golden ticket

Note: Golden Ticket has previously appeared in Liberti magazine.  If you've already read it perhaps you'd like to read one of my older posts instead? You could try the tenby wind about my brush with police aviation whilst cooking al fresco on the Pembrokeshire coast or if you're in the mood for spring-time gardening: veg patch.

It’s breakfast time, I haven’t slept, and Robin’s telling me the full plot of the Sooty Show for the fourth time in a row; Nathalie’s taking half an hour to eat a small bowl of cereal and the cat’s miaowing for food. I excuse myself from the table and sneak to the utility room. I open the fridge door and take out the bar of Dairy Milk. I break off a square and pop it in my mouth, closing my eyes and sucking the chocolate into a sweet paste.

“Mummy! Natty’s not eating her muesli.”

“Mummy! Robin said, that I said, that she said, that I’m not eating my muesli. But I ammm.”

I let the chocolate soothe me, keeping my eyes closed until I hear a chair scrape back over the kitchen tiles. At the sound, I hurriedly pop the bar back into the fridge and suck the evidence of the UK’s top selling chocolate bar from my teeth.


I remember the moment I saw it, like I remember how I heard about Princess Diana, and my Dad remembers the lunar landing. It was a summer morning in 2009 and I was buying bread from One Stop on the walk home from school. I glanced at the confectionery shelves and stopped in my tracks. Was that the...? I picked up a purple-wrapped bar and stared at it like Charlie finding the golden ticket to Willy Wonka’s factory. I texted Mark and my Mum and my friend Michelle, I gabbled excitedly to the young man at the checkout: the UK’s top selling chocolate bar was sporting the Fairtrade logo. Chocolate ethics had gone mainstream.


In the last two years, Nestlé have controversially followed Cadbury’s lead, making Kit Kat Fairtrade, Mars’ Galaxy became Rainforest Alliance certified, and this spring Mars are adding Maltesers to the Ethical Big-Brand Chocolate Gang (although it doesn't seem to have happened yet), pledging that they’ll be buying 100% of their cocoa from sustainable sources by 2020.

"Nestlé!" a friend of mine choked when I told her the news about Kit Kat, and "I saw the ‘chocolate' Panorama" and later... "it’s just greenwashing".

Well maybe it is, but you have a choice: boycott these big-brand efforts and wait for the world to be perfect or join in pushing the ethical-chocolate landslide. So, how about joining me in a fast? Except it’s not really much of a fast – you can still eat chocolate. Just that it must be Fairtrade or Rainforest Alliance or similar. According to Mars’ aspirations, its eight years max that you’ll be deprived of Mars bars, M&Ms, Snickers, Twix and Milky Way, and others are bound to follow suit before 2020.

This is a fast of greater significance than your waistline or your personal discipline – some uncertified cocoa farms supplying big-brand manufacturers are using child slaves to grow and harvest their crops, other ‘legitimates’ work for a pittance in appalling conditions. This is a fast towards providing the golden ticket to freedom and fairer treatment for children and cocoa-workers across the world. So why not finish off your Easter eggs and go 'clean'?

Read last month's post: fifteen minutes