to efficiently extract minerals like nickel through bioaccumulators rather than mines, we could dramatically reduce the mining industry’s environmental impact and even ensure our food doesn’t contain hazardous pollution.
So yes, it seems our environmental irresponsibility has made chocolate a bit toxic. But the same mechanism that is making chocolate toxic can also be used to clean the environment of our environmental sins and even revolutionise the mining industry. As such, it doesn’t have to be this way. We can ensure our planet’s environment is clean, healthy, and thriving. The technology and structures to do that without sacrificing our quality of life exist. We just need to choose to use them in that way.
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Sources: Scitechdaily, Frontier, NCBI, Will Lockett, NCBI, NMLS, Global Data, Visual Capitalism