Holiday Gift Ideas

If you're looking to get the early jump on holiday gift ideas for your office or family, check out this list of possibilities from Bittersweet! (PDF file)

They're guaranteed to love it!

A Chocolate Evening at SF Conservatory of Flowers

Our own Seneca Klassen, who spent the summer planting his own Cacao Plantation in Oahu, Hawaii, will be speaking at the Conservatory of Flowers in Golden Gate Park Thursday, September 17th, from 6-7:30 PM.

Please join Seneca as he shares information about the botany and cultural history of chocolate. You’ll also experience a “behind the scenes” visit to a hidden treasure – a fruiting cacao tree in a Conservatory greenhouse. And then… you’ll enjoy tasting of 5 origin chocolates while gaining an understanding about the importance of post-harvest processing and quality finishing.

This is part of a Chocolate Event that they are hosting as an Evening of Chocolate. You can visit the Conservatory site to learn more and purchase tickets. Space is limited.

Chocolate Coconut Chill is back!

That's right--the Chocolate Coconut Chill is back in rotation for the season. This luscious combination of young coconut juice, dark chocolate and vanilla--delicious, exotic, vegan and perfect for a warm afternoon. Come on by and pick one up today...

Herrania

On a recent origin trip, we came across a collection of Herrania, a cousin of cacao with quite stunning flowers. Unlike Theobroma family members like Grandiflorum (Cupuaçu) and Bicolor (Pataste/Pataxte), we're not aware of any food use of Herrania, but it was a site to behold nonetheless, as you can see from the photos below.

What to plant? What to value?

As the craft chocolate marketplace continues to develop from the demand side, we can increasingly see a critical need to engage cacao farmers (and whole farming communities) in the idea that we as chocolate makers and consumers are ready and interested in valuing their crops based more on their overall quality than their sheer quantity.

This seemingly simple change in perspective will in fact take substantial time and effort to get into place, and as we read further into the collective past of cacao cultivation, it's very clear that questions of yield versus flavor (and other related dichotomies) have been with us for at least 150 years or so.

As new origins are planted and established regions are revitalized with an eye to this new higher-value chocolate market, it's an exciting time to engage in what turns out to be a very long conversation with cacao about what we want from it--and what it wants from us as well.

Chaco Canyon inhabitants used chocolate

For years there's been speculation on just how far north and south cacao was traded during the precolumbian period. Now, for the first time, there's solid scientific evidence (theobromine residue, in this case) that chocolate made it at least as far north as Chaco Canyon in New Mexico.

This is the first proof of chocolate's use north of Mexico before European contact, and a nifty piece of the evolving picture of cacao's travel through the precolumbian Americas.

Thoughts on finishing Deep Economy

Having just finished reading Bill McKibben's thoughtful book Deep Economy, I was struck by the following passage's relevance to chocolate and cacao (emphasis mine):

"The poor nations of the world need to develop. But if they develop according to our model, the planet will break under the strain. We in the rich nations need to change, not just for environmental reasons but because our way has stopped producing as much human happiness as it should. That middle ground is hard to define, and we will take generations to reach it, because we start so far apart. But it is more local than the world we know now, and less individualistic. It measures not More but Better."

Barring dramatic changes in climate, locavores in the Northern hemisphere will never find cacao at their neighborhood farmer's market. And that makes it even more important that all of us who really love this food become more mindful consumers, supporting those parts of the chocolate and cacao economy that we find to be most viable and productive, not in the harsh glow of globalized economics, but instead in the warmer lights of human happiness and quality of experience.