Easter and fecundity, Easter and chocolate

My favourite Easter joke — which I told countless times as an adolescent because there was bound to be someone among family members and Francophone community who would take offense — was this one.

Jesus has been nailed to the cross, he's weakened by his ordeal and his disciples gather below him.  Peter notices him staring, struggling to say some words.  Resources are marshaled by the small group to get Peter up near Jesus so his last words can be heard. 

(Elaborate details on the maneuvers and acrobatics required to do so.) 

Finally Peter is propped up to a level where he can hear what Jesus is whispering: "Look Peter, we can see your house from up here."

Location, location, location. Ba-da-bing!



But seriously folks, it's become a tradition for me to allude to chocolate, as well as the pagan origins of Easter.  Check these inks to past posts about "spring spheres", and eclectic paschalaphilia.

Feast upon this splendid article about cocoa: its history as well as current current ethical and cultivation challenges.

Conveniently, cacao is already a hybrid by nature. “If one cacao plant is compatible with another, they will mate,” Adler says. “Cacao is a slut. A cacao pod can even have more than one varietal strain inside of it. It can be pollinated multiple times.”

There are more than 14,000 known varieties of cocoa beans around the world, the two most prominent being “Criollo,” which originated in South America and traveled to Mesoamerica, and “Forastero,” a native of the Amazon rain forest basin. As soon as they met, these two got it on, creating “Trinitario,” named after the island of Trinidad where their union was discovered.

"Cacao is a slut"... perfect, since it's a legal drug that stimulates production of endorphins and seratonin, those brain-happy substances.

While casting about the weird world web, using search terms for chocolate and also Claire Brétecher, I came upon an illustration of hers for a book of bandes dessinées, a fable about endangered species, over-breeding and extinction ...

What is the Occidental Bolot? A small mammal closely related to the dog with a rampant libido that makes it hump anything that moves, its fertility rate is decreasing.  Females now only produce a litter of 20 to 30 piglets.  Before the rise of CO2 emissions, they would typically birth 50.  This deplorable situation has incited the Bolot to seek refuge in a beautiful reserve dedicated to endangered animals...

Mmm.  Sounds amusing.

Easter

It's not that I've got nuthin', in fact I have a lot of sumtin'.

First this; as my son-in-law said, easily the most disturbing photos of the Easter Bunny he's ever seen. Almost worse than than Pennywise, the murderous circus clown from 'It'.

And then Roger Ebert has an answer to the often asked question of what really, really went down at the Last Supper.

For the traditionalists out there, something less sacrilegious and more relevant to the focus of Easter: chocolate.

From Hell's Heart of the New West, I Stab At Thee

I'll preface this up front by stating Halloween and Days of the Dead is/are my favorite social celebration/s of the year. It's a momentary departure from how one is told one *should* behave that not only permits but encourages all ages to celebrate colour, imagination, magic, What-if, the fantastic, the unknown, the untouchable, pageantry, debauchery, overdose of sugarbombs liquid and solid, heros, villains, ancestors, and anything else you can cram into it.

The fiestas are the breath between Harvest's closing and hopefully fat moments, and the shadows veiling the next Harvest, reminding us the only true certainty in the future is Death and if we don't laugh about it, we'll cry.

Having so much fun contemplating altered states and mortality apparently drives 'serious' religionists bats. And when they insist on being serious in Alberta, I get to hear about it as if it's news. Welcome to Jeesusween . Not as fun as you'd think.

Aside from the 'what marketing genius thought up the name so the rest of us can point and laugh', it's sadly apparent that the pastor doesn't seem to understand the Christian origin of Halloween. Note, I didn't say origin of Samhain, I said Halloween, or All Hallows Evening, the un-fun night before the amazingly un-fun All Saints/Hallows Day. No, not Harry Potter's Deathly Hallows. That would be *fun*. Yet another church day invented by the Catholics to usurp the pre-Christian Roman Empire rituals of the 'Celtic' calendar, in this case, their New Year.

You'd think Christians would at least know their own history but perhaps that far back is too papal. All I really know is, when the Christian Hellhouses started up in righteous moral opposition to the demonic influences of 'secular' Halloween, it was easy to see the teenagers allowed to take part were diving into the grislier parts of their horror show with nearly secular glee. They truly found their inner Grand Guignol in depicting the sins and punishments of Hell. Medieval as H..all get out.

Trust Alberta to come up with a version that will suck even that much life out of the experience for kids and everyone around them. This October 31st, I could find adults using kids as their stalking horses, planting them on doorsteps with some version of Christian bibles and 'sharing the Word'.

From "Benefits" at the darling website...

"The children coming out to give the bibles will do it with excitement. They will not feel deprived as they will be coming out like other kids to give the Word to people. They will definitely be received by families as it is just natural not to turn a child down. The children will understand from an early age that it is fun to give the Word."

And if that isn't enough, just think of the fun on the faces of the children receiving bibles and other heartwarming Christian paraphenalia in their treat bags when visiting a Jesusweenie household. I mean, really? Not even a chocolate Jesus?

