At the Quakers Uniting in Publications conference this past weekend, the topic of chocolate came up in conversation, as it often seems to do when I am around. A Friend requested a copy of this article, which I wrote for Friends Bulletin back in 2008. I thought others might also find it useful- enjoy!

As some Friends can attest, one of the most pleasurable ways to connect with Quaker history is by nibbling on a bit of chocolate. Known as Theobroma cacao to botanists, the history of this “food of the gods” is closely intertwined with that of the Society of Friends. However, finding chocolate that honors our Quaker heritage along with Quaker values such as equality and integrity can be challenging in modern times.

Industrious Friends and Chocolate

Friends’ interest in chocolate has its roots in England’s Industrial Age. Although chocolate had been brought from the New World perhaps as early as the mid-1500’s, it remained a beverage of the elite until the Industrial Revolution. The Frys, a Quaker family, changed all this in two ways: with the use of a steam engine to grind the beans (previously work done by mortar and pestle), and in 1847, the invention of the chocolate bar. No longer merely a beverage, chocolate took off, and the Royal Navy enlisted J.S. Fry & Sons in the effort to sober up their soldiers, replacing daily grog rations with chocolate bars. Other Quakers throughout history also advocated chocolate as a substitute for alcohol as part of the temperance movement.

Best known in the U.S. for the Eastertime Cadbury Egg, Cadbury’s remains one of the world’s best-recognized names in chocolate. John Cadbury, a Quaker from Birmingham, started his chocolate empire as a modest shop in 1824. At the time, chocolate was just beginning to gain in popularity with the masses, and the Cadburys managed to tap into the market with great success: by 1853, Cadbury’s became Queen Victoria’s personal supplier.

To support this success, the Cadburys built Bournville, a model factory town outside of Birmingham. The “factory in a garden” featured sturdy housing, gardens for workers, reading and dining halls, quarters for pensioners, and educational programs for workers and their families. After several years of service, workers received a savings account. Cadbury’s was also the first company to adopt the 5-1/2 day workweek. By 1919, 7,500 workers lived in Bourneville. Modern-day Quakers may recognize Bourneville as the site of Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre, located in the Cadbury’s former family home.

Other Quaker chocolatiers such as Fry, Rowntree, and even Milton Hershey in Pennsylvania, went on to build similarly appointed factory towns and to provide for the well-being of their workers.

The Dark Side of Chocolate

Although the factories where cacao beans were processed into cocoa and chocolate bars were humane, Friends have had a much harder time addressing the inequalities found on cacao plantations. Native to the South American tropics, cacao trees will only grow within ten degrees of the Equator, preferably as part of a tropical forest understory. This means that the vast majority of cacao is grown in countries with poor human rights records. Over 40% of today’s cacao comes from the Ivory Coast and Ghana, two African nations well-known for child slavery and worker abuses. Other cacao producers include Indonesia and numerous South American countries.

In some circumstances, Quakers were able to make a difference on cacao plantations. After witnessing firsthand the near-slavery of laborers in Portugese West Africa, the Frys boycotted West African cacao until conditions improved. Despite this good example, the Cadburys are known to have turned a blind eye to the forced labor, death rates as high as 20% per year, and other horrors occurring in the same region—the source of over half their cacao beans. It wasn’t until 1909, after the story broke in English newspapers, that the Cadburys boycotted West African cacao.

Guilt-Free Confections

Sadly, West Africa’s legacy of slavery and worker abuse remains alive and well today, as does its predominance of the world cacao market. A 2002 study of four West African cacao-producing countries by the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture estimates that 284,000 children work on cacao plantations. Many of these children work twelve-hour days, receive little or no schooling, and regularly apply pesticides, wield machetes, and undertake other dangerous labor. As many as 12,000 of these children may be slaves, sold into service by parents from surrounding countries. Cacao workers have also suffered from years of depressed cacao prices, often earning less per pound than the cost of production. Though prices have risen in recent years, global markets continue to be unstable and unfair.

