November 23, 2022 • 27 mins
On the edges of one of the world’s most stunning nature preserves, an ancient Mayan secret has been hiding in plain sight. Want some of this god-level chocolate? Kaleidoscope has joined forces with Luisa Abram and Stettler Chocolate to make a special box to go along with this very podcast. Just visit: www.stettler-chocolate.com to order your wild chocolate today. Like what you hear? Follow us @kscope_nyc on Twitter and Instagram.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:12):
I didn't want to do the nine five. I was
not going to take the normal path. I'm sitting in
a hammock in well paradise if your idea of paradise
is kind of the classic one. Lush rainforests, green hills,
clear streams, too many chattering birds and monkeys to count.
At night, the wood swarm with headlight beetles, which are
(00:34):
like giant fireflies. It feels like Pandora. I wanted to
go see some chocolate forests, and I wanted to go
catch sneaks and crocodiles and stuff that I did in
the hammock. Beside me is Jacob Marlin, and this is
his baby. The Belize Foundation for Research and Environmental Education
or be Free, I one thousand acre preserve in the
(00:55):
Maya Mountains, dotted with thatch huts and visiting biologists who
come here from all over the world to study what
a healthy rainforest is like. Beefree is right at the
juncture of several other huge preserves, including the Bladen Nature Reserve,
the crown jewel of Belize wilderness areas, which is why
Jacob bought it thirty years ago and has lived here
(01:16):
as its conservator ever since. It connects all the other
preserves into one massive wild forest. Jacob is laid back
dude in his fifties. His long hair parted in the middle.
Kind of reminds me of the actor Crispin Glover. He
came here as the reptile guy on a team of
biologists that were exploring the Bladon, which is famously remote
(01:38):
and inaccessible. As he hiked his way through it, Jacob
felt like he'd entered a time capsule. We went to
places that no human had been since St. Chimayah. We
came upon clay statues of monkey and jaguar gods. We
saw barrel grounds of maya stuff. Clearly no one had
been there. For the next two weeks, Jacob found himself
(02:00):
exploring a world straight out of a fantasy novel. You're like,
oh my god, I think I say a cave opening,
and then you go in there, and then you walk
for nine hours, and then you look down and fifty
feet below you there's a massive river flowing. And then
you look over there and there's like mine pottery and
skeletons and ship scattered over there. Then swim out the
cave and go over here, and then you find two
(02:21):
fifty spider monkeys swinging down. Then there's a jaguar over there.
That's what our expedition was like. It's lost the whole time.
I mean, we were all lost. It was madness, but
it was the best kind of madness, the kind he
wanted to devote his life too. When I came out,
I was completely blown away, and I was like, Oh
(02:43):
my god, this place is incredible. I wonder if I
could get involved in this place. In fact, the Blatant
was so full of wonders that he overlooked one of
them entirely. I remember passing wild cacao trees, which I
was like, Oh, it's a wild cocow. Who cares to Jacob,
cocao was agriculture and he was a nature guy. So
(03:03):
he devoted his life to preserving the big nature of
the Blatant and forgot all about the cacao. But little
did he know that that particular cocao hiding in plain
sight in the Maya Mountains would end up being the
key to protecting the very rainforest he devoted his life too,
and possibly a whole lot more. He was living with
(03:25):
ancient ghosts that had been waiting centuries to speak their
Peace of Kaleidoscope and i Heeart podcasts. This is Obsessions
Wild Chocolate. I'm Roman jameson chapter five Ghost Chocolate. The
(04:11):
Forest of Belieze contain more than a thousand species of trees,
astounding diversity. To Jacob, pacat was just one of those thousands.
But as he explored his preserved he began catching his
eye more and more. Some of the pods are one
color or another color or another color. Some are yellow
when they're ripe, Some are orange when they are oranges,
(04:32):
purple when they're right. Some are green when they're ripe.
Some are multi colored when they're right. It's different shapes,
a little bit different sizes. The trees had a lot
of diversity in appearance, but they had one very important
thing in common. Sometimes you'd walk up to a tree
it's and it's a nine percent shade to the middle
of the forest shade, and its covered ponds. To the
(04:55):
average person that might not sound like a big deal,
but to people who think about sustainable food production, that's
the holy grail. Think about every crop humans have cultivated,
corn rice, gale, whatever, They all need full sun. Same
for the modern strains of cacao, we've used for a century,
and that means that growing food often means wiping out
(05:17):
for us. And that's been especially true for cacao in
West Africa, destroying national parks. It's eradicating species. It's uh,
I'm like, fuck, caca is horrible, but not this cacao.
