How cacao is grown, harvested, fermented, roasted, then moved into the supply chain until it gets to its final destination, aka your mouth, isn't a simple process. In fact, it's incredibly complicated. Award-winning writer Rowan Jacobsen — who has joined Good Food to discuss terroir, oysters, and the impending agricultural crisis — discovered just how tricky it is while researching and writing his latest book, Wild Chocolate: Across the Americas in Search of Cacao's Soul.
Evan Kleiman: We're so used to getting these deep dives into intriguing subjects from you but this one has a swashbuckling element, given that so much of what is happening with the type of chocolate you were exploring happens in forests. Before we get deep into the territory of wild chocolate, let's start with the seduction. What was your first encounter with it? And how is it different from other types of chocolate you had previously experienced?
Rowan Jacobsen: For me, it started around 2008, 2009. I've always been curious about foods where the place they come from makes a big difference in the final food, in the flavor of the food or the character of the food, and chocolate was one of those. I was on this deep dive into chocolate and I started hearing these rumors about this wild chocolate that was coming out of the Bolivian Amazon.
Some people in the industry were saying, "There's no such thing as wild chocolate. We've been farming wild cacao for centuries." Other people were raving about this particular bar called Cru Sauvage that was being made by a Swiss chocolate company but they were sourcing all their cacao from the Bolivian Amazon. So I got a hold of one of the bars. It was beautifully packaged and when I tasted it, it was delicious, which lots of chocolate is, but it just had this other thing going on.
It had a beauty to it, almost a shyness that I found really compelling. It was just different. Right from that moment, I just felt like there was more of a story to tell with this chocolate. The chocolate itself was telling more of a story than most chocolate I'd had.
Many of us have heard the origin stories of Mexican chocolate and its spiritual and ritual importance to indigenous peoples. For this story, we're focusing on chocolate found in the Americas. Is this where it all originated?
Exactly, it is. And that was the other piece of it that caught my fancy. The quick bio on cacao is, it's native to the Amazon. It was used there for lots of reasons that other fruits are used in Amazon. You're eating the pulp fresh or you're using it to make alcohol. Then, sometime in the ancient past, it came up into Mesoamerica, into what's now Guatemala and Mexico. There, the Maya and some of the earlier pre-Hispanic cultures got a hold of it, and they're the ones who created this whole culture of chocolate that we have been fortunate enough to inherit. That was where cacao became something more than just another fruit to ferment in the jungle.
The overwhelming amount of chocolate that we consume all over the world comes from Africa. Can you give us some context of the massive business of chocolate in Africa? How did the trees get there originally? This is so we have some context once we start delving into the story of wild chocolate
Up until first contact between Europe and the Americas, chocolate was purely a Maya thing in the Americas. Then, once the Spanish arrived, they also took a fancy to it once they started adding sugar to it. Then, they started taking over the production of it. They definitely muscled out the Native Americans and created this industry around it. As chocolate got more and more popular through the 1700s and 1800s, they couldn't grow enough in the Americas anymore, so they started plantations in Africa, which had the cheap labor they were looking for and tons of land that was available. Also, it was closer to market in Europe.
That really started in the 1800s but then the African countries themselves saw it as a great way to build their own economies, so they really took it and ran with it in the 20th century. In a sense, it was a big success for West Africa in that they really took over the industry and today, they produce about 70% of the world's cacao.
The problem has been, cacao is a commodity now, so you have these international traders that buy cacao 10,000 tons at a time and drive price right down to the bone, just like they do with other commodities. That has put millions of African farmers into impoverishment because they get so little money for their cacao. The industry has huge social justice issues and environmental issues because of the commodification of it.
Also, the flavor has kind of been ruined along the way because the varieties that produced the most cacao were not necessarily the ones that tasted the best. The ones that tasted the best were mostly abandoned back in the Americas, and the ones that got grown on these farms were the high-yielding ones that often had a much less interesting flavor. That left us with the modern chocolate story, where there's a ton of it made and most of it is not that interesting.
Going back to that chocolate bar you tasted, Cru Sauvage, who was the man who actually got the beans to the Swiss producer of that bar?
This was a guy named Volker Lehmann, who'd been doing development work in the Amazon for decades. He was kind of the first person who realized that there was quite a bit of this wild cacao in the forest, just growing wild, and that it made great chocolate. He then had to prove that to somebody in Europe who would actually make chocolate with it and that took him years.
It was an uphill battle where he kept trying to source the beans and get people interested. The beans were weird. They were much smaller than farmed cacao and much harder to get. So if you can imagine going 500 miles, 1,000 miles into the rainforest and having to harvest your beans and dry your beans in the rainforest, which is famously rainy, and then get them out of that environment and into the world's transportation system, it was kind of an insane thing to do. He was a dreamer in the best sense. He kept at it for years, even though it never made any economic sense whatsoever.
There was so much about the time that you spent with him that was amazing. The way you describe your voyage through the forest and flying into a landing strip that had been taken over by cocaine drug lords. It was really an insane trip, but then you end up in Beni, Bolivia with Volker. Can you describe the ancient "chocolotales," what they are and what it meant for him to find them?
