Chocolate

Chocolate A Bittersweet Saga of Dark and Light
By Mort Rosenblum
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1. And everyone in this small world is stocking up with chocolate for the holidays - only Hershey's Michael Weller alimni director, takes three bars from his drawer. They owe everything to this chocolate. It may not be the best in the world, but who dares to say so? This is still Hershey's best kept secret.
2. My discovery was no accident. I had gone to the Ivory Coast to find out what war might do to the world's principal cacao crop. Fine chocolate depends on pampered beans from small peoduction plantations in South America and Madigascar. But that was a small part of picture. The big factories like Hershey, consume nearly a million tons a year of foratero from West Africa's chocolate coast.
3. Cacoa farming is hard enough on orderly plantations, where crews can work methodically, with some gasoline - powered help and facilities for drying the beans. For dirt - poor African farmers, conditions range from primitive to prehistoric.
4. "It takes years to build a plantation," he said. "It cannot be forced or pushed too quickly, or there'll be an imbalance. And without balance, it is a disaster. Each step must be taken carefully, with thought toward the next. Above all you have to think of yourself as immortal.
5. Coffee is not easy to grow, but cacao is a killer. The first trees in Africa were planted in 1822, right next to Terreiro Velho, by Portuguese settlers who brought seedlings from Brazil.
Questions -
1. What did the director from Hershey's mean that it was their "Best kept Secret?"
2. What war is going on in Africa that the author was afraid of?
3. Why are the plantations so poor when companies like Hershey's are buying tons of cacao?
4. What made the Portuguese bring the seedlings from Brazil?
Vocabulary -
1. painstakingly - careful and diligent effort.
2. blasphemy - an act of cursing or reviling God.
3. irreparable -not reparable; incapable of being rectified, remedied, or made good: an irreparable mistake.
literary terms -
settings - the Ivory Coast and Madigascar.
exposition - plantations throughout Africa.
Outline -
Next to coffee, the cacao plant is one of the most popular to grow in Africa. It is also the hardest because it takes a lot of hard work and needs the most attention of any plant there is. The farmers work very hard and under extreme conditions. A lot goes into that bar of chocolate we take for granted.