Rowan Jacobsen (Bloomsbury Publishing)
I thought I knew the basics about the chocolate industry. Most comes from hundreds of thousands of small cocoa farms in Ghana and Ivory Coast. Many of these use child labour – a truth well hidden in the exquisite confections a lot of us are working our way through this January.
Rowan Jacobsen’s new book Wild Chocolate: Across the Americas in search of cacao’s soul doesn’t tell this story in detail. Instead, Jacobsen, a science writer, spins a narrower tale – one for which the author has put himself in the crosshairs for well over a decade. It is a story of wild chocolate, a product that, as its name suggests, attracts danger and adventure.
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Deep in some of the world’s most remote rainforests in South and Central America, wild cocoa trees with beans of all different shapes and colours grow. If expertly harvested, the beans can be used to make the world’s best chocolate.
It is a subset of these trees that was brought to West Africa by European colonisers. Following independence from British rule, Ghana invested heavily in its cocoa production, and Ivory Coast quickly followed suit. Now, most of the chocolate we eat comes from this strain of West African trees – bred to be robust and yield large quantities of cocoa beans that, according to Jacobsen, make chocolate with a “fudgy, astringent flavour”.
The original cocoa strains of Central America were left behind, so Jacobsen thought, until he tasted a chocolate bar called Cru Sauvage, which its maker claimed was the first made entirely from wild cocoa that grew in the Bolivian rainforest.
“It melted like silk,” writes Jacobsen. “The flavor dove into a deep, dark place, and then, just when I thought I had a handle on it, the bottom fell out and it dove some more.” Soon after this first mouthful, Jacobsen flew to the Bolivian jungle to meet Volker Lehmann, the eccentric German agroforestry expert behind Cru Sauvage. He found him at the landing strip, alongside four gun-toting men. The explanation is simple, if stark: the Bolivian rainforest may be an excellent location for rare cocoa plants, but it is also a prime spot for illegal drugs manufacturing.
Reading through this often nerve-racking story, we sweat alongside Jacobsen as he travels into the hearts of Central American jungles dripping with humidity and black flies. This is a world where “cocoa detectives” exist and experts wax lyrical, describing chocolate as a “symphony orchestra”.
We meet people with big dreams who believe they can protect the rainforest by turning ancient strains of cocoa trees into a valuable commodity. We know of 10 or so families – or genetic clusters – of cocoa, but Jacobsen expects there are many more to discover: the latest grouping to be found, the Juruá, is the first with fully red seed pods, for instance.
Saving them isn’t easy. The trees are in some of the world’s most remote places, where setting up effective methods to dry and ferment the beans is no mean feat. So, while Wild Chocolate opens up a new world of ancient and fantastical cocoa trees that are just waiting to be harvested, it is also obvious that there is no guaranteed way to monetise these plants – the economics are too finely balanced.
If I had any criticism, it is that I would have liked to hear more from the Indigenous peoples who harvest wild cocoa. They could help with questions, such as how difficult is it to pick the pods? What happens during severe floods, like those that hit Bolivia in 2019? And will climate change destroy this enterprise?
The book has changed the way I look at chocolate. I think it will do the same for a lot of readers.
Jason Arunn Murugesu is a writer based in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
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