Halloween is a time for ghosts, goblins and the latest cartoon or sci-fi characters. And oh the candy! This year is the fifth annual Reverse Trick-or-Treating, an initiative of Global Exchange’s Sweet Smarts network, with leadership from Equal Exchange. Trick-or-treaters around the country will be handing out fair trade chocolate to over 100,000 adults who normally would be handing goodies to them.

This national giveback event focuses awareness on child slave labor, trafficking, poverty and hazardous environmental conditions rampant within the cocoa industry. (See Civil Eats coverage of this issue here and here.)

In 2003, the U.S. State Department issued a report stating that “approximately 109,000 child laborers working in hazardous conditions on cocoa farms in the Ivory Coast,” a country where “the law does not prohibit trafficking in people.”

There’s documented forced child labor in the Ivory Coast, a large source of the chocolate sold in the U.S., said Kelsie Evans, worker/co-owner of Equal Exchange, a chocolate fair trade organization that supports farming cooperatives around the world who provide sustainable farming methods.

The average cocoa farmer may earn up to $100 a year—nowhere near what it takes to take care of a family. To maximize cocoa yields, wildlife habitat gets destroyed and increased pesticide use is encouraged. All this for the gooey chocolate treats you hand out every year.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the signing of the Harkin-Engel Protocol—an agreement by this country’s largest chocolate companies to put an end to forced child labor on cocoa farms in West Africa by 2005. While some of the chocolatiers have made strides to correct these abuses, Hershey’s has done little, activists say.

Global Exchange, Green America and the International Labor Rights Forum (ILRF) issued a joint report targeting Hershey named “Time to Raise the Bar, Hershey!” It details how hundreds of thousands of children are still being forced to work under abusive conditions for long hours on cocoa farms in West Africa, while others are victims of trafficking and forced labor. The documentary, “The Dark Side of Chocolate,” also profiles this sobering subject.

But change is happening. Five years ago, Global Exchange, a San Francisco-based, international humanitarian organization, partnered with Equal Exchange to create the first Reverse Trick-or-Treating event.

It’s a hard topic to talk about, says Evans. “Chocolate is seen as a source of joy in the world,” she said. But, she added, “Children grasp some of these concepts about fairness.”

Reverse Trick-or-Treating happens Halloween night, according to Kylie Nealis, the coordinator of the campaign.

“It’s kids taking action on a problem that affects other children,” she said.

“It’s a great teaching moment,” said Rodney North, The Answer Man and co-owner of Equal Exchange. “There’s a surprise factor of the child down the street is bringing the lesson to me—and you get to eat the solution.”

Originally published on Global Exchange

There’s nothing funny about all those E. coli and salmonella outbreaks that keep popping up and plaguing us like the Undead. But with trick- or-treat season right around the corner, I thought it might be nice to take a brief break from food scares and focus on scary food we can safely sink our teeth into, like Rocky Road-To-Perdition Fudge or I’Scream Cake.

Those are just two of the diabolically delicious recipes I found in Ghoulish Goodies by Sharon Bowers, a clever collection of Halloween-themed concoctions. Some are sweet, others savory, but they all sound eerily tasty. I spotted this book at a friend’s house last weekend and essentially stole it after leafing through its pages and finding such ingenious Halloween snacks as Cheddar Eyeballs, Candy Corn Pizza, and Bandaged Fingers, to name just a few of the more than seventy inventive recipes featured in Ghoulish Goodies. The recipes have simple ingredients, easy-to-follow instructions and plenty of photos to inspire you.

The eyeballs, for example, are just a round, bite-sized ball of dough with a pimento-stuffed green olive plunked in the center to glare back at you. The bits of cheddar cheese baked into the dough leave little orange streaks that give the eyeballs a bloodshot quality.

Other perfect finger foods, literally, are the Bandaged Fingers, a twisted take on the eternally popular Pig in A Blanket, featuring cocktail wieners wrapped in flour tortilla strips, with just the tip of the wiener jutting out. A dollop of ketchup on the tip serves as a bloody-looking fingernail.

This hors d’oeuvre is horrifying enough without the added atrocity of factory farmed meats, of course. A vegan version with tofu dogs is one alternative. I’ve yet to find a source for cocktail wieners from pastured livestock, so I’m going to go with my favorite local grass- fed hot dogs instead of, say, Costco cocktail wieners. I’ll cut them in half, which will make for a rather long–and presumably even creepier–finger.

