3. It can make you feel good, delivering a dose of phenylethylamine, the same thing you get when you’re in love. Yeah, baby.
4. It can do good, if you buy it from a little nonprofit called Rescue Chocolate, which donates 100%--yep, you read it right, 100%--of its net proceeds to animal welfare groups.
The cherry on top? “No animals [are] harmed in the making of these products,” explains the company’s website. “Rescue Chocolate is always 100% vegan. Our chocolate is handcrafted in Brooklyn, NY and certified Kosher Parve. It is made in the finest Belgian tradition with top quality ingredients and no artificial preservatives.”
Enjoy such offerings in September and know that you’re helping In Defense of Animals (IDA), the animal protection organization to which Rescue Chocolate’s donations will go throughout the month.
Each creation features info about animal issues on its packaging and/or via the website:
• The Fix, a “pure, rich dark chocolate bar,” calls attention to pet overpopulation and spay/neuter efforts.
• The Peanut Butter Pit Bull, “crispy peanut butter and luscious 64% dark chocolate,” is dedicated to that much-maligned and misunderstood breed of pooch, one of whom, named Mocha, owns Rescue Chocolate’s founder Sarah Gross.
• Wild at Heart, “dark chocolate hearts filled with zingy raspberry ganache,” spotlights the plight of “circus animals, laboratory subjects, abandoned exotic pets, and victims of ‘roadside zoos’ who were meant to be wild, and to those human caregivers who provide them with love at long last in wild animal sanctuaries.”
Other treats to try: Bow Wow Bon Bons, Pick Me! Pepper, and Foster-iffic Peppermint.
On her blog Gross says she chose IDA as September’s beneficiary because "They have rescued stray dogs in Taiwan, baby seals in South Africa, dolphins in Japan. And of course they are active in the States too—creating sanctuaries for lab animals, exposing and shutting down puppy mills, responding to natural disasters. I can't think of a better group to support this month."
Before tucking into your bar of Mission Feral Fig (which “advocates humane treatment of feral cat colonies”), you can raise it in toast to IDA for their many accomplishments, and to Rescue Chocolate for providing what very well might be, as their motto goes, “the sweetest way to save a life.”
Katerina Lorenzatos Makris is the author of 17 novels for publishers including Avon, E.P. Dutton, and Simon & Schuster, and hundreds of articles for publications such as National Geographic Traveler, San Francisco Chronicle, and Veggie Life. She wrote a teleplay for CBS and short fiction for The Bark magazine. With coauthor Shelley Frost, she wrote Your Adopted Dog (The Lyons Press). Holding a B.A. in Environmental Science Studies and a lifelong interest in animal issues, she spends a lot of her time battling a severe addiction to dogs.
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