NYC sister and boyfriend flew in late last night from the Newark airport. Flying on the day of the biggest airline terror alert since Sept. 11 didn’t sound fun, but their biggest problems really seem to have been weather-related. Apparently, a thunderstorm still has the power to make you sit on the tarmac for four hours, then go back to the terminal to refuel and get the plane serviced before leaving. I’m sure other flight disruptions didn’t help matters, but if the weather had been better in Newark and Nashville, I am pretty sure they would have gotten here before 11:30 p.m.

  Two chocolate treats 

When they finally arrived, they managed to conquer their hunger and general travel delirium long enough to give me a present. They knew about my quest for tasty fair-trade chocolate items and surprised me with two tins of chocolate-covered cacao nibs from Sweet Riot. This stuff is great. I see on their website that the closest store to me is in Franklin….hmm. Will have to figure that out. But I’ll definitely be getting more of this!

And now I just can’t bring myself to purchase non-fair trade chocolate.

If you’re not familiar with the problem, the short explanation is that any chocolate you’ve eaten made by a major U.S. or European manufacturer may have been touched along the line by a slave worker — a child slave, likely as not. At least, the manufacturers claim they’re unable to prevent that due to political volatilty in West Africa and uncertainty in their supply chains.

Pause.

You know, I don’t think Wal-Mart is good for much of anything, but if we could get Wal-Mart to decide it’s a bad idea that Mars can’t promise me a child slave never touched that M&M anywhere along the line….well how fast do you think the manufacturers would clean up their acts? Wal-Mart so famously pressures even the largest suppliers to bend to its will. Of course, it doesn’t have the best labor record itself. (Heck, all the more reason to make the chocolate manufacturers clean up theirs. Everyone gets clean in the same wash. But I digress.)

Back to my personal problem. Because I know you are worried about that. So I can’t buy regular chocolate anymore. So here’s what happens: I am eating, over the past several months, significantly less chocolate, probably than ever before in my whole life. But I don’t want it any less.

I buy a decent amount of fair-trade chocolate, spending a small chunk of my disposable income to do so, especially from my favorite neighborhood store, The Turnip Truck. However, despite now meeting my ethical standards, I also still have my culinary ones. So I can’t buy bad or flavorless fair-trade chocolate. I’ve found a couple things I like:

Green and Black’s Hot Chocolate
Endangered Species Milk Chocolate with Peanut Butter Brittle

But I have not yet found any equivalent to Hershey’s Kisses, or M&M’s or some similar little chocolate snacky piece. For when you don’t want a whole candy bar but just a few bites. Or for something you can put in a jar on your desk and everyone in your office can eat out of. You know, the kind of thing that creeps out the germ-o-phobes and that everyone else is delighted you keep so they can get their chocolate fix too.

Let me know if you have something I should try. For the record, every single time I go to Target and Publix, I’m reading the labels on half the chocolate there, hoping that suddenly a major brand (or even a minor one) has been able to certify itself as fair-trade. This exercise is taking up a lot of my time. I’m still waiting.