Kristy Leissle has earned the title “Dr. Chocolate” by her friends and colleagues, as she continues her search for the world’s best chocolate.

Dr. Chocolate is a lecturer at the University of Washington’s Bothel campus and teachers incoming freshman about history, economics, literature, and culture using chocolate as her medium. Her class is called Chocolate: A Global Inquiry and obviously is a hit with students.

Leissle, 37, claims she’s been a chocolate addict from birth. Her grandfather used to feed her chocolate to keep her quite as a baby, and now, Leissle continues to eat chocolate everyday, multiple times a day, usually dark chocolate. She even keeps a blog called Mostly about Chocolate to catalog her experiences with the sweet treat.

Leissle turned her addiction into an academic pursuit during her graduate career studying in the women, gender, and sexuality studies department at the UW. She first explored the global chocolate trade and the injustices that were linked to unfair trade practices surrounding the production of cocoa. She traveled to Hawaii, Malaysia, Singapore, United Arab Emirates, India, South Africa, Finland, Austria, Ghana, and the U.K. all in order to analyze the conditions that farmers are exposed to as they produce cocoa and the industry that has flourished due to the world’s obsession with the dark stuff.

She’s found that as the chocolate industry has moved from a purely standard white and milk chocolate to higher quality dark chocolate and exotic flavors, farmers are being exploited in order for companies to turn a profit. 

Leissle also argues that in areas where chocolate production is highest (West Africa), high end chocolate companies are less willing to do business. Although many claim that cocoa from this part of the world is less tasty, Dr. Chocolate says it’s not about taste but about people’s fears of buying chocolate from a place they associate with conflict, poverty, and AIDS. Her research continues to examine fair trade between chocolate companies and the farmers they buy from and is shedding new light on the chocolate industry, revealing the injustices that farmers go through, in order for us to enjoy a single bar of chocolate.