This stuff is weird. It is, it's weird. The trees
are different. These are not hardy, robust plants. These are
(05:41):
rainforest play they want you know, don't don't put them
in the sun. Don't give them any sun. These trees
do best in shade, and if you give them, lestie
die good. I know, I know. It's amazing, amazing because
a tree that could flourish and produce fruit in the
(06:02):
deep shade of the jungle that requires rainforests over its head, well,
that could turn farming into a way to grow new
rainforests and pay for it. So Jacob got super curious
about these cocoa trees, and the first step was to
find out how many he had. So in two thousand
twelve he hired Elmer Salama, a local mind, got to
(06:23):
map them. So I did the expedition for I think
like two three years. Find do them white trees, new jungles,
just wandering around. So I didn't have any GPS, just
my memories. And you're started cutting trialsutting trels on to leg,
(06:47):
you know. And I found it about almost like three
on the trees wild trees here, and it's out of
water place phenotypes. We have harpolo orange, who have guint
to yellow. We have um print to green. Then we
have multiple colors. Those are the four types of trees
(07:08):
they've identified, all named for the colors of their pods
as they ripen. All four are members of the same
shade loving variety, which Jacob hoped could be the engine
of his rainforest revival scheme if, of course, it produced
delicious chocolate. So it was like, well, shut up, man,
let's make some chocolate because if nothing else, we could
chocolate here like chocolate. Yeah, why not, just as like
(07:29):
a hobby. As we tore the preserve, Jacob and Elmer
offered to snag a couple of pods for me to
show me their special qualities. But the pods are twenty
feet up, like three four five. That's like five pods, guys,
most progress, yeah, yeah, because what we do be hardest
(07:50):
do bring along bush stick with h Yeah, gonna. Cahoons
are crazy palms. Their fronts could be thirty ft long,
shooting up from the ground. And these graceful arcs walking
through a Calhoun grove you expect to come upon a
Brontosaurus munging on them. The immense fronds are the go
to choice for roofing, and the sharp and central ribs
(08:12):
make awesome jousting lances for cutting to cow pods out
of trees. Get a catch here, thing you like? Oh
I see, so you just scrape scrape up the drunk
and got it and there it is in my hand.
To cow with some very unusual qualities. The multicolor and
the purple orange had close to like almost six cocoa
(08:33):
butts super high super high rich creamy chocolate. Some people
say it tastes like almost like milk chocolate. It's a
light brownish red shot, zero bitterness, there's nothing bitter about it,
and it doesn't even taste that much like chocolate. What
you think of his chocolate Like at first, Jacob's chocolate
making skills were limited, but he kept dialing it in
(08:55):
and so like every year about this time we go
out there with backpacks and and I'd bring up to
the station and make chocolate with him, and I'd experim him.
I'm learning, I'm trying to figure things out. People would
come through here and it's like that creole. You can't
believe that that stuff is probably really special. That word
creoio is a famous and sacred term in the world
(09:18):
of chocolate. But Jacob was only just discovering the treasure
he had on his hands. I'm learning about creb I
don't really know much about what that meant, but it's like, okay,
so it's it's a relic cocao. It's not prow much.
Creoa was the original cacao of the ancient mile the
variety they cultivated all over their empire and introduced the
Spanish and the fift hundreds. The smooth, creamy flavor of
(09:40):
creoia made chocolate a worldwide obsession. It was the only
chocolate anyone knew until the seventeen hundreds, when it began
to get wiped out by disease. Soon it was replaced
by hardier and more productive hybrid varieties, varieties that didn't
taste as good, but we're easier to draw, and those
varieties took over the world For decades, craft chocolate cares
(10:00):
have been scouring Central America for sources of Creoia. The
best they can usually find are hybrids that have a
percentage of creoo gens and a trace of that original
creole smoothness. Pure creoia. You never see it. But Jacob
began wondering about his three trees if there was anywhere
some old creoio strains could have escaped hybridization that was
(10:21):
in the middle of one of the most inaccessible rainforests
in the world. It's least explored, least disturbed, most unspoiled place.
Everything up there. It just feels like this stuff has
always been here, just old. So he embarked on a
new quest, find someone who would tell him just how
(10:43):
special this stuff was and find out if anyone cared.
