Chocolate Lovers, Your Health is in Danger

One of the things we want to do here on The Chocolate Cult is to help you not only find the best chocolate for your money and mouth, but the safest. Recent restriction on Federal health agencies communication with everyone is a direct threat to chocolate lovers health.

We don't get paid salaries on this blog nor do we charge readers or chocolate companies, so while we do our research, we have to be smart about our time. To help us vet information quickly and with a high degree of accuracy, we've relied on the FDA emails about recalls to food and beverages that we highlight for you all to check out.

We are no longer getting any information from the FDA so we cannot help you stay notified of chocolate related recalls. Sure, we could do all the steps suggested below and share it with you, but we aren't paid by readers or businesses so we don't have the time to pull from our salaried and royalty jobs.

What can you do to protect yourself and your loved ones?

1. Set your own alerts to try and stay updated on chocolate related recalls. Some search engines allow you to do so and you'll get an email when any type of post comes up. 

That "any" is a big problem. Now you will need to wade through the information, checking that the source is reliable and the the information is uptodate.

2. If you only buy chocolate from a small set of brands, routinely check their websites for any recalls they might have.

This assumes that they will share it. At this time, the FDA seems to still have the authority to check on the safety of food and issues recalls, just not communicate that to anyone... how will that work? Let's be blunt, if the food and beverage industry cared about your health, we wouldn't have all of the regulations and inspectors that we do in the first place. 

3. Check with agencies from Canada or the EU or other governments.

Most of our readers and all of our writers are in the USA, so we focus on the rules here in the United States.

Most nations have their own food and beverage regulations and can issue warnings to their citizens. But the names and ingredients of products varies from one location to another. What is considered safe under one set of rules may differ from what is considered safe elsewhere. This is the reason why we always tell you to check locally when we've shared a recall here. 

4. Make your own chocolate.

Good luck with that. Unless you already own a chocolate making business, you may find it difficult to acquire the ingredients you need to make chocolate from "bean to bar". No, just buying the coverture won't protect you because it has already been processed and problems could have entered the equation. In fact, unless you are also growing the cocoa trees and harvesting them, there are problems that could arise.

5. Stop consuming chocolate (or anything else the FDA used to warn us about).

That obviously will not work for the vast majority of us who rely on farmers and the food industry to grow and do most of the processing of that food in to forms we consume.

If the USA health agencies are allowed to communicate with the public and to do inspections and enforcement of safety rules in the future, we'll update this post at the top of it. 

For now, your best options to protect yourself are 1 and 2 above.

Good luck everyone!