The Food With the Second-Largest Footprint in the World

Chocolate is one of the most common and enjoyed goods across the West, often the first choice for a gift or idle treat. But it is also the single least discussed food that has a huge impact on the planet. Reducing your meat intake for the sake of the planet is a rising trend, which has been proven to make significant cuts in your carbon footprint. However, a meat-free diet is not necessarily a low impact diet, especially if it includes a large amount of chocolate. Why is this?

Chocolate is made from the pods of cocoa trees in rainforests, which can only be grown in tropical regions. These areas are vast and remote, which makes them extremely difficult to monitor, and a prime target for clearing to use as agricultural land. The largest cause of deforestation is the production of soy for beef farms, but cocoa production is high on the list as well. Around 90% of rainforests in the Ivory Coast have disappeared since their independence in 1960 due to cocoa production (The Guardian, 2019), to the point where their namesake — forest elephants — are on the brink of extinction. Soon, there will be no more ivory in the Ivory Coast.

Dark chocolate is the worst culprit as it requires more cocoa to produce, with a higher impact than milk chocolate despite milk chocolate including the emissions from cows! The sheer amount of CO2 that is released from burning rainforests in unsustainable farming practices puts its greenhouse gas footprint above every other food except one type of beef, according to Our World in Data.

Take a moment to absorb the following graph:

This graph shocked me when I first stumbled across it. Dark chocolate, coffee, and cheese have a significantly higher footprint than I had ever imagined, each greater than pig and poultry meat combined. On their website you can filter it per 100g of protein or per 1000 kilocalories as well, but the picture is the same. The saddest part is that this graph only shows the warming impact from the emissions of each food — the case for chocolate is even worse because producing chocolate involves destroying rainforest, and the loss of habitat and scale of land use is immense. Not only does it release a tremendous amount of CO2, but it also decimates unique habitats, animals, and plants.

So why is nobody talking about this? While these impacts are devastating, they are also distant. Central and Western Africa are the main areas where cocoa production takes place, and Europe and US are almost exclusively the consumers. Culture is also a big player — everyone loves a bar of chocolate. It is ingrained as a tasty delicacy from childhood, and the end product seems innocent when you are unaware of its destructive journey to your supermarket shelf. But if we want to get serious about changing our diets to minimise our impact on the environment, we have to face the consequences of chocolate and respond accordingly.

There is yet some consolation; choosing chocolate produced in cooperation with organisations such as Kuapa Kokoo reduces your impact, as they have a pilot project of new cocoa farms that use sustainable farming methods, as well as tackling humanitarian issues in the industry. Alternatively, if you enjoy a packet of sweets as much as a bar of chocolate they have been proven to have a significantly lower footprint, making for an excellent swap.

I’m not advocating that we all stop eating chocolate. Learning how to consume more sustainably is a step in the right direction, and one of the many tools people should use to combat the climate crisis. Ultimately, nobody is perfect, and chocolate alone won’t be the downfall of humanity — but the more we learn about climate change, the better equipped we are to deal with it.