A Vision of Chocolate's Future in an Amsterdam Brownie

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.

Or if you just pass through a US Walmart! Tony’s is everywhere, now.

Was the vaping ironic? I know very little about the effects. Last I heard the flavors people buy are full of garbage, so this is more or less a question

Gives you popcorn lungs, but it is technically a replacement.

There was a problem with using flavoring agents that aren't meant to be inhaled. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronchiolitis_obliterans#E-cig... :

> The American Lung Association listed use of flavored e-cigarettes as a risk factor for BO in 2016.[37] Health Canada has, however, seen no cases as of 2023.[38] Public Health England writes that the association has come about as "some flavourings used in e-liquids to provide a buttery flavour contain the chemical diacetyl… However, diacetyl is banned as an ingredient from e-cigarettes and e-liquids in the UK."[39] The UK National Health Service's website states that "vaping does not cause 'popcorn lung'".[40]

Diacetyl is a chemical used to flavor popcorn, and is safe to eat. Inhalation leads to "popcorn lung," named because people working in microwave popcorn factories got it.

Heads up Tony's Chocoloney is available across the EU now.

It was news to me that it's an ethically driven business, I just enjoy the chocolate.

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.

> Gives you popcorn lungs

This is a myth. You could be confusing the story of the factory workers who had popcorn lung, or you may be thinking of the bootleg marijuana carts which had vitamin E in the mix, in either case the story is wrong and also about a decade out of date.

Vapes do not cause popcorn lung.

https://www.nhs.uk/better-health/quit-smoking/ready-to-quit-...

It's been available in North America as well for years.

People were using analogies to the notorious industrial outbreak of "popcorn lung", because lipid pneumonia was so rare in other contexts.

What happened with vaping was that THC-containing liquids were an illegal cottage industry, being brewed up in people's garages to their novel recipes, despite the labels for selling them being fairly standardized on certain absolutely-not-a-brand-name-but-appears-to-be-one. These thousands of amateurs compared notes on dedicated forums online, and their iterative recipes had a quite good safety record... until the summer of 2019.

In the summer of 2019, some experimenter decided that vitamin E acetate ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%91-Tocopheryl_acetate ) was actually a very effective emulsifier/thickener for their liquid, allowing an incremental increase in profitability, and posted about their experiments on one of these forums. Hundreds of fellow independent/amateur manufacturers around the world followed suit and tried it out on their next batch.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaping-associated_pulmonary_in...

Suddenly heavy users started showing up in emergency rooms complaining they couldn't breath. Nobody knew the cause. It took a few weeks to recognize the trend and trace it to vaping, and the cigarette manufacturers immediately weaponized this with propaganda (regulated nicotine vapes / e-cigs retain an incorrect stigma to this day). The press labelled it "vape lung", and eventually doctors settled on EVALI. Rumors of "fake" carts abounded, everybody panicked trying to figure out what was safe and what wasn't. Eventually it was identified as a lipid pneumonia (in some cases postmortem). It took another few weeks for the CDC, some independent labs in quasi-legalized enterprises, and the relatively small niche of cannabis media to put together the pieces and break the story. Once they became aware of the consequences of vitamin E acetate (a lipid which sits inert in the lung blocking airflow), manufacturers immediately stopped using it. But the product already manufactured and sold took a while to work its way through the supply chain, leading to cases showing up all that year.

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.

I find critiques of palm oil accurate, but it begs the question - what is your preferred source of saturated dietary fat? You can do all sorts of things with vegetable oils from seeds/legumes, but you need saturated triglycerides for high melting point products like chocolate or to maximize the stability of deep-frying.

Maybe we could go back to artificially hydrogenated oils, but actually give a damn about food safety this time and work out an industrial process to separate trans fats?

In my grocery stores in Kenya too, for what it's worth.

It started out as a tv-documentary series on Dutch television. It's presenter was called Teun (Tony) and he wanted to be convicted for eating chocolate which he knew was produced by making use of slavery. This failed and he then created his own brand that should have been 'slavery free', which proved very difficult indeed. The brand was later taken over and made into what it is now.