Originally published at: "Chocolate breakthrough" reported by Swiss scientists - Boing Boing
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I gather this post needs a theme song.
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No. Wrong. That juice should be used as a fermentable adjunct in making beer. I’ve had it and it is amazing.
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why not both?
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Sweet, sweet science! Truly wonderful.
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Yes, that’s what will happen, it always does. Right?
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The promise from Trickle-Down Economics? That is what I see here
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If the price of a raw material is soaring while the people who produce that raw material remain poor then the problem is about how labor is compensated, not about how much value is extracted from said labor.
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Indeed, and while we’re at it, let’s also make the pie higher!
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Don’t expect a lot of impact from this. Cocoa beans are around $8380.13/metric_ton as I type this (Cocoa Bean Price Monthly Analysis: IMF Primary Commodity Prices | YCharts). Sugar is around $407.63/metric_ton (https://www.isosugar.org/prices.php). Farmers have been throwing the fruit out because it’s not table-ready, it rots once you pull the cocoa beans out, and there’s not a lot of it produced per hectare of land–making it uneconomic to build a refinery nearby.
It’s a heck of a lot easier to come up with a way to transform something into something else than it is to come up with a way to do it that justifies the effort. You can make gasoline out of avocado pits, too, or nerve gas out of daisies and bat guano. But such things don’t justify the term “breakthrough”; making something out of an unpromising feedstock makes for a good headline but lousy applicability.
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Meanwhile, Mondelez scientists are busy trying to remove the chocolate from chocolate.
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Cool! Is blues music involved somehow?
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Tell me more, mostly where I can get me some of that!
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Yes, but the really hard part is fitting the avocado pits all the way into the goats.
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I’ve been eating whole cacao chocolate for years. WHOLE CACAO CHOCOLATE BARS – Blue Stripes
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I’ve toured a couple of cacao plantations in Mexico, and this seems like a solution to a non-existant problem, or at the very least a non-solution to the real problem of rural poverty. The cacao fruit at both locations, once the chocolate parts were removed, did not go to waste. One place fed them to their livestock (goats and pigs,) and the other turned it into a rather nice if kinda weak beer, or at least that is what they called it. As others have mentioned above, it did not seem that not using the whole fruit is the problem, but the systemic rent-seeking of the landlords and profit-taking by middlemen in between the farmer and the grocery store. That was back in the 90s, so things in the industry have probably changed quite a bit since then, but I’m assuming human nature and the insatiable greed of the rentier class hasn’t.
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Extracting the sugar is cool, but my concern is what will replace the pods, which act as natural compost fertilizer for the trees.
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I thought that had already been achieved in Reese’s Pieces
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