Cocoa Clique Leads In The Chocolate War Skirmish Goes To Europe’s Hard-Line Purists

The European Parliament erupted in angry recriminations Thursday after voting on an issue that has split Western Europe for more than two decades: the Two Chocolates Policy.

The vote left Britain, Ireland and Denmark seething with rage, while the Belgians and French quietly gloated. The Germans, after siding with the French, were rumored to be wavering and thinking of defecting to the other side.

So the fight is far from over.

Eight European countries, led by Belgium and France, require that chocolate be made exclusively with cocoa butter. Seven others, led by Britain and Denmark, allow companies to mix in substitute vegetable fats like palm oil, a practice that Europe’s purists consider abhorrent and threatening to their own chocolate industries.

After months of fruitless negotiations, spurred by the drive to unify European standards, the European Parliament voted overwhelmingly that “chocolate” is something different from what companies in Britain, Denmark and the other five countries have produced for decades. They also voted to force Britain and Ireland to rename their milk chocolate, arguing that it has too much milk by European standards.

Caroline Jackson, a British member of the European Parliament, ended the day fuming. “Debates over food should be about safety, not about what makes a chocolate bar really chocolate,” she said. “This isn’t radioactive.”

This isn’t the first food fight Europe has seen. There was the feta cheese brawl in 1996, in which Greece persuaded the European Union to block Denmark and other countries from using the word feta. There have been similar clashes over words like gouda, brie, sherry and brandy.

But the chocolate war is on a scale all its own, dating back 24 years to the early days of the Common Market. And it remains a vivid reminder of the stubborn obstacles to unity that Europe still faces.

To hear Belgians tell the story, the battle is over protecting “real” chocolate and a cherished national industry against cheap substitutes from multinational conglomerates like Cadbury-Schweppes, Nestle and Mars.

“My country is very famous for beer and chocolate,” said Philippe de Coene, a Belgian socialist member of the European Parliament who has led the battle for pure-cocoa countries. “Chocolate without vegetable fat is much more difficult and expensive to manufacture,” he said. “If you are faced with a chocolate that is much cheaper than yours, it will be much more difficult to compete.”

But to Britons and Danes, the fight is about free trade and common sense.

“We aren’t talking about synthetic substitutes just to make cheaper chocolate,” said Philip Whitehead, a British member of the European Parliament. “Historically, this is the way the British make their chocolate.”

On Thursday the full European Parliament voted 306-112 in favor of the hard-line purists, but that does not mean the war has been won. The measure must still be approved by the European Council of Ministers. And then it will be up to the European Commission - administrators in Brussels who are strong champions of a free-chocolate ideology - to figure out how to enforce the rule.