CHOCOHOLICS need no longer feel guilty about scoffing their favourite food during Lent.

An Ilkley church is challenging them to eat all the chocolate they like during the period, traditionally associated with abstinence.

But there is one condition - the chocolate should come from a source which ensures the producer gets a fair price for it.

Rosie Tudge, of All Saints Parish Church, and around 40 volunteers, will be running a stall promoting chocolate, coffee, tea and similar Fair Trade items at Booths supermarket in Leeds Road tomorrow and Saturday.

She explained: "National Fair Trade Fortnight asked local churches to contact their most 'fair trade-minded' supermarket. Booths in Ilkley was identified as selling the largest selection of these products and has been most enthusiastic about All Saints Church manning the stall.

"Lent is seen as a time of penance. We decided that to make people think about the issue, it would be great to ask them to take up chocolate.

Choose a chocolate that has the Fair Trade mark and eat your way through those 40 days knowing that you are doing a company that trades ethically a lot of good."

Mrs Tudge said that such trading cut out the middle man, ensuring more of the purchase price was paid to the grower.

"This provides a subsistence wage, rather than one which means the whole family has to work on the crop to survive."

Volunteers on the stall, which will be set up in the entrance to Booths, will hand out samples of coffee and tea, snack bars and chocolate bars.

A much wider range of Fair Trade goods, including cereals, toiletries, dried fruit and nuts and kitchen and toilet paper, is regularly on sale after each of the four services at All Saints on Sundays.

l Eight pupils from Ilkley Grammar School will be flying to Erfurt in the former East Germany next month.

The young people, who all have a connection with All Saints Parish Church, are part of a group from the Bradford Diocese taking part in what is hoped will be an exchange trip.

Mrs Tudge explained that the Diocese, already linked with The Sudan, wanted to build a relationship with a deprived area of the former East Germany.

She will give the group a crash course in German before the trip, which takes place from April 15-22 and is subsidised by the Diocese.

"This is an exciting town to be visiting as the German Christian churches played a key role in bringing about the peaceful end to communist rule in the former Eastern Germany," she said.

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