I want to taste of some of this God love chocolate.
We got you covered. Kalia Scop has joined forces with
(11:03):
Louise Abram and Stetler Chocolate to make a special box
to go along with its very podcast Taste One has
driven many to near madness at www dot Stetler dash
Chocolate dot com. What I always remember is the smell,
(11:28):
just the smell of my ya Ya's kitchen during the summer.
Remember Matt Capoda, the Salt Lake, Delhi guy who became
America's heirloom chocolate champion. Matt credits his Greek grandmother for
his passion for rare ingredients and unusual flavors. She had
a tiny little plot in Salt Lake City. She grew
her own potatoes, dandylion greens. You know, her produce didn't
(11:51):
taste like the produce you could buy in the grocery store.
So I became accustomed to looking for flavors that don't
really exist in you know what has become a pretty
monoculture food system. Taste and smell are some of the
first most important ways that we make meaning of the
world around us. They're the raw material of experience, the
(12:12):
scaffolding upon which we hang our memories. They're the way
each generation passes its passions to the next. No matter
where you're from in the world, we have beautiful traditions,
delicious foods, incredibly rich ingredients that are disappearing at an
alarming rate over the years. Matt had built Caputos into
(12:32):
a show house for these cultural Touchsdownes, but he'd also
watched in dismay. As those flavors disappeared, it was harder
and harder to get, you know, a raw milk, pecorino, romano.
And I would see this trajectory in every category, not
just cheese, of things getting more and more homogenized, more
and more flavorless. As he watched industrial agriculture set fire
(12:56):
to the world's libraries of flavor, Matt became convinced that
he had to be a kind of librarian, preserving as
many of the great flavor manuscripts as he could, and
cacao seemed like a special case, with some of the
most endangered masterpieces of all he wanted to help. Then
he heard about a new initiative that captured his imagination,
the Heirloom Cacao Preservation Fund. The goal of the project
(13:18):
was to identify the world's great cocaws with an expert
tasting panel and to prove their uniqueness through genetic testing.
That certification would be the stamp of approval, drawing the
attention of Beam to Bar chocolate makers. The first designee
was an easy call, Volker Lehman and his Tranquilidad beans.
Soon other designees were added, including Emily Stones my Mountain
(13:40):
cocao in sen Jacob submitted the be free beans, hoping
they had enough Creoo parentage to be something special, and
soon enough he heard back from the committee congratulations, your
beans have made the cut. I heard that from one
of their board members. Oh, We're going to be announcing
this your pure CREOLEO in San Francisco at this big
(14:03):
chocolate event. And I was like, you are. I mean,
that sounds I'm coming. Thanks for not inviting me, but
I'm like, I'm sucking going to San Francisco. God damn it.
So he attends the awards ceremony. The audience is student
in fifty well dressed people in the world of chocolate,
and the m C is Ed Sege, a legend in
(14:23):
the fine chocolate industry, and to Jacob's amazement, ed is
getting all worked up over Jacob's beans and he's talking
about pure Creoo. It's the only pure cacao known in
the world. The tasting parils never tasted anything quite this
Araban before pure creator Parentidge blah blah blah, and I'm like,
(14:45):
what what does that even mean? And and then he's done,
and I was like, wait a minute. So I stand
up and I said, wait, a minute. I'm the guy
that submit of those means you're not gonna invite me up.
(15:06):
Jacob was just looking for a little love, but he
got a lot. After the ceremony, it was swarmed by
chocolate makers. Could they get some samples of those beans?
How about a few tons? Did he need a business partner?
He soon found out why. The expert tasting panel had
tasted Jacob's submission and found it to be a paragon
of smooth and silky chocolate. Then the genesis of the U. S.
(15:29):
D A did their thing and came away and shocked.
These beans weren't high in preoil content. They were a
hundred percent kreoia. In other words, this was the original
cow of the Maya, a direct line back to the
one that existed before Europeans ever got involved. Somehow, it
had hold up in the Maya Mountains for a thousand years,
(15:52):
and now it was ready for re entry. The panel's
declaration gave Jacob all the incentive he needed to try
to make that delicious, shade loving cow a flagship of
rainforest restoration, and those original three trees became sacred to him.
