Today's Articles (12/3/2026)
‘I took two bites and had to spit it out’: candy makers are phasing out real cocoa in chocolate
Cocoa, obviously, is the central ingredient in chocolate. It’s a complex food that, on its own, tastes almost bitter. Since humans began eating it, they’ve combined it with other ingredients, such as cinnamon and chilis, to make it more palatable. Hershey, Reese’s, and other commercial chocolate companies use sugar, milk and oil. For Reese, the extras had finally overshadowed the bittersweetness of the cocoa.
The volatile cocoa market is, in fact, a major factor in chocolate pricing. Since 2020, the climate crisis has led to a cycle of droughts and floods in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, which, combined, produce 70% of the world’s chocolate. This led to diseases that destroyed the cocoa plantations and decimated the cocoa supply, says Alexis Villacis, an economist at the Ohio State University who studies the chocolate industry.
The demand for chocolate, though, has only increased. Our society, as Villacis notes, has been built around chocolate. It’s become essential to holiday celebrations including Halloween, Christmas, Easter and Valentine’s. It’s marketed as the ultimate cheap luxury, something to brighten up a dreary time, and seasonal sales have continued to grow in spite of the rise of GLP-1s and healthier lifestyles.
Peak interest: Toronto’s snow mountains that refuse to melt are a toxic hazard
Most mountains take tens of millions of years to form. Toronto’s newest mountain took just days.
Towering atop the crowns of evergreens, it has no skeleton of limestone or granite. There are no spires, cornices or headwalls. It is simply piles upon piles of snow, mixed with a toxic cocktail of road salt, antifreeze, oil, coffee cups and lost keys.
Major cities that experience the full brunt of winter have long been forced to confront a reality that snow cannot stay on streets or sidewalks. The solution is to truck the snow – sometimes for weeks on end – to storage facilities along the urban outskirts.
The city says it uses a variety of tools to prevent contaminants such as oil from cars entering water systems. But salt is a pervasive foe, passing through most storm water treatment.
A recent thaw eroded chunks of Toronto’s snow mountain, pushing vast amounts of salt into waterways.
“Even if we stopped applying salt right now, it would take years to decade to flush out of all of our soils and the groundwater.”