“It’s Easter Sunday,” I said, falling to my knees. “That can mean only one thing.”
She paused. “Resurrection, renewal and eternal life?”
“Get your priorities straight,” I replied, peering under the bed. “I’m talking about Easter eggs. Where did you hide them?”
Really, this should have been her role, according to gender stereotype. It’s a gross over-generalization, but convention says it’s women who most crave chocolate, finding in the confection a level of satisfaction that is otherwise absent from life.
“It’s not that chocolates are a substitute for love,” wrote Britain’s Miranda Ingram. “Love is a substitute for chocolate. Chocolate is, let’s face it, far more reliable than a man.”
Hard to deny that. Chocolate doesn’t forget birthdays and anniversaries. Chocolate doesn’t wipe up spilled orange juice with its stocking feet. Chocolate doesn’t ogle Ms. Hottie on parent-teacher night, or watch the game on its phone during funerals. Chocolate doesn’t hog the channel changer, drink out of the milk carton or laugh when it breaks wind.
It’s not that men don’t enjoy chocolate. They do, just not in the same way that they enjoy, say, bacon. Tell a man that he can’t eat chocolate and he will adjust his diet, but tell him he can’t have bacon and he’ll adjust his noose.
Of course, eating too much bacon (yes, I know that’s an oxymoron) will send him waddling down the path to an early demise anyway. To quote The Simpsons shopkeeper Apu Nahasapeemapetilon as he rang through Homer’s purchases: “Let’s see. Farmer Billy’s smoke-fed bacon, Farmer Billy’s bacon-fed bacon, Farmer Billy’s travel bacon. Mr. Simpson, if you really want to kill yourself, I also sell handguns!”
But I digress. Today is Easter, so the subject is chocolate — or, to be precise, the pressure on the chocolate chain.
Global factors have pushed up the cost of key ingredients, we are told. Hot, dry weather hit cacao crops in West Africa, where there is also increased scrutiny of labour conditions. High sugar prices have been blamed on everything from Hurricane Ida to frost in Brazil. Milk costs are curdling. Packaging materials are in short supply. Transportation is a challenge. And demand has spiked as the world eats its way through, or out of, the pandemic.
Right, the pandemic. If there’s one thing we have gained from COVID, it’s a heightened awareness of the global interconnectivity of things, of how a rock thrown in the water on one side of the world can send ripples all the way to the other.
This isn’t new, of course. A jarring example came 20 years ago when the 9/11 attacks staggered a most unlikely target in Wildwood Works, a tiny business on distant, off-the-grid Lasqueti Island. How so? At Wildwood, cheerful hippies fashioned a range of items – buttons, bentwood boxes, clocks, hair clasps, pens — from salvaged wood, mostly yew and cedar. The problem was that many of those products were sold at airport gift shops. When air travel dried up after the bombings, so did sales.
It’s only lately, though, that frequent interruptions have reminded us of the vulnerability of the global network we have long taken for granted. The term “supply chain” appeared in the Times Colonist 347 times over the past 12 months. In 2019 the count was 79.
Reminders of interdependence have been constant. With sunflower oil no longer available from the world’s largest supplier, Ukraine, you’re about to pay more for cooking oil of all types. Last year’s ice storm in Texas contributed to a worldwide shortage of plastic resin, worsening a porta potty shortage that threatened the resumption of outdoor events. Power shortages in China forced clothing factories to reduce capacity, cutting the demand for wool, hurting Australian sheep farmers.
Bottlenecks beget bottlenecks. Shortages beget shortages. When a product is assembled from dozens or hundreds or thousands of components sourced around the world, the lack of just one of those components can bring the whole process to a halt, causing yet more shortages. Car dealerships don’t have cars to sell in part because automakers are fighting for computer chips with everyone from gaming-console manufacturers to crypto farmers.
I contemplated all this while still down on my knees, peering under the bed. It looked tempting. “I think I’ll just crawl under here for awhile,” I said.
“Never mind that,” she said. “Come have a nice Easter chocolate.”
