It is Friday the 10th of January in 2025. For me, born in 1957, 2001 will always be in the future. For me, age 67, I'm still 25 in my head. @ 25 I was a werewolf, a bronze bull.
I know I am not any of those things, still and all, safer with me than anywhere else in the universe.
I like this book and you might want to read it.
There was a USA chocolate rennaisance in the 2010s, and as usual I sleptwalked through it. I knew about the coffee rennaisance in the 70-80s, but this hunt for heirloom strains of cacao, the source of chocolate Inow know through this book.
Big Chocolate, with plantations mainly in Ghana and Ivory Coast, uses hardy breeds with bitter taste and no flavors. Original cacao is reknowned in Mexico but from the Amazon. If you have read the book 1491 by Charles C Mann you will know that up to 40 million people lived there, with roads and island cities and plantations. Teddy Roosevelt almost perished on an expedition to the Amazon. Like conquistadors before him, he nearly starved in a garden.
Original cacao is callled food of the gods for a reason. Not quite psychedelic but at the least taking the right direction. It's nice to see coarse USA tastes maturing and taking flavor, taking life seriously. Fine chocolate now is sourced directly from indigenous "farms" and is called bean to bar, and savored by locality, reputation, etc. "farms" in quotes because the trees are not a monoculture. It turns out cacao trees really like being at the floor of rain forest, so win/win for farmers and rain forest.
I had considered a greenhouse of cacao trees up here in the Midwest. I mean, Canada and Iceland grow bananas, tomatoes, and coffee, why not cacao? Easy to bring sunlight down to 40%, humidity up to 80% and temperatures ranging from (depending on what you want the fruit to do) 80-90F. It turns out the pollinators for cacao are these bitey little mites that leave horrid marks if you scratch them, and they need a rainforest in a greenhouse to survive. Pass on the greenhouse for now.
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