However, fair trade certified chocolates are a way to eat sweets without a heavy heart. Fair trade certification provides a variety of benefits, including a reasonable minimum per pound rate and environmental standards for farming practices. Worker ownership is encouraged, and child labor and forced labor are banned. Although organic standards differ depending on the certifier (USDA, Oregon Tilth, and Organic Trade Association are just a few), they often include some elements relating to fair labor—so in a pinch, if fair trade chocolate in unavailable, reach for organic. And don’t forget to thank our Quaker forebears for their chocolaty contributions to our physical and spiritual well-being!

Kathy Hyzy is a member of Multnomah Monthly Meeting in Portland, Oregon, and a regular participant in Meeting for Worship with a Concern for Physical and Spiritual Growth (aka Meeting for Chocolate.) She is also now the editor of Western Friend magazine.

Sources:
Global Exchange: http://www.globalexchange.org
The True History of Chocolate, Sophie & Michael Coe, 1996.
Chocolate on Trial: Slavery, Politics, and the Ethics of Business, Lowell J. Satre, 2005.

Much like coffee, fair trade chocolate is rapidly gaining popularity in the U.S. Although more expensive than other chocolates, the small premium buys a great deal of peace of mind. The following is a partial list of nationally marketed fair-trade chocolates; seek them out at your local co-op or natural foods store.

Dagoba Chocolate
Equal Exchange
Endangered Species Chocolate
Green & Black’s
Divine Chocolate
Global Exchange
Theo Chocolates

This past year has again brought bad news for our planet: glaciers melting ever faster, the cyclone in China, the paralysis of international agreements over reducing greenhouse gas emission, and here in California, the over 2,000 wildfires that have burned since the beginning of summer. But the involvement of Quakers in Pacific Yearly Meeting (PYM) in Earthcare action tells a different story.

Pacific Yearly Meeting’s Unity with Nature (UWN) Committee brought forth a “Responding to the Global Climate Crisis” minute at PYM’s 2007 Gathering, which was approved. In that plenary, the committee was charged with two tasks: gathering the reports from monthly meetings on their actions regarding global warming over the course of 2007-08, and to begin drafting a new testimony on “Harmony with Nature,” in cooperation with the PYM Discipline Committee.

In addition to PYM’s minute, the past year has brought other sources of inspiration for Earthcare. Ruah Swennerfelt and Louis Cox of Quaker Earthcare Witness spoke to over fifty Quaker gatherings as they trekked from Vancouver to San Diego. In March 2008, under the care of San Francisco Monthly Meeting, Rolene Walker began her “Walk with Earth,” starting in San Diego with the ultimate goal of reaching Santiago, Chile in two years. Her email reports show an active engagement around environmental issues with dozens of schools and colleges. Also, Friends Bulletin published Earthlight, a book consisting of articles from the magazine of the same name. [This book is available on this website--click on the "subscribe" tab at the top of the screen.]

We live in an exciting time, as energy builds among us for better care and respect for the planet. A transformation seems to be occurring, and people like Ruah, Rolene, and the creators of Earthlight may be among our prophets.

Admittedly, this is a bold statement. Is this optimism warranted? Before receiving these reports, no one in PYM could know the extent of environmental involvement among meetings, and some assumed it was minimal. Here is what UWN learned:

Over 75%–29 meetings and three worship groups—sent a report. This number gives us some real confidence that the overall findings are representative of the yearly meeting as a whole.
About 85% of meetings and worship groups, the overwhelming majority, stated that they had considered and taken significant steps to respond to the environmental crisis. Naturally, some meetings are much more involved than others. But it is clear Earthcare is not only alive but flourishing among PYM Quakers.