Fun. I do not think this word means what you think it means. Also, too, Jesusweenies? Stating "The dictionary meaning of Ween is to expect, believe or think"...

a/doesn't make it so no matter how much you want to retroactively try to make it sound like you meant it that way and scavenging a dictionary for justification is just *low*. If you came clean and stopped doubling down, you wouldn't have to resort to JesusWin as the hep backup name.

b/isn't where Ween comes from in relation to Halloween, hence apparently requiring you to spout what Word Detective encounters all too often in etymology; 'common sense' interpretation of origin. How's that working out for you around evolution again? I mean, why not just say Jesus'een? or better yet and this is after three seconds contemplation on my atheist part, Nazar'een...wait...why am I helping you? You're accomplishing all I can ask of a Christian 'outreach'.

Happy Halloween, Pastor Paul.

That's Spring Spheres to you, bunny!

Every year I find a news item or an urgent issue that inspires a post about Easter.

In 2011, this has to be the one.

A teenager volunteering at a Seattle elementary school was apparently told to use the politically correct name “spring spheres” when she tried giving kids plastic Easter eggs filled with candy.

But a Seattle school board spokesperson told the Star it has not been able to confirm whether the incident actually happened.

“They said I could do it as long as I called the treats ‘spring spheres.’ I couldn’t call them Easter eggs,” a 16-year-old named Jessica told a Seattle radio station.

Ah, "political correctness", a term now pejoratively used by those who are too intellectually lazy, too ideologically religious or too politically entrenched to accept a challenge to their bigotry.

The incident above sounds like a humour-challenged fundamentalist misunderstood a comment or invented one to create the perception that there's some anti-christian "War on Easter" being waged.

That's actually quite amusing, given the pagan origins of Easter and the christians' systemic appropriation of beliefs and traditions that pre-date the alleged resurrection of their saviour.

Consider the squeamishness of RWNJ (right wing nut jobs) when certain words from *down there* are uttered publicly. From here:

At one point [Democratic State Representative Scott] Randolph suggested that his wife "incorporate her uterus" to stop Republicans from pushing measures that would restrict abortions. Republicans, after all, wouldn't want to further regulate a Florida business.

Apparently the GOP leadership of the House didn't like the one-liner.

They told Democrats that Randolph is not to discuss body parts on the House floor.

This led to a hysterically witty tweet campaign, in response to the Republican Stoopidity, with evocative Twitter hashtags: #uterati #GOPnames4uterus #OMGuterus #uterusmovielines, and more.

And also. The Raging Grannies sing out in their typical fashion.

Speaking of eggs ...

Better chocolate: less is more.

This could be the start of a DAMMIT JANET! tradition. Last year we blogged about cruelty-free chocolate.

It appears that the production of cocoa is threatened. The cultivation of cocoa trees require specific growing conditions and it leaves the soil leached of nutrients after 20 years or so. As well, monoculture practices and the reliance upon one type of tree that yields large crops has made it vulnerable to disease. A deadly fungus is decimating farms in central and south America. A virus spread by insects is destroying those in western Africa.

As with most agricultural practices, the challenge comes down to rotating crops and developing hybrids that have the most desirable and disease-resistant traits. Fair trade cocoa co-ops need the support and funding that will allow them to train specialists and to develop the resources necessary to sustain development.

So, choose delicious, flavourful fair-trade chocolate that's not sweetened with high fructose corn syrup. Your health will benefit, as will the farmers' co-operatives.

Cruelty-free chocolate tastes better.

There are hard questions regarding chocolate that go beyond whether one first chomps on the ears or the tail of a chocolate Easter bunny.

Questions around provenance, for example. Nestle and Lindt, two major players in the global production of commercial chocolate purchase cocoa crops from densely planted, heavily fertilised and pesticide-sprayed plantations in Ivory Coast, Ghana, Malaysia and Brazil.

But far more serious is the issue of child slave labour.

... the big household names, such as Cadbury Schweppes, Mars and Nestle, refuse to speak individually on the thorny issue of child labour. They describe it as an "industry" issue. They say they are setting up a trust foundation and that surveys have been commissioned. They've also signed an international protocol.

The International Labour Organization (ILO) reports that

... 30% of children under age 15 in sub-Saharan Africa engage in child labor, mostly in agricultural activities including cocoa farming. Of the 200,000 children working in the Ivory Coast cocoa industry, the ILO claims - a maximum of 6% (12,000 children) may be victims of human trafficking or slavery.

Fair trade chocolate products can be found everywhere nowadays; there were even Green & Black tablets on sale at the local Blockbuster recently. An important aspect of fair trade is offering the farmers an opportunity to also participate in the transformation process, which creates more jobs in addition to those dedicated to agriculture employment. Fairly traded chocolate are available from Cocoa Camino (from La Siembra, Canada's largest fair trade chocolate company), Dagoba and others, here.

Another concern, but not as pressing from an ethical and human rights perspective is the ongoing debate among European Union governments and their chocolate producers regarding changes to chocolate purity standards.

How much vegetable fat -- other than cocoa butter -- can you put in chocolate and still call it chocolate? ... The EU's chocolate debate pits eight purist nations against seven that take a relaxed view of chocolate. Belgium, France, Italy, Spain, Luxembourg, Germany, Greece and the Netherlands ban cocoa-butter substitutes in chocolate. The others [are] Britain, Ireland, Denmark, Portugal, Austria, Finland and Switzerland ...

With respect to fairly traded and organic chocolates, regulating whether products are adulterated with GMO soya, canola or corn oil, for example, is not as urgent a matter since farming and manufacturing practices are transparent and open to accountability.