Cocoa

http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/11659/1102/

Chocolate's cocoa can be replaced by trans fat and partially hydrogenated oils, particularly when the price of cocoa increases because of the bad harvest in Ivory Coast and Ghana, the two largest producers of cocoa beans in the world.

The suggestion is certainly criticized as trans fat, an unsaturated fat unnecessary for our health, is gradually abandoned by many countries. Yet the cost of adopting the new composition is one third of the original cocoa, despite cocoa is healthier, especially in terms of our cardiovascular system.

The bad harvest was due to a dry weather. I guess global warming is inevitably one of the reasons for the weather. That means it is possible to see the extinction of cocoa because of the continuing bad weather.

I am no longer a big fan of chocolate; still I find it quite unacceptable in my sense that cocoa will disappear from our life one day. We have so much chocolate in our daily life - chocolate bars, chocolate cakes, chocolate ice-cream and so on. Even though someone now says there is a substitution of the same taste, it can never be the same without cocoa. Chocolate, the name itself is already come from cocoa. Can you link chocolate and cocoa together? Probably not; I cannot imagine.

Nevertheless I remember I read one Chinese fiction before about a woman from the future suddenly went back to the past and met a chocolate factory owner. It is an amour but in the story chocolate was extinct in the future world. No one in the future knew the taste. It was one of the most touching stories I have ever read, possibly because I was very young when I read it. Will it become real, let say 50 years later? I feel sad for this.

This morning I read some environmental news provided by the Reuters RSS feed. Everyday there are many pieces of bad news, telling everybody how dangerous the current situation is and how urgent we have to take action for life sustainability. Someday glaciers will be gone, like the news about the melting of glacier in Germany since the beginning of industrialization. Rivers will be dried out or polluted irreversibly, like Yangtze River. Aquatic life is ruined owing to over fishing - can you imagine tuna fish will disappear from our diet completely because of extinction?

The bad news overwhelms the good.

When an increasing number of people gather to fight for our living environment to be livable, wars and human conflicts continuedly devastate our established civilization. It is always easier to destroy than to construct. It takes 30 seconds to knock down a building with a bomb after it took maybe a year to have it built up. People in the war surely understands but they seemingly won't think about it. These people are the most powerful to save the world from deteriorating, yet they apparently choose to create damage rather than aids. It is hardly convincing to be optimistic.

Still, we have to work on it. Otherwise we wouldn't have any single opportunity to survive.