Finally, the activities reported are not merely conventional ones like using florescent bulbs or cloth bags, but show an impressive and creative variety of approaches. They included:
Holding “locavore”, 100-mile potlucks
Developing awareness of native Hawaiian concepts of nature
Donating tax rebates to environmental causes
Joining with interfaith groups
Installing solar panels
Holding retreats in natural settings
Animal kinship projects
Organizing “carbon footprint” support groups
Committing to car-free transportation
Accumulating a Green Fund of over $4K for Earthcare projects
Producing an environmentally friendly purchasing guide
Dozens of other activities are too numerous to mention here, including some that were a bit provocative, such as a worship group whose members “dumpster-dive” for reusables! (Unity with Nature is happy to share these reports; please contact Joe.)

The second charge for the UWN Committee this past year was to begin work on drafting a new testimony on “Harmony with Nature.” The committee conferred about this for several months and contacted the Clerk of Discipline Committee to begin work together. Since February, an environmental working group composed of members of Strawberry Creek Meeting (but with no official ties) has written a draft, which is now available for consideration. It broadens our definition of community to include all of life and challenges us to consider our place in a society that routinely consumes the diminishing resources of an ailing planet.

Conclusions and Reflections
From relative quiescence two years ago, the membership of PYM seems to be experiencing a collective shift in a spiritual connection to the planet. Maybe our energy has become contagious. In July, North Pacific Yearly Meeting also approved a climate change minute, drawing on our minute and using some of the same wording.

What might all this mean? Things are happening so fast that it is hard to define the pattern –akin to drawing the shape of a cloud that changes from moment to moment. As Quakers are wont to say, “Proceed as way opens.” Certainly more surprises await us. As Earthcare becomes part of our spiritual lives, several new personal challenges seem to be emerging.

A critical one is the place of environmental justice. Most all of the meeting activities are focused on care and respect for other species. Yet our current testimonies urge us to minister to the poor and disadvantaged of the world. Pointedly, these are the very ones most harmed by the exploitation of the environment, whether they are inner-city children in LA developing cancer from the fumes of diesel trucks, impoverished families who must live near toxic waste sites, or the millions in Africa facing famine or starvation due to the prolonged drought.

We Quakers still are learning that care for the planet must include care for its people. If, for instance, we don’t address the poverty of people in Brazil, they will continue to cut down rain forest and further impact us all. As oil consumption grows, it not only increases global warming but also the odds of war over scarce resources. We cannot ultimately separate environmental activism from social activism. A positive example is the work of the Right Sharing of World Resources project.

A second challenge is work with other groups –both interfaith and nonreligious—for Earthcare. Only four meetings reported such activities, yetit is linked to our testimony of community.  We will never be able to do this work alone.  We need other people, the 99.9% who are not Quakers, to widen our vision and the impact of our actions.  In this, we are significantly behind many churches, who have many interfaith alliances for the environment.  This now includes both liberal and evangelical denominations.

A powerful positive example is Interfaith Power and Light, which began in the San Francisco Peninsula and now has branches around the country.  Why not invite non-Quakers like Sally Bingham, the founder of Interfaith Power and Light, to speak to us at Pacific Yearly Meeting’s 2009 Gathering?

The need for collaboration demonstrates that the job of Earthcare is not to move away from the age-old Friends testimonies of equality, simplicity, and community, but to build on them, revealing new meaning in them for the 21st century.

Our Quaker ancestors would probably agree.  In 1693, William Penn wrote, “And it would go a long way to caution and direct people in their use of the world that they were better studied and knowing in the creation of it.  For how could men find the conscience to abuse it, while they should see the great Creator look them in the face, in all and every part thereof.”

A final challenge is dealing with our negative feelings–anxiety, discouragement, guilt, and powerlessness–surrounding the planetary crisis we now face.  These feelings (sometimes called “green fatigue”) seem to be growing in our country, and they can paralyze any effort.

