Halloween isn't just an occasion to be frightened by witches, vampires, and prepubescent girls in revealing Halloween costumes. It's also a great time to spread a bit of social conscientiousness to revelers in the form of organic and fair trade candy.

Before grabbing a bag of bite-sized Hershey bars, consider where that chocolate comes from. An estimated 40 percent of chocolate comes from Ivory Coast, where most cocoa farmers are impoverished. Farmers in the other top cocoa-producing nations, including Brazil, Indonesia, and other West African countries, don't fare much better. Responding to a fair-trade inquiry in her column, Grist's Umbra Fisk details some of the not-so-fair practices in the chocolate business. With Ivory Coast cocoa farmers netting approximately one cent from a 60-cent candy bar, farmers are using their children as laborers. The work is endangering: "[T]hink swinging a long machete when you haven't had enough to eat, or spraying pesticides without the proper protective gear," writes Fisk.

These kids aren't always there by their own or their family's will. Liza Featherstone, blogging on for The Nation's The Notion, cites the Organic Consumers Association's statistic that 284,000 children in West Africa "are working under dangerous conditions, or have been trafficked."

There are ways to avoid supporting such practices. The fair trade label guarantees that growers received a fair wage for their product, and inspectors are employed to monitor child labor practices. However, in the $60 billion chocolate industry, fair trade chocolate doesn't even make up one percent of sales. Both Fisk and Featherstone assert that consumers could swing this percentage up this Halloween with their purchasing power.

Now that you've thought about where candy comes from, consider what it's doing in the body. Childhood food allergies are popping up in schools everywhere, and the folks at Go Dairy Free encourage people to stock up on vegan and allergen-free treats this Halloween. They've included a list of trick-or-treater-ready candy manufacturers who make treats free of artificial flavors and many common allergens, such as dairy, soy, nuts, gluten, and casein. Some companies offer standard Halloween fare, like witch-shaped chocolates, but others are a little more inventive, like YummyEarth, who had the ingenuity to make vegan pomegranate lollipops.

While buying socially responsible candy for Halloween might take a bit more work, try looking in your local health food store or online and you might be surprised how accessible these treats are. Halloween is supposed to be scary; your candy is not.

Cool Capitalists Gone Wild

So, is the metro, forward-looking American Apparel really just a throwback to anti-union paternalism in its manufacturing practices? Without question, the company’s internal corporate culture seems to present Charney as the old-fashioned patron with some cool sideburns painted on. Indeed, besides his anti-union factory tactics, Charney presents another parallel to this persona: a recurring sexual-harassment theme. One of the ugliest sides of employer paternalism has always been the likelihood of such unequal power relations giving rise to sexual abuse, and Charney has been sued by multiple former employees for sexual harassment. He maintains his innocence, and many in his white-collar workforce defend the environment at American Apparel as an updated, pro-sex take on feminism. But the fact remains: Charney has had more people sue him for sexual harassment than, say, Joe Francis, the young entrepreneur behind the Girls Gone Wild video empire. Negative publicity around these recurring sex scandals at the company has caused Charney even more grief than have his anti-union tactics and has led him to make bizarre statements on gender equality like “women initiate most domestic violence.”

Sexual-harassment scandals as liberated feminism? Workers spontaneously organizing other workers to carry out an anti-union management campaign? A wealthy prep-school kid who, in two decades, went from scabbing on striking workers to stopping his own workers’ unionization today being lauded as having created a “hyper capitalist-socialist fusion”? The contradictions that underlie American Apparel certainly go deeper than the incongruous messages of their ubiquitous advertisements. But a certain consistent logic is evident, not only with Charney’s business, but in all companies that have staked their brand image on socially conscious consumption and ethical trend-making. Companies like Starbucks and Whole Foods have also climbed their first few rungs up the ladder of corporate success by appealing to liberal professionals on the basis of a hip image and social responsibility – but both have fought unionization drives with the same grim gusto as American Apparel.

This is possible because, at least so far, the new niche market of liberal consumerism is primarily concerned with workers’ rights if the workers in question live far away, in an exotic locale where adding a fair-trade sticker costs a corporation pennies. Deciding to not buy a product because the company that makes it is fighting its own workers’ unionization efforts is not something Charney’s “young metropolitan adults” really do. And as long as progressive consumer standards apply only to workers’ rights in other countries, Dov Charney’s factory is unlikely to supplement the free massages with job security or a voice at work.