SOUL FOOD:

As I scoured the Internet for a purveyor of kulich pans I landed on the blog of an Australian woman named Julie.

The heading for her post on March 26 held my attention; it reads: “A more ethical Easter.”

If you don’t know kulich from Adam’s house cat, stay with me. It’s about Easter, too, and I’ll get back to that.

Julie is a former environmental scientist who left her career to stay home with her three daughters and to make cheese, spin wool and weave baskets.

She calls her blog “Towards Sustainability” and describes it as “the journal of an Australian family of five baby-stepping their way to a simpler life and a sustainable future in suburbia.”

She says they are “preparing for a future living with the effects of climate change and the end of cheap oil.”

But she clearly has her eye on other issues as well that are tied to human commerce and consumption.

The notion of an unethical Easter implicit in “a more ethical Easter” was jarring.

For anyone who views Easter as the culmination of God’s work of salvation for mankind a breach of ethics in its celebration would be, at best, ironic.

What could I be doing, I wondered, to corrupt this holiest of Christian holy days? Thoughts of factory-farmed ham and lamb came to mind.

Since I’m not a meat-eater that would leave me out. But I wasn’t to get off that easily.

In the fourth sentence of Julie’s post three words — “chocolate Easter eggs” — stopped me cold. Chocolate eggs?

Though I don’t eat meat, I do eat eggs. Chicken eggs, I mean. And of late I’ve been more intensely scrutinizing the ethical issues involved with purchasing them.

But, honestly, it had never occurred to me that purchasing foiled-wrapped chocolate eggs could present me with a moral dilemma. After reading what Julie had to say and doing further research, I’ll never look at chocolate the same way again.

Most of the world’s chocolate, it seems, is made in full or in part from cocoa beans harvested using child labor, labor that according to the United Nation’s definition is child slave labor.

Children, mostly on farms in West Africa, are forcibly held and work without pay for as many as 80 to 100 hours a week. This is not “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.”

Farms in Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria and Cameroon — most of them using forced child laborers — produce 70% to 90% of the world’s cocoa.

Americans, I discovered, spend $13 billion a year on chocolate, most of it tainted by these farms’ child slave labor.

Guilty pleasure took on a new meaning for me.

Get a quick but eye-opening glimpse of this not-so-sweet chocolate industry by watching the 3-minute, 27-second “Tony and the Slave Free Chocolate Factory.” Dutch journalist Teun van de Keuken, who started a Fair Trade chocolate business called Tony Chocolonely as a result of his research, made the short film, which you can find at www.chocolonely.com/index. php?page=4_3&videoId;=7.

If I’ve cast a pall over your Easter festivities, wait; there is some good news. More companies are beginning to offer Fair Trade chocolate, though I haven’t found Fair Trade chocolate eggs this side of the Atlantic.

The first place I looked for Fair Trade chocolate was Trader Joe’s, since that’s where I buy most of our treats. I found a couple 3.5-ounce bars in milk and dark chocolate, both products of Switzerland, sold exclusively by the Monrovia-based grocer.

I bought a bar of dark chocolate for my husband to enjoy after the fast of Great Lent. At $1.99, it was still cheap.

Later, I started to feel guilty. How scrupulous is it, I began to wonder, to buy Fair Trade chocolate from a vendor who also sells non-Fair Trade chocolate?

Being honest with myself, I’d have to say I think not very. The allergy to chocolate I developed in middle age is beginning to look like a blessing.

After all, there are other sweets. Which brings me back to kulich, the traditional Russian Easter — or Pascha — bread, similar in substance but not appearance to hot cross buns.

I find kulich, which is most often baked in tins that once held coffee or juice or fish, to be more fun. I was looking for a kulich pan because since it has been a long time since I have bought coffee or juice or fish in cans, I have none on hand.

If anyone sells kulich pans, I haven’t found them. But I did find some tips for using a soufflé or round cake pan (enhanced with parchment paper) to bake a kulich in.

To truly be kulich, the bread must be taller than it is wide. The bread resembles the form of a chef’s toque — a cylinder with a pouffed crown.

Rich in eggs — not chocolate but chicken, nearly one per cup of flour — the bread, in our contemporary times, is not itself free of ethical concerns. Our cheapest and most common eggs are factory-farmed, coming from chickens that live in nothing short of diabolical conditions.

This egg production is known as the battery system. As many as six chickens share a cage with barely a hair’s breadth between them.

It’s all but impossible for them to turn around.

They are de-beaked to prevent them from injuring or killing each other.

I’d long been buying eggs from chickens said to be cage-free, range-free or free-roaming. Then I discovered these terms are, let’s say, malleable.

A cage-free chicken may instead live in a barn crammed wing-to-wing with thousands. The term is not legally regulated. Neither are the terms range-free or free-roaming.

Pastured eggs, I learned, are what I am looking for — eggs from chickens pecking in green pastures, feeding on bugs and grubs and worms.

But such farms are scarce as, well, hens’ teeth.

Here in Orange County that means traveling to a farmers market in Santa Monica or to a farm in La Habra Heights for eggs. Which presents another ethical conundrum.

So this Pascha, as I call Easter as an Orthodox Christian, there will be no foil-wrapped chocolate eggs in anyone’s basket. But the eggs in my kulich will likely not be from pastured hens.

I’ll celebrate a more ethical, but not a perfectly ethical, Easter.

MICHÈLE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She can be reached at michele@soulfoodfiles.com.