An objection raised at the recent North Pacific Yearly Meeting Annual Session was, “why should we bother about global warming? Can we make any difference?  Don’t the corporations or the government or China really call the shots?” Quakers voice these doubts here as well.  Discouragement easily becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Ultimately, the ethical rightness of an action is separate from its hoped-for effects.  I am reminded of the Vietnam protestor, standing alone on a street corner in the seventies, who was confronted by a sarcastic driver.  “Do you think you can really change the generals in the Pentagon?”  He replied, “I’m doing this so they won’t change me.”
The writer Nelson Henderson also expressed it well: “The meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.”  What we do today to heal the planet may not be noticed in our lifetime or even in our children’s.  Maybe our grandchildren will benefit.  It will take generations, many scientists say, for our planet to noticeably heal.  And some damage is irreversible.  Extinct species are gone forever. Earthcare may then be the most unselfish social movement in our history.

That is why care for the Earth must be a spiritual matter!  And that is why, in this ailing world, we in particular are needed and called.
Author Joe Morris is a member of Santa Monica Friends Meeting, and has been Clerk of the Unity with Nature Committee of PYM since 2006.

by Marjorie Sykes, Pacific Yearly Meeting (though living in India at the time)
March, 1975

A lot of people have been raising questions about the whole idea of “membership” in the Society of Friends, not only here in the U.S.A., but also in Britain and in India. And not only now, but for some time past. When I was asked to write for the Bulletin, I got out and re-read a paper I had written exactly twenty years ago, a paper which records the exercise of about twenty Friends (Indian, American, British) who came together in India to consider this subject “in a spirit of worship and of loving candour.” The wording of the record is my responsibility, but I believe it represents a genuine consensus:

“The religious fellowship of a Quaker Meeting for Worship is and should be open to anyone who seeks to share it. But when a person asks for membership a new factor enters in. The Society of Friends is not just a kind of religious club. It is a continuing organism, which was born of the union of the creative energy of prophetic religious insight with the spiritual environment of England in the seventeenth century. Like the physical organism it carries within itself the “genes” of its parenthood, and that parenthood is Christian.

” The origin of Quakerism in Christianity is undisputed historical fact, and it would be less than truthful to ignore or minimize it. This fact is not one of geographical accident but of spiritual kinship. We ought to expect inquirers to study the Gospel records and the treasures of the Johannean and Pauline epistles, not as an ‘authoritative scripture’ to be accepted, but as the story of a creative and healing power set free.”

Having said this we must also say, with equal clarity and force, that by a ‘Christian’ we mean simply one who seeks to learn from Jesus and to live by the same Spirit. We do not and we must not apply any ‘creedal’ test, and we do not ask for any ‘orthodox’ interpretation of the nature and power of Jesus; we gladly and humbly welcome the work of the Spirit far beyond the boundaries of historic Christianity.

“If an inquirer, having, considered these things, is satisfied that Friends have something which he needs, and desires to become one with the life of the Society, we should be prepared to accept him. We should not be content to offer any lesser alternative to those who desire to be fully identified with us. We must accept the responsibility of decision.”

That was written from the point of view of the Meeting. What about the “inquirer”? And what about those who say that we should return to the ways of the first Friends and have no formal membership roll at all, none of those categories or gradations of Quaker status which may create divisions where none should be?

The beginnings of an answer may perhaps be found in those words which Barbara Janoe used in a recent Bulletin in relation to human sexuality: respect, responsibility, and expectation, considered in their basic meanings. Many people are attracted to Friends because they find themselves respected, looked upon, in a way which seeks to understand rather than to judge. The first significant step towards fellowship is that the newcomer should show a similar respect, should look upon Friends with the active desire to understand, to study the roots of their belief and practice.

If, after this exercise of respect, the seeker desires to be fully identified with Friends, he/she needs to be willing to respond, to make a commitment, to pledge thought and time and talents to the service of the Meeting. This is responsibility. Along with responsibility comes expectation, the confident looking-out-for, waiting for, the Spirit that can enlighten and empower both the group and the individual member within and for the group. It is the quality of this expectation that gives the fellowship the extra dimension that is reflected in its name; we are not merely a Society of Friends, we are a Religious Society of Friends.