You know, we all touched these trees. Yeah, I don't
do anything. All we do is harvest pods, collect data,
and collect budwood. That budwood super important. Budwood is the
(16:16):
newly formed tips of branches that are used to grow
an exact duplicate of the mother tree. When Jacob returned
from his trip to the States, he's set to work planting.
We have almost ten thousand trees of this material now growing,
ten thousand trees, ten thousand baby creas, a forest of
ancient mind CaCO rising up in the Belize wilds, and
(16:38):
they are just the beginning. If Jacob has his way,
those ten thousand trees will give birth to a million more,
not just a bee free but anywhere anyone wants to
grow new rain forests and figure out a way to
pay for it. As a bonus, we'll all get to
experience this ghost of chocolate past. Jacob also became the
volunteer president of the air Land could Cow Preservation Fund,
(17:01):
which is now designated sixteen of the world's cocaos as
essential cultural heritage. That's helped bring recognition and a decent
income to the farmers who are keeping these masterpieces alive.
But it isn't always enough. Ironically, it couldn't save the
very first DESIGNI Vulgar Layman. After years of dodging bullet
(17:21):
after bullet in the jungle, he was about to take
one right in the heart. Everything went just upside down,
and all from one moment to the other. I thought
I was doing the good things, and all of a
sudden I was in turmoil. You know, the sky was
(17:42):
falling on my head. One thing I noticed right away
(18:11):
when I came back to Bolivia in was that whatever
romance the jungle had once held for Vulgar, it was
long gone. It seems like that the birds in in
the in the jungle, in the Amazone and in the
tropical here, they don't know how to sing. It seems
(18:33):
like they never went to singing school. And it most
and most of it is it's like more like shouting noise.
Uh like this, And there's one I maybe we're here.
We're here. It's like a like a dying sound. It's
(18:58):
it's like somebody is strangling the bird while he tries
to sing. Like that sounded like a different guy from
the one I had left on top of the world.
After our visit to the euro Care, they'd agreed to
provide fifteen tons of cacao, which meant he'd be delivering
(19:19):
forty five tons to felsh Lean three shipping containers. But
he needed serious capital. He needed to build a fermentation
center in the jungle, He needed boats, and he had
to hire people to do the buying and transporting for him.
Most of all, he needed cash to pay all the harvesters,
so he took on investors. It was a huge gamble,
(19:40):
but the first year it worked great. He produced more
cal than ever. The quality was awesome. Felsh Lean was
thrilled and he made his payments. It worked the next
year too. He felt like the system he'd always envisioned
in his mind was finally up and running. But in
three years into his business, the rains came even harder
than usual. The mom Rae flooded badly. I wasn't in
(20:04):
very good terms with the people, so I trusted them
and I asked him, would that be cacao? Yeah? Yeah,
there will be a lot of cacal, you know, but
give you us so much and repay you don't worry.
So he flashed fifty into the jungle, expecting to get
twice that much in cacao out of it. For weeks later,
(20:25):
the harvest trickled in just twenty worth of cocao. Vulker
was understanding despite the knot in his stomach. He said, fine,
whatever things get weird in the jungle, just give me
back the rest of the money. And his buyers said, well,
here's the thing. We gave the money to the pickers
(20:46):
and they spend it all. Sorry, thirty grand just evaporated
into the bush. What was he going to do? Bring
a legal case against the whole forest. He decided to
eat the losses himself. Liked the guys and they've had
a good track record until then. I said, that's not
a problem. Okay, you owe me so for the next year. Yeah,
(21:08):
next year, and so we we leveled this out. It's
not such a great deal. In other words, no worries.
Consider it an advance on next year's Kao. He comes
so close, and he just really didn't want to see
this one go down the tubes. He was now fully
emotionally invested. But then it was time to talk to
(21:28):
his lenders and explained that he couldn't make his payment
this year, and they were not emotionally invested. I said, okay,
this year I present a loss, and they said what
is the loss? Um, please explain you know, I said, yeah,
loss is when you don't have earnings. You know you
(21:50):
you're on the negative. Yeah. Negative is no good? Yeah.
Oh could we sue you? Yeah? Yeah, you have to
give us the money back. I said, the money is
with the people in the jungle. I explained it again
to you if you want, I'm happy to explain it again.
So I gave the money. The horfus was low. So
(22:11):
now we have to recover the loss. Oh loss, no no, no, no, no,
you have to give us a monthay, I said, I
have no money. Oh yeah, then we seize your as
it Okay. I ended up in a lawsuit, total fucking disaster,
(22:32):
leans on his house and on his business. He had
to declare bankruptcy. His marriage crumbled. Later, as we were
driving around Bolivia looking for a cowdibi, Walker confessed just
how devastating it all was to his life and his psyche.
