Water for Chocolate
Sorry to repeat myself, but one of my favourite films, is the 1992 Mexican film “Like Water for Chocolate” – Como Agua Para Chocolate. The film is nothing about water – mostly about cooking and relationships, family, love and lots of second guessing.
The cocoa beans give chocolate its main ingredient flavanols, which scientists say may reduce the risk of heart disease. This is great news for chocolate lovers. Delicious, dark, tempting chocolate that, may be good for us – eaten in moderation. However, chocolate is a lot about water.
Fact: The water footprint (WF) of pure chocolate is 2400 litres for a 100-grams……About 10 bath tubs worth.
A WF consists of: the volume of water used in litres – for the various stages of the process.
The composition of dark chocolate is 40% cocoa paste with a WF of 33260 litres/kg; 20% cocoa butter having a water footprint of 50730 litres/kg and 40% sugar with a WF of 1526 litres/kg.
So the water footprint of making a kg of chocolate is about 24,000 litres[1] – not insignificant.[2]
[1] https://www.waterfootprint.org/media/downloads/Hoekstra-2008-WaterfootprintFood.pdf
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/07/it-takes-21-litres-of-water-to-produce-a-small-chocolate-bar-how-water-wise-is-your-diet