These demands are reciprocal. In a healthy Meeting each member respects, responds to, expects from the organic life of the whole body; the body also respects, responds to, and expects from the life each member contributes to the whole. Insofar as this experience is realized, the Meeting and its members come to know one another in depth, in the Eternal; their diversities tend not to division, but to a “dear unity,” whether there is a “membership roll” or not. Human beings being human, there will always be “joiners” and “non-joiners.” Perhaps we should relax, and let the form be shaped by the Life.

And perhaps all of us, seekers and finders, newcomers and old stagers, joiners and non-joiners, should constantly renew our own commitment to respect, to response, to expectation. “Seek, and you shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.”

The Permanence of Matter
by Sally Bryan, San Juan Worship Group

“What perplexes the world is the disparity between the swiftness of the spirit, and the immense unwieldiness, sluggishness, inertia, the permanence of matter. “-Thomas Marm

In our reflective moments, most of us are only too willing to acknowledge that we are involved with mankind. We have believed poets who say we are lessened if a clod washes into the sea, and we have read physicists who say that a butterfly that moves its wings in Japan will affect forces, unknown though many may be, in Chicago. In a few tender and near-incommunicable moments, we may have experienced this all-inclusive relatedness. Truly we know that we are participants in a participatory universe.

But we are human animals—bone and gut and gristle. When I am electric with pain from a broken femur, there is no place left for the realization that another in Oklahoma or Bosnia is in equal (or greater) pain. Neither can I believe that the careful, concerned, competent E.M.T. bending over me experiences one iota of my pain. This seems to me to be a basic, primary, experienced fact. We are matter. This matters.

There is another constraint on our moment-by-moment realization that “the hurt of one is the hurt of all.” As we are encased in our biological matter, we are entwined in our cultural precursors. These move in overlapping circles from those general to the whole of humanity, to those that increasingly focus on the single individual. Civilized by the tribe, family, and associations, each is a uniquely complex, uniquely encultured human being. Brought together into this moment (and each succeeding moment) are all these assumptions, approved ideas, “right” ways of seeing and doing. And out of all this welter of possibility, our being, our spirit, our consciousness, plummets every moment at the center of the about-to-be-actualized event. The strength of the bonds of habit vary from time to time and from person to person. But to be human is to be encultured by all that has produced us.

Matter we are, but it is possible to believe that we are something more. Perhaps there is that of God in us, an inner Light. Perhaps we are ineluctably physical matter, and free will exists only in our capacity to delay a response, allowing events around us to shift while less strongly programmed ideas and actions arise in us.

Whatever reason we ascribe to it, we are aware that as we face each other (as I hold fingers over the keys), possible words tingle on the threshold. Yet, some are chosen to emerge into the air, onto the paper. It is exhausting to realize that each second carries both the movement of the habitual and the possibility of its deflection. Recognized or not, both initiation and response hold the flick of new potentiality.

It is most comfortable to speak from and to a culture with a shared canon. Thus at ease, we need not remember the assumptions that create congruence. We can be safe with the habits that spring easily to us.

We ask how we can teach that bigotry is wrong when we cannot confront bigotry that faces us. A bigot is a person obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his/her own belief or opinion. So can one call another a bigot without being one? In Friendly circles there are approved ways of thinking about multicultural neighborhoods and affirmative action, but are they right because they are shared? And are those who argue for the demise of affirmative action, who favor cultural grouping of homes, “wrong,” and bigots if they argue too passionately?