I mean, it seems like it must have been hard
just personally to walk like when you just gotten all
(22:53):
that recognition, you knew you were making one of the
best chocolates in the world. It took me, um, you know,
from basically from fourteen to until last year actually to
recover um financially or personally, spiritually entirely. Yeah, everything, everything
(23:21):
a little bit because everything is interlinked, and you know,
and and I wanted to save ton Kilda, and I
wanted to save at least you know this part. Yes,
his creditors were coming for his glove and the cow
forest man. You must have been furious at a lot
of people. I had a little it was a section
(23:48):
of rage and now a pure rage. I would now
with a gun in my hand, I would have killed
some people. Maybe. Fortunately he didn't. In fact, at the
moment of maximum rage, when he thought he might explode,
he just let it all go. The lawsuits, the frustration,
(24:11):
the fury gone. The guys who just lost all his
money in the jungle. He knew they were hard up,
so we said, why don't you just live in my
house and trided ad for free until you get back
on your feet. Ever since, I'm calm. I'm much calm,
was than be far much more. Oh off, Budda is
(24:33):
is nothing. You know. I'm more calm than the river
Sitata was sitting at. Have you ever been in touch
with those guys? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you know
I saw. Yeah. Yeah, once in a while I remind
them to pay me and then they laugh and say, yeah, yeah,
(24:54):
we do. Is that just kind of how things work here? Yeah? Yeah,
Just forget about it and go off. It's like a
pant divorce. You know, you cannot suffer forever, you know,
you have to go on with your life. And he did.
In fact, he pulled a full Siddartha. He just decided
(25:18):
to walk away from Tranquila Dad, from Bolivia, from Cacao,
from everything, a new start. But he did need to
make good on his debts, so he took a job
as a consultant with Conservation International in Costa Rica, living
like a hermit, saving every penny. And with that, it
seemed like the dream of wild Cacao had died. Perhaps
(25:40):
it was just too hard, too remote, too iffy. A
successful coco business requires predictability, and Amazon eats predictability for breakfast.
But unbeknownst to Vulcar, even as he struggled to put
Coco out of his mind for good, the seeds were
taking hold on new ground, and the next crop of
cocaw lenders was about to blossom the same year he
(26:06):
was walking away from the Amazon Louisa Abraham was plunging
in year by year, just coming and just showing them
that I was not gonna be defeated, like I was
going to persist, And she wasn't going to let European
chocolate makers or loan sharks tell her how to operate.
(26:30):
She was going to do it all on her own terms.
A new hope next week on Obsessions Wild Chocolate. Wild
Chocolate is a Kaleidoscope production with I Heeart Podcasts, hosted
and reported by me Rowan Jacobson and produced by Shane
(26:51):
McKeon at Nice Marmot Media, Edited by Kate Osborne and
my Guest out of Kudor. Sound design and mixing by Soundboard.
Original music composition by NCER Stevenson, a k a Botany
production help from Baheeny Shorty from My Heart. Our executive
producers are Katrina Norbelle and Nikki Etre. Special thanks to
Laura Mayor, Costaslinos Ozwalash and Aaron Kaufman, Will Pearson, codel Burn,
(27:16):
Bob Pittman, Daria Daniel and the team at Stetler who
are helping us make a very special chocolate of our own.
That's right, we're working with Louisa and others to protect
the rainforest and make delicious Amazonian chocolate. Visit www Dot
Stetler dash Chocolate dot com to taste it for yourself.
That's www. Dot Stetler Dash Chocolate dot com And if
(27:39):
you want to hear more of this type of content.
Nothing is more important to the creators here at Kaleidoscope
than subscribers, ratings, and reviews. Please spread the love wherever
you listen.
I didn't want to do the nine five. I was
not going to take the normal path. I'm sitting in
a hammock in well paradise if your idea of paradise
is kind of the classic one. Lush rainforests, green hills,
clear streams, too many chattering birds and monkeys to count.
