Fair-trade chocolate: a sweet V-Day, indeed

Sure, your coffee is fair-trade but that only covers one of your addictions. Chocolate is the other bitter wonder in our world. Unfortunately, even the darkest of chocolates can't win a bitterness contest with its own means of production (think child labor, lots of child labor).

Fair-trade chocolate is harder to find than its coffee cousin, but you can probably sniff out some options in your community. If there are no local stores selling Equal Exchange bars, some other tasty morsels that are also child-labor-free includes Green and Black's, Cloud Nine, Tropical Source, and Newman's Own Organics. And, in Providence, kill two addictions with one stone with Coffee Exchange's chocolate-covered espresso beans.

Note: Interesting bit of certification politics going on between Ben and Jerry's, which uses fair-trade coffee in some ice cream flavors, and TransFair, which is a certifier:

For our Coffee Heath® Bar Crunch and Coffee Coffee Buzz Buzz Buzz® flavors, TransFair waived the requirement on the chocolate ingredients, as Ben & Jerry’s does not source these chocolate ingredients directly.

Ben and Jerry's used to have a fair-trade chocolate flavor. Not sure if it's the case with the new organic-certified flavor that replaced it.