This is the nub of the problem. Each of us is comfortable when we are with those who share our significant and deeply held beliefs. Adrenaline pumps when a serious challenge is raised. Fight or flight, that’s our animal heri-tage; it is one of the sluggish and permanent features of matter.
It is possible to seek out those who hold opinions that contradict our own. Indeed, Friends work harder than most people at extending the comfort zones of familiarity. But understanding develops slowly and most often affection follows. Shared space is essential. The more contrary the views, the more alert each must be to private assumptions so that challenge does not immediately leap to reification and the attack of labeling. Exchange means that each is willing to hold lightly even the most deeply-rooted principles and ideas. If I am passionately right, and I identify you as a bigot, no growth in understanding is possible. Indeed, no meeting is possible. “All real living is meeting,” Martin Buber says. We need divine assistance, moment by moment, as we face each other, ready now to change and to be changed. This continued seeking is the essence. We cannot rest on the belief that for all time divine accord has been given.

The greatest challenge comes from those who do not place a high value on tolerance. It requires strong faith and deep will to continue to move into encounters with them. Despite repeated failures, each moment is a new instant of potentiality, despite all previous failure.

Most, however, have tolerance somewhere on their personal value scale. Meeting is possible when Friends are simply and immediately present in the moment, holding strong beliefs while knowing deep down that they could be partial or mistaken, bearing the pain that contradiction always brings. The mutuality of this willingness to accept or to inflict hurt impregnates the moment with the possibility of change. Hiding hurt, avoiding hurt, is a strategy for missed meeting, for assuring
that past assumptions pour forth unmitigated, shaping the future.

In the general sense, we know that “the hurt of one is the hurt of all.” But few generalizations are empowering over personal pain, over challenges that aim at the solar plexus. Saints (and poets, Thorton Wilder says in Our Town) may hold suffering lightly. But most of us are imprisoned by it. Our sluggish, unwieldy, and permanent physical matter and cultural past whirl us into howling out our pain and defending our personal beliefs. Again and again, all-inclusive relatedness is submerged in the frenzy of personal crisis. But when it subsides, when we approach the still center again, we know. Our human selves have raged forth, loosed from our spiritual understanding. But there will be another time. We can try again. Perhaps T.S. Eliot is right; “For us there is only the trying. The rest is not our business. “

Blockade

As Friends Bulletin goes to press, some of its readers from many meetings are witnessing to their conviction of the harmfulness of nuclear power plants by participating in the non-violent Blockade of the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant in San Luis Obispo, California, an action of protest organized by the Abalone Alliance. In this issue a statement is included written by Redwood Forest Meeting in support of its member Russ Jorgensen who has been arrested for trespassing at Diablo Canyon. I urge Friends to read it and to consider the issues of survival which it raises.

Other Friends arrested at the Blockade are: Dave Hartsough, Finley Peavey, Christopher and Ross MacKinney, Caryn Dasbach, Bede Gey, Willis Good, Earle Reynolds, Deverell Paul. Friends participating as support for those arrested are: Betty Black, Rebecca Hall, Chris Booth, Judith Bishop, Paul Burks, Barbara Graves, Keith Barton, Cindy Norvell, Margaret Mossman, and Bob Jolly. (This is only a partial listing derived from Friends involved.)

The Blockade began September 15 when groups scaled the front gate at the nuclear power plant, or entered by boat from the ocean side, or walked in from other property contiguous. Arrests (the greatest in such a protest) number 1,425 on the seventh day. People are still arriving in San Luis Obispo to join the Blockade which will continue as long as there are those willing to participate in civil disobedience.

Questions have been raised in the media about the purposes of such an action as the Blockade. Is it just a symbolic gesture or did those participating hope to delay the start of the nuclear power plant which will begin test operations later this month? Questions of purpose aside, the Blockade heightens public awareness of the dangers involved in the production of nuclear power: the possibilities of massive release of radiation in nuclear accidents such as Three Mile Island, the lack of safe waste disposal, the production of nuclear materials which can be used for nuclear weapons, our greater vulnerability militarily as nuclear power plants are targeted for attacks. Nuclear is political, as witnessed in the recent Israeli attack on an Iraqi nuclear power plant. The political is also personal, and in this case, threatens our safety and our lives.

What are our remedies, Friends?

Shirley Ruth, Editor