The Saxon spring festival of Eostre, was named for their goddess of dawn.
She is the friend of all children, and to amuse them she changed her pet bird into a rabbit which brought forth brightly coloured eggs, which the goddess gave to the children.
When the Saxons converted to Christianity, Easter was converted to the story of the death and resurrection of Christ.
Traditionally Passover, the Jewish festival connected to the story of Christ’s death and resurrection, is calculated as the first Sunday after the first full moon following the spring equinox. In the Christian story, Passover becomes Easter.
When I was about six, I spent Easter Sunday with my cousin’s family. We made hardboiled eggs and dyed them and we children climbed Arthur’s Seat, the Mount Benson of Edinburgh, with instructions to roll the eggs downhill in celebration of the rolling of the stone from the tomb of Jesus.
We brought the eggs back and were instructed to eat them. I was horrified, not being able to connect the pink-tinged stuff under the shell with real food. I tried to tell my aunt I couldn’t do it, but she insisted. I gagged down the egg and proceeded to whine all the rest of the day.
Thomas King called his 2003 Massey lecture series The Truth about Stories. The truth about the story of Easter today is that chocolate is a lot more enjoyable than boiled eggs, but not so enjoyable for the young slaves who work on cocoa farms in Côte d’Ivoire.
Looking into the story of how Easter became entwined with chocolate, I learned that William Cadbury, who led the world’s largest chocolate firm from 1922 to 1937, was responsible for Cadbury pulling out of the purchase of West African cocoa linked to slavery.
About 10 years ago the world became aware that about 12,000 boys were working as slaves in Côte d’Ivoire, which produces 70 per cent of the world’s cocoa.
By 2009, Cadbury was able to announce that the Dairy Milk chocolate bar would carry the fair trade mark and be slavery-free because of an agreement with a Ghanaian cocoa farmers’ co-operative.
Then, in 2010, Cadbury’s fell victim to a hostile takeover by Kraft. Whether Kraft will continue to honour the Cadbury agreement after expiration remains to be seen.
The reality of 12,000 boys enslaved who never get to eat chocolate continues.
If you want justice as well as chocolate for Easter, look for the blue-green fair trade sign which means the cocoa farmers were paid a fair price and their workers are, too.
Marjorie Stewart is board chairwoman of the Foodshare Society and president of the multi-stakeholder co-op, Heritage Foodservice. She can be reached at marjorieand
alstewart@shaw.ca.