Most people who know me, or who have read this blog for a long time, would know that I love to cook. In fact I would have to say that it is a passion.

So much so that I have started writing a recipe book... It's not for mainstream publication. It is actually for friends and family who really enjoy the food.

One of the things that I love to make and have pretty much perfected is ice cream. And my speciality is chocolate sherbet. That is an ice dessert with no eggs and no cream. But it has a lot of chocolate in it!

The one thing that I have wanted to do to continue to improve this dish is to find the right chocolate to use. And that means finding a good source of Belgian chocolate.

I discovered a place in Double Bay in Sydney this week that fit the bill.

And that led to me having a really interesting conversation with the owner, a Belgian, who is part of the family that manufactures this particular brand of chocolate. He was a mine of information. What he told me has implications across  multiple areas of industry and business and humanity.

So lets start with the chocolate part of the story. And if you eat chocolate you will want to know some of these facts, believe me.

First up, what we call cooking chocolate is just the same as regular chocolate. It's just marketed differently to create a product differentiation on supermarket shelves. What is important of course is what the ingredients of the chocolate are. And for the most part commercial chocolate has relatively little real chocolate in it. Apparently there has been a massive increase in the demand for cocoa butter from the cosmetics industry over the last few years and as a result prices have increased because supply is limited.

Since there hasn't been and reduction in the amount of chocolate bars that you see in your local shop, you have to figure that it hasn't been that big of a deal, right? Well, actually it has. Major chocolate manufacturers have been replacing the cocoa butter with other products that enable the same consistency to be maintained. That means that lard and other fats find their way into the chocolate that you may purchase when you need a quick sugar hit.

If you have been around on this planet for a long time, you may remember as a kid, sometimes buying chocolate that had a "bloom" on it. (That is when the chocolate gets a kind of whitish colouration to it). You rarely see that these days. Apparently this is because chocolate manufacturers apply a varnish to chocolate bars to ensure that they don't bloom - gives them more shelf life.

One other piece of trivia. Apparently the best, best chocolate that you can buy is in Easter Eggs. In order to enable the eggs to be constructed in the way that they do, a much longer "tempering" process is applied to the chocolate in the manufacturing process. This makes for a more brittle chocolate that has more intense flavour.

So I ended up buying chocolate and making ice cream last night, and to be honest, the flavour is not that much different to the ice cream that I make up using the Plaistowe's (Nestle) 70% chocolate. But I must say that the product with the Belgian chocolate has a slightly finer and creamier consistency.

So the bottom line on the ice cream is this:

To manufacture at home an amount of ice cream that you would buy in a supermarket for about $10 costs in raw materials about $15 - without the work.

But the difference is that you know what is in the end product, whereas the shop bought product lives somewhere between being a basket of chemicals from a couple of test tubes and a really good product, depending on who made it (some companies being more scrupulous than others about how they make money).

So what does this say about how globalization and price competition affects us all?

We have seen what happens when a Chinese milk manufacturer tries to extract more profit from their product line and includes melamine. Kids die.

How do we bring back honesty into manufacturing? Clearly the problem is that the kind of honest that you get when you create a bespoke product is hugely expensive. But that is how things used to be.

It used to be that ice cream was a treat that you only had once in a while. And you only had chicken on Sundays. Now without wanting to deteriorate this into a Monty Python sketch, the reality is that if we want sustainability of our lives we have to understand that quality of life - true quality - does not come at the supermarket check out as a guaranteed right.

Our opportunity is to understand that quality comes as a result of not just consumption of a taste, but from being a part of the total continuum of the production of that taste...

The same applies in business. To create a really successful and sustainable business, it is imperative to understand that doing things right and understanding the history of the ingredients in the product, along with what the competitors do to schlock their stuff, is a key part of the experience...