To complement my relatively plain choice of regular old milk chocolate from Endangered Species Chocolate, I also bought a bar of "exotic" chocolate from Green & Black's.  Maya Gold is described on the label as "Bittersweet dark chocolate with orange and spices."  Which spices, exactly?  I was curious to find out.

Green & Black's is one of the premier high-end chocolate companies in the rapidly growing field of what I'll call "eco snacks."  All of their cocoa beans are grown organically, and shade grown to boot.  The inside of their label paints a lovely picture of happy cash crop trees all growing alongside each other in the rainforest ecosystem.  Not sure how realistic that is, but it's a far sight better than what happens to bring that Mounds Bar to the table.

One thing that intrigued me is that the inside of the label specifically states that they are "sourcing our cocoa directly from the growers."  If accurate as I understand it, then this would definitely address the problem of "cocoa laundering."  

As described in the BBC documentary "Chocolate: The Bitter Truth," cocoa beans can be grown with the slave labor of abducted children, then sold to a broker.  The broker in turn fudges the paperwork, blends it with a bunch of legally grown beans, and sells it all up the chain to his broker.  Thus whitewashing the beans which were grown on plantations that operate illegally.

It must be a lot more work to buy beans directly from the farm.  But if you want to guarantee that your Fair Trade chocolate really is free of child slave labor, then you're going to have to operate directly.  Maybe this helps explain why this bar cost three times more than the Lindt or Cadbury bars beside it on the shelf.  (Unfortunately, chocolate is one of those things like clothing, where low prices are being subsidized by inhumane conditions at the far end of the supply chain.)

So we've established that buying a Green & Black's bar makes you a good person.  But how does it taste?

Pretty dang good.

My experience with organic chocolate bars is that they have a weird gritty texture, but this Maya Gold bar was nicely textured.  As a bittersweet chocolate, it had a definite whiff of bitter chocolate and orange notes.  The spices are a peppery sort of blend with strong clove notes.  It wasn't quite chai, and it wasn't quite Mexican chocolate, but it was definitely in that family.

When I was a kid, there was a really nice upscale tea store downtown.  They sold a lot of candy, which is what drew me in.  The store had the most wonderful smell, a combination of all of the different teas that they sold, which you could smell from the sidewalk.  It was intoxicating, and I could spend ages just wandering around the store in a happy daze.

This chocolate bar tastes exactly like that store smelled.  In fact, I had forgotten all about the tea store until I tasted this Maya Gold bar.  A very strange experience, I can assure you!

Texture-wise, the bar broke nicely when I bit into it, with some little shards flying off.  But it quickly turned creamy, without having a texture that was too brittle or chalky.