Читать книгу Chocolate Busters: The Easy Way to Kick It! - Jason Vale, Jason Vale - Страница 5

GLOBAL ORGANIZATION OF DRUG-FOOD SUPPLIERS (G.O.D.S.)

Michael Jacobson was the first person to coin the phrase ‘junk food’ back in 1972. It rocked the ‘sweet’ world and, just like the tobacco industry, the chocolate industry hit back with claim after claim of why its product wasn’t ‘junk’, but indeed one of the best food sources on the planet (a point I will shatter in depth later). Well, I will agree with them in one respect, commercially made chocolate isn’t junk food at all – no, it’s ‘DRUG FOOD!’ If you think the term ‘junk food’ played havoc with the industry back in 1972, with sweet sales dropping a massive 25%, just imagine what my term of ‘Drug Food’ will do.

Let’s face facts, chocolate is a massive global business and there is just no way the chocolate industry will let this lie. Please don’t be surprised if you start to see scientific paper after scientific paper being produced ‘proving’ why their product is not addictive (in exactly the same way that tobacco companies did for years). After all, they have a lot which needs protecting. In the United Kingdom alone we spend a whopping £4 billion a year on chocolate. That’s £65 for every man, woman and child, or to put it another way, 312 oz a year or, to really bring it home, over 22 lb of chocolate per head per year! Now bear in mind this is the ‘average’. Many people are consuming far more than this and the figure doesn’t include what we buy from duty free airports and when we are away abroad. An article in the Daily Mail a few years ago ran the headline:

‘WHY I MUST EAT 200 CHOCOLATE BARS A WEEK’

They were referring to Maureen Young, a self-confessed ‘chocoholic’ who ate 200 chocolate bars every week for 6 years. If my calculations are correct that is a cost of over £20,000 in just six years! And that’s just one person. Maureen, although clearly more ‘addicted’ than most, isn’t the only one bringing in massive revenue for the chocolate industry. Even the average chocolate addict will get through a whopping £10,000 on chocolate in their lifetime. That figure shouldn’t really come as any surprise since in Britain at Easter alone we will get through 100 million eggs; that’s nearly two chocolate eggs for every person in Britain – ’Jesus!’ (well, quite). But, as you may have guessed, we don’t lead the world in chocolate consumption, that title is held by the Swiss, who manage just under 28 lbs a year! The US aren’t to be left out either – they spend a staggering $14 billion a year on the dark stuff. M&Ms now rank as the world’s most popular confection bringing in an amazing $2 billion a year. Let me emphasize that in case you just skipped over it, that is:

TWO BILLION DOLLARS EVERY YEAR JUST ON M&Ms!

M&Ms, although first made in 1940, were virtually unknown in Britain until a few years ago. When we wanted some round brightly-coloured sweets with chocolate centres it appeared that only ‘Smarties had the answer’ – which is quite funny as Smarties were first produced in 1937, three years before the now mighty M&Ms. M&Ms are owned by one of the biggest drug-food giants in the world – Mars Inc – a true superpower in the world of chocolate.

Mars Inc is a company that produces enough Fun Size Milky Way every year literally to reach the Milky Way. In fact, the huge amount of those little, sorry, I mean ‘fun-size’ choc bars, made every year are enough to circle the globe – TWICE! In the UK we buy 17 million Bounty Bars annually, once again a bestselling confectionery made by – yep, you guessed it – Mars Inc. It is no wonder then that the Mars Inc company are the largest sweet manufacturer in the world. What may come as a surprise though is that Mars, in financial terms, are now bigger than McDonald’s with an unbelievable $20 billion a year in sales from various interests.

Chocolate, like most products these days, has big guns globalizing the industry. In 1945 there were roughly 6,000 firms producing the stuff. It is estimated that by 2010 that the number will be as low as 150 worldwide. Mars Inc, in my opinion, are the McDonald’s and Marlboro of the chocolate world. And just like the fast-food and nicotine trades, the chocolate industry also has its Burger King, Silk Cut, Wendy’s, Benson and Hedges, and Wimpy in the forms of Cadbury, Nestlé, Rowntree, Green & Blacks, Lindt, Thorntons and, in the US, Hershey. In fact, in the US if you mentioned Cadbury they would wonder which planet you’re from, but say, Hershey and they immediately know what you mean. That’s because in the US Hershey are a very big player in the chocolate world – it even boasts its own town! The battle between Mars and Hershey has been going on for years and it echoes that of Pepsi and Coca-Cola, each company battling for number-one spot. At last count, Hershey was winning the US battle, but, by the time you read this, in the cut-throat, back-stabbing, idea-pinching world of chocolate, that could have easily changed. However, whatever the chocolate company, just like their nicotine, caffeine and fast-food cousins, each, on a financial front, are doing just fine and dandy thank you very much. And this is why chocolate is now one of the most traded commodities in the world, and to the villagers on small farms in places such as West Africa, and on plantations owned by wealthy land barons in other parts of the world, cocoa is as important to the economies of these countries as oil is to the Middle East.

Cadbury, Britain’s leader in the land of the chocolate, aren’t too far behind. Despite their ‘local brand’ impression – Cadbury are a major global player. Two billion bars of Cadbury’s chocolate are bought every year. If just the creme eggs it produces each year were stacked on top of each other they would be 900 times higher than Mount Everest, and if the Crunchies eaten in the same length of time were lined up they would stretch from Birmingham to Bangkok. On top of that, just like Hershey in the States, Cadbury even has its own town – Bournville, or as they like to describe it, Cadbury World.

Chocolate has also been written about in some of the most famous children’s stories ever told, from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to the modern day phenomenon which is Harry Potter. Major blockbuster films have not just featured it but have even been based on and named after it – Chocolat being the obvious example. There are few items in the world that do not have a chocolate version of them somewhere. You can get chocolate televisions, chocolate typewriters, chocolate hats, chocolate houses, chocolate cigarettes, chocolate body paint, chocolate love toys (I didn’t say all chocolate was bad!) and there is even a place that will make an exact replica of your good self carved entirely from chocolate!

It has been linked to every emotion we possess and the Global Organization of Drug-food Suppliers (GODS) have managed, through clever advertising, to make us believe it can genuinely help our moods, act as a catalyst to the land of the bliss and, more recently, that it is actually good for us (this point will be covered in depth a little later). They have also managed to make it perfectly normal to start children on this stuff from an extremely early age. In fact, they have so brainwashed and conditioned us that if we don’t give children chocolate, especially if they have been ‘good’, we are the ones who are seen as the bad guys!

So how have we reached the stage where so many people believe that life wouldn’t be the same without a mass of drug-like substances entering their bloodstream on a regular basis? Why do we automatically think of chocolate when Valentine’s Day comes around, or Mother’s Day, or Christmas Day, or Easter Day, or a birthday – or, let’s face it, any day? Why do we continue to eat this stuff even though we nearly always feel sick and ‘Oh, I wish I hadn’t done that’ afterwards? Why is it so strongly linked to love, comfort, joy and, of course, PMS? Why does it seem to take such an emotional hold unlike any other ‘food’ on the planet?