I've been enjoying many fake/replacement things for years: vegan ice-cream, beyond meat, quorn, vaping.. I'll be happy if we can move away from damaging products relying on unsustainable cocoa production.
Nice mention of Tony's Chocolonely, if you pass through the Netherlands it's one of the great gifts to pick up to take home.
Globally, people are getting richer (particularly east Asia), and consequently using more energy and resources. Sustainability is really contingent on demand versus innovation and land encroachment; some products use more than others, but basically all will use more land/energy if demand grows enough. There's no agreed-upon benchmark for what constitutes sustainable, it's vibes. You could just as easily say that a perpetually growing global population is not sustainable, but thankfully it is projected to stall. In a scenario where the population doesn't grow (or not much), no product can be considered unsustainable.
You can yield improved efficiency for almost anything. In China, fossil-fuel use has plateaued despite growing demands for energy, because they have so much solar. Their emissions growth is finally projected to stall, but the coal mining has hindered that somewhat.
The U.S. hasn't seen significant land-use increase for agriculture over the years, in fact there's been less. Some of that is innovation, but some is also cruel commercial practices. As the States move away from that animal products will get yet more expensive in the short-run, and consumers will more readily look to alts. Actually the subsidies have been driving down prices for those, but everyone seems quick to defend them as though farmers couldn't possibly do without. Animal products are cheaper in the U.S. than many developed countries. If you really wanted to scale back that consumption, all it would take is to allow the products to be more expensive; simple.
Is cacao production unsustainable? It seems the problem is the oligopolistic and exploitative price setting architecture for cacao. Pay farmers more, and supply will increase.
One of the alt-chocolate alternatives mentioned here involve palm oil, one of the most environmentally destructive ingredients on the planet.
I don't think beyond meat is an example to follow. It is ultra-processed fake food ruinous of health, and rightly - at least in the UK - now has an aura of ill-health surrounding it. Better to just make yourself a burger with healthy whole foods, like lentils, mushrooms, chickpeas.
The article covers a variety of different approaches to dealing with high cocoa prices, but the Amsterdam brownie in the title is using a more heavily alkalized cocoa powder to maintain a similar taste while using less cocoa:
> The former gets its punch from using more heavily “dutched,” or alkalized, cocoa. It’s also what made that magical brownie taste so chocolatey.
If you buy dutch chocolate for baking you are told that this is actually significantly less flavorful, but a darker color, and useful for eg dark baked goods, when you're mostly trying to create a certain color shade without adding a ton of chocolate flavor.
> alt-chocolate is here to stay, in the same way that it’s become commonplace to gorge on a passable meat-free burger
Is it though? Outside of personal bubbles, does anyone see impossible/beyond ‘meat’ being regularly consumed? It’s been relegated to a tiny shelf of my grocery store’s butcher shop, to the point that I can’t recall the last time I even saw it there.
I have lots of thoughts about this. I never like to see the price of something increase, and the reasons for the increase in this case are not anything anyone wants. On the other hand, for me personally I feel like chocolate is far too prevalent, at least in the US, and if it led to more variety in desserts and candy I'd be happy.
Carob seems relevant to this? I know the associations from the 70s and 80s but I sort of feel like that was a marketing or framing problem rather than a taste problem. Substitute anything never goes over well.
I also feel like what's happening with cocoa and chocolate is representative of a lot of agricultural products today. Vanilla prices skyrocketed at some point in recent memory for similar reasons and haven't recovered, and there's similar tradeoffs involved there, with companies doing all sorts of things to offer alternatives to expensive pure natural vanilla or inexpensive artificial vanilla.
From last month, an article in the Atlantic about how candy makers are experimenting with new non-chocolate ingredients and flavors in existing brands:
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 38.4 ms ] threadNice mention of Tony's Chocolonely, if you pass through the Netherlands it's one of the great gifts to pick up to take home.
It was news to me that it's an ethically driven business, I just enjoy the chocolate.
You can yield improved efficiency for almost anything. In China, fossil-fuel use has plateaued despite growing demands for energy, because they have so much solar. Their emissions growth is finally projected to stall, but the coal mining has hindered that somewhat.
The U.S. hasn't seen significant land-use increase for agriculture over the years, in fact there's been less. Some of that is innovation, but some is also cruel commercial practices. As the States move away from that animal products will get yet more expensive in the short-run, and consumers will more readily look to alts. Actually the subsidies have been driving down prices for those, but everyone seems quick to defend them as though farmers couldn't possibly do without. Animal products are cheaper in the U.S. than many developed countries. If you really wanted to scale back that consumption, all it would take is to allow the products to be more expensive; simple.
One of the alt-chocolate alternatives mentioned here involve palm oil, one of the most environmentally destructive ingredients on the planet.
I don't think beyond meat is an example to follow. It is ultra-processed fake food ruinous of health, and rightly - at least in the UK - now has an aura of ill-health surrounding it. Better to just make yourself a burger with healthy whole foods, like lentils, mushrooms, chickpeas.
> The former gets its punch from using more heavily “dutched,” or alkalized, cocoa. It’s also what made that magical brownie taste so chocolatey.
Is it though? Outside of personal bubbles, does anyone see impossible/beyond ‘meat’ being regularly consumed? It’s been relegated to a tiny shelf of my grocery store’s butcher shop, to the point that I can’t recall the last time I even saw it there.
Carob seems relevant to this? I know the associations from the 70s and 80s but I sort of feel like that was a marketing or framing problem rather than a taste problem. Substitute anything never goes over well.
I also feel like what's happening with cocoa and chocolate is representative of a lot of agricultural products today. Vanilla prices skyrocketed at some point in recent memory for similar reasons and haven't recovered, and there's similar tradeoffs involved there, with companies doing all sorts of things to offer alternatives to expensive pure natural vanilla or inexpensive artificial vanilla.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/2025/10/chocolate-shortag... (gift link)