The recipe for Ladies’ Fingers offers a sweet variation on the finger concept, using a shortbread-style cookie dough embellished with reddened sliced almonds for fingernails–a bit of beet juice would be the ideal liquid for coloring if, like me, you find food dyes truly too scary!

My favorite savory offering in Ghoulish Goodies is the Candy Corn Pizza, which, thankfully, does not require any real candy corn. You need only four ingredients to create it: a pizza dough (ready-made is fine); tomato sauce; shredded mozzerella; and shredded cheddar. You apply the tomato sauce at the edge, then a ring of orange cheese, and then white cheese in the center. Slice it into triangles, and voila! You’ve got all of candy corn’s charm and none of its cloying sweetness.

Like every other holiday, Halloween has fallen victim to rampant commercialization in recent decades. I’m not sure what’s more appalling: the orgy of chocolate candy made from cocoa beans harvested by enslaved children; the avalanche of cheap plastic pumpkin baskets and other landfill-ready Halloween accessories; or the obnoxious and offensive costumes–the most egregious, this year, being the Illegal Alien costume which Target had the bad taste to stock before outrage compelled it to remove the offending item from its shelves.

Ghoulish Goodies gives you some great DIY ways to reclaim Halloween from all the retail horror. So skip the mass-produced monstrosities and bake your way to a less heinous–but cheerily eerie–holiday!

Originally published on the Green Fork

Halloween is an amazing blend of history, superstition, tradition, and culture. It is simultaneously a time a celebrating life on Earth while honoring those who have passed beyond Earth’s shadowy borders. People have been using pumpkins as a symbol for this holiday for centuries – carving and lighting them as a symbol of the transition between fall and winter, life and death.

Countless thousands of pumpkins have been harvested and sold in the previous weeks, but starting on November first the questions turn to: What do we do with them now? Some pumpkins will have turned soft or moldy, and are best suited for the compost pile. But many more are still firm and perfect for holiday eating.

Now is the time for me to state my bias: I love pancakes, and I’m not afraid to say so, and so I think that pancakes are the perfect place to put that Halloween pumpkin the day after.

Here in America, the majority of pumpkins of the Halloween variety are grown for size and shape, and not for taste. In fact, both the taste and texture usually pale compared with some of pumpkin’s other squash cousins like the butternut, the acorn or even that “Japanese Pumpkin” the Kombocha. With this in mind, I think it’s perfectly acceptable, even advisable, to mix your squash varieties for greater complexity of flavor.

I mention this in the recipe to follow, but it’s important to say it again here – the consistency of your squash when cooked can vary greatly depending on a thousand factors, and so this is a recipe that requires a willingness to tinker and play until you get it right each time. Please, don’t feel a need to be exact.

Enjoy for a nice weekend brunch before you sneak off the grab that bag of candy you have hidden away in your room!

Winter Squash Pancakes

2 cups winter squash – from pumpkin, butternut, acorn, etc.
1 ½ cup whole milk
1 cup buttermilk
3 eggs
½ cup butter, melted
2 ½ cups all-purpose flour
2 tsp baking soda
¼ tsp ground cloves
½ tsp cinnamon
1/8 tsp allspice
1/8 tsp powdered ginger
¼ tsp salt
¼ cup sugar

For the squash puree, cut a whole squash in half and scoop out the seeds. Place cut side down in a baking dish and bake at 400 degrees for 30 – 45 minutes, until a fork pierces easily. Let cool. Scoop out of the skin and mash with a fork to a thick paste.

Beat the liquid ingredients with a whisk or a large fork until frothy. Mix the squash in to the wet milk and egg mixture.

Sift the dry ingredients into a separate bowl. Slowly, fold the wet ingredients into the flour mixture. Mix thoroughly until no chunks of dry flour remain.

This is one recipe that needs adjustment to compensate for variations in the pumpkin or squash consistency. Depending on the texture of the squash, you may need to adjust the amount of milk until the batter is smooth and not too thick.

Heat a lightly oiled griddle or frying pan over medium high heat. Pour or scoop the batter onto the griddle, using approximately 1/4 cup for each pancake. Brown on both sides and serve hot.

Photo: Mark Johnson, photographer and pumpkin-carver