I don't know what I expected exactly but I pictured Amazon rainforest trees growing in the understory and the part of Bolivia, it's the Amazon, but it's kind of a different Amazonian environment where there's a lot of grasslands and a lot of flooding. It feels a little bit like the Everglades. Kind of like you see in the Everglades, there are these little islands of trees that are just a few feet higher than the rest of the landscape, and that is high enough to keep the trees out of the floodwaters that are there for months every year, so the trees can survive.
So you've got wetlands everywhere, and for hundreds of miles in every direction. Then you have these little raised islands of forest that are just a few feet above it all, and that's where all the cacao trees grow. The locals call them chocolatales — chocolate islands, basically.
Volker started working with them and realized that this had been a tradition for the people there for a long time. Then, these archeologists started showing up and clued him into what we've learned a lot about in the past couple years, which is that this was actually the remnants of what had been an incredibly advanced, an incredibly large civilization, maybe 1,000 years ago. All those islands were man-made.
The entire landscape had actually been engineered, and the people who lived there had all kinds of sophisticated means of food production. They were farming fish on a massive scale, and they created these raised islands, both where they could farm things like cacao, but also where their settlements would go, or even like their little cities. And they would all be connected by these raised causeways that had canals that ran beside them, where they would canoe their goods back and forth.
It was this incredibly sophisticated urban environment. It basically would have been one of the most interesting, complex urban environments in the world at the time. And then it all disappeared probably because of diseases that were introduced. The interesting, surprising thing is there were no rocks. It was all just earth and trees. So when the people disappear, it all just gets covered over with jungle and wetlands. You don't even know it's there until you have planes with ground-penetrating radar flying over that can see all these structures through the canopy. Basically, the whole reason that all this cacao is there is because it's kind of like the feral remnants of this ancient civilization.
And chocolate trees never really die. So these are trees that have just died back and resprouted and have been the survivors over millennia.
Yes, and they'll just do that forever. Volker literally said to me, "They don't ever really die." The trunk will fall over but then it sprouts and then another trunk grows up, so it's the exact same organism, and then that will fall over. So you get this pattern of concentric rings of trees going out from the original mother tree.
Aside from finding the trees and the whole transportation issue, one of the big obstacles he had to overcome was the preparation of the bean itself. In order to have fine chocolate, the beans have to be fermented. These beans were just being washed because they were used for a different type of chocolate beverage, right?
Yeah, exactly. In Mexico today, most cacao is not fermented, it's just washed, which means that the seeds grow in these pods that look almost like a delicata squash. You open them up and they have pulp just like in the squash and then these fat seeds. The easy way to deal with that is you wash off all that pulp, then you dry the seeds, roast them, and grind them, and you've got chocolate. But it's going to be extremely astringent and bitter because it's got all these compounds in it that you really need to transform if you want to create proper chocolate.
The way you do that is a fermentation process where the microbes basically eat away at the beans and turn all those bitter and astringent compounds into those beautiful, aromatic compounds that we like in chocolate. It's a pain in the butt if you don't have modern facilities to do it in. And most people in the world who are either farming or harvesting cacao don't have access to modern facilities. They're in the middle of nowhere and usually in a very wet climate because that's where cacao tends to grow. There's this constant issue everywhere cacao is produced. The really good stuff, the stuff we want in our bean-to-bar chocolates, needs to be beautifully fermented for a two-week period where conditions are carefully controlled in terms of humidity and temperature and stuff.
What is the Heirloom Cacao Preservation Fund?
While I was cruising around, working on this book and meeting people who were also cacao hunters, I came across this organization, a very unusual organization that had been started about 12 years ago, called the Heirloom Cacao Preservation Fund. Weirdly, it was a joint venture between the USDA and the fine chocolate makers of America, who were both concerned that they were not going to have access to enough great beans, because at that time, it was a lot harder than it is now. So these guys got together and raised a little bit of money with the goal of preserving these heirloom cacaos before they went extinct. A lot of them were like one farmer who was 80 years old and if he went, his trees were gonna go too.
So it's kind of like a seed bank for cacao germplasm.
Exactly. That is a really good model, because the goal was to keep those seeds alive so you could grow more and then expand it... a seed bank combined with a bit of a market incentive. The HCP's idea was that once they found these great cacaos that were hiding out there, not only would they help to keep them alive but they would promote that cacao in the US and Europe.
Is it possible to buy this chocolate? Do you want to do some shout-outs to producers or people who sell many different producers' wares?
Yeah, if you go to the Heirloom Cacao Preservation Fund site, they'll link to places that sell a bunch of the ones that they have designated as heirloom. The retailer who has really spearheaded a lot of this is a guy named Matt Caputo who has a specialty food store in Salt Lake City, of all places, called Caputo's and is the #1 important distributor of specialty chocolate in the US. You might buy more than you expect.
"Wild Chocolate: Across the Americas in Search of Cacao's Soul" is a swashbuckling tale of the origins of one of the world's favorite sweets. Photo courtesy of Bloomsbury Publishing.