Watch a cocoa farmer try chocolate for the first time

boing
21

Thank you for sharing that important link!

22

Man, did you ever really savor an M&M
 take your time and really experience the flavor? They’re awful.

4 Likes
23

Well, you have to take them in historical context


also

1 Like
24

A brief insight into the true depth of human ignorance. They’ve grown it for years and multiple generations don’t know what it’s for and much of the world was like this until the last few generations. The cultural momentum of the west is huge.

25

Or perhaps, the capacity of some humans to exploit and maintain the ignorance of their fellow travelers on this dust ball is huge?

Chocolate is way older than the European colonial conquest of Africa. It was first used by mesoamericans, with evidence dating back to 1900 BC.

Factoid: The scientific name of Cacao is “Theobroma cacao” which means “food of the gods.”

I have tasted quasi-authentic Aztec-ish chocolate exactly once. It’s a whole 'nother experience.

2 Likes
26

I was thinking that this was confusion arising from the making of chocolate liquor (which is then used to make the candies).

1 Like
27

Why did this feel like staged reality TV to me, more than a documentary? I simply find it very difficult to believe that cocoa farmers, including farm managers, would be 100% ignorant of the use of their cash crop. And the argument that they’re too poor to consume it doesn’t hold much water to me. They don’t seem particularly shocked by the magical video recording devices being used to record the encounter. I don’t know – the whole thing seems exaggerated to me.

1 Like
28

And tastes horrible!

29

What if it isn’t? What you’re jaded?

30

So, the west is better?

31

That sounds uncomfortable and unsanitary.

5 Likes
32

[quote=“AcerPlatanoides, post:30, topic:38094”][quote=“WTF, post:24, topic:38094”]
A brief insight into the true depth of human ignorance.
[/quote]
So, the west is better?
[/quote]

I wouldn’t say better is the word; less downtrodden, for sure.

Africa is hardly a bastion of enlightenment, but quite obviously, the plebs in the West are a bunch of mushrooms in many important ways
 I’m thinking of the rampant insanity fostered in the US, in particular.

The scum want the dregs to stay at the bottom.

33

My dad says the US army chocolate that was rationed out in Yugoslavia immediately after WW2 was the best thing he ever tasted (though being more or less starving for the thee years prior may have something to do with it). They were also perplexed over the canned pineapples and orange coloured cheese.

1 Like
34

Absolutely fascinating and tragic in equal parts.

35

And yet, many people around the world can’t - even in this country. That’s just a fact of life at this point. There is a line from a Leonard Cohen song, Everybody knows, that speaks to this - “Old Black Joe is still picking cotton for your ribbons and bows
” I think is how it goes.

36

Thanks for posting these links! I’ll check them out and see if I can find them or I’ll order online.

37

1 Like
38

Given the shitty treatment I’ve recieved in the UK working for ‘fairtrade’ companies, colour me un-fucking-surprised.

39

Aren’t we all?

40

@Bearpaw and others - MadĂ©casse’s “about us” page doesn’t do a good job of going into much detail, but their Wikipedia page has more details - basically, the company owner realized that most of the economic value of cacao gets “added” by production processes post-harvest, and almost none of the people doing the growing, harvesting, and drying had access to the knowledge or means of doing that production. This put them at a tremendous disadvantage in the market in part because their product has little use other than selling to chocolate producers, and the farmers are so cash poor that they can’t afford to wait for a better price, so if growers don’t like the price the buyer is offering, the buyer can just “starve them out.”

So he worked on developing the infrastructure (including roads), building the factory, acquiring the equipment, and training locals to do most of the post-harvest chocolate production on-site, which enabled them to capture much more of the economic benefit for themselves. The impact goes way beyond Fair Trade chocolate, provides jobs for women as well as men, and has been widely praised as a business model that creates a self-supporting economy for farmers rather than exploiting them for Western profit.

(They gave a presentation at the California Academy of Sciences “Night Life” series a couple of years ago, at a night that focused on chocolate. I was duly impressed - and their chocolate is really good!)