At night, the wood swarm with headlight beetles, which are
(00:34):
like giant fireflies. It feels like Pandora. I wanted to
go see some chocolate forests, and I wanted to go
catch sneaks and crocodiles and stuff that I did in
the hammock. Beside me is Jacob Marlin, and this is
his baby. The Belize Foundation for Research and Environmental Education
or be Free, I one thousand acre preserve in the
(00:55):
Maya Mountains, dotted with thatch huts and visiting biologists who
come here from all over the world to study what
a healthy rainforest is like. Beefree is right at the
juncture of several other huge preserves, including the Bladen Nature Reserve,
the crown jewel of Belize wilderness areas, which is why
Jacob bought it thirty years ago and has lived here
(01:16):
as its conservator ever since. It connects all the other
preserves into one massive wild forest. Jacob is laid back
dude in his fifties. His long hair parted in the middle.
Kind of reminds me of the actor Crispin Glover. He
came here as the reptile guy on a team of
biologists that were exploring the Bladon, which is famously remote
(01:38):
and inaccessible. As he hiked his way through it, Jacob
felt like he'd entered a time capsule. We went to
places that no human had been since St. Chimayah. We
came upon clay statues of monkey and jaguar gods. We
saw barrel grounds of maya stuff. Clearly no one had
been there. For the next two weeks, Jacob found himself
(02:00):
exploring a world straight out of a fantasy novel. You're like,
oh my god, I think I say a cave opening,
and then you go in there, and then you walk
for nine hours, and then you look down and fifty
feet below you there's a massive river flowing. And then
you look over there and there's like mine pottery and
skeletons and ship scattered over there. Then swim out the
cave and go over here, and then you find two
(02:21):
fifty spider monkeys swinging down. Then there's a jaguar over there.
That's what our expedition was like. It's lost the whole time.
I mean, we were all lost. It was madness, but
it was the best kind of madness, the kind he
wanted to devote his life too. When I came out,
I was completely blown away, and I was like, Oh
(02:43):
my god, this place is incredible. I wonder if I
could get involved in this place. In fact, the Blatant
was so full of wonders that he overlooked one of
them entirely. I remember passing wild cacao trees, which I
was like, Oh, it's a wild cocow. Who cares to Jacob,
cocao was agriculture and he was a nature guy. So
(03:03):
he devoted his life to preserving the big nature of
the Blatant and forgot all about the cacao. But little
did he know that that particular cocao hiding in plain
sight in the Maya Mountains would end up being the
key to protecting the very rainforest he devoted his life too,
and possibly a whole lot more. He was living with
(03:25):
ancient ghosts that had been waiting centuries to speak their
Peace of Kaleidoscope and i Heeart podcasts. This is Obsessions
Wild Chocolate. I'm Roman jameson chapter five Ghost Chocolate. The
(04:11):
Forest of Belieze contain more than a thousand species of trees,
astounding diversity. To Jacob, pacat was just one of those thousands.
But as he explored his preserved he began catching his
eye more and more. Some of the pods are one
color or another color or another color. Some are yellow
when they're ripe, Some are orange when they are oranges,
(04:32):
purple when they're right. Some are green when they're ripe.
Some are multi colored when they're right. It's different shapes,
a little bit different sizes. The trees had a lot
of diversity in appearance, but they had one very important
thing in common. Sometimes you'd walk up to a tree
it's and it's a nine percent shade to the middle
of the forest shade, and its covered ponds. To the
(04:55):
average person that might not sound like a big deal,
but to people who think about sustainable food production, that's
the holy grail. Think about every crop humans have cultivated,
corn rice, gale, whatever, They all need full sun. Same
for the modern strains of cacao, we've used for a century,
and that means that growing food often means wiping out
(05:17):
for us. And that's been especially true for cacao in
West Africa, destroying national parks. It's eradicating species. It's uh,
I'm like, fuck, caca is horrible, but not this cacao.
This stuff is weird. It is, it's weird. The trees
are different. These are not hardy, robust plants. These are
(05:41):
rainforest play they want you know, don't don't put them
in the sun. Don't give them any sun. These trees
do best in shade, and if you give them, lestie
die good. I know, I know. It's amazing, amazing because
a tree that could flourish and produce fruit in the
(06:02):
deep shade of the jungle that requires rainforests over its head, well,
that could turn farming into a way to grow new
rainforests and pay for it. So Jacob got super curious
about these cocoa trees, and the first step was to
find out how many he had. So in two thousand
twelve he hired Elmer Salama, a local mind, got to
(06:23):
map them. So I did the expedition for I think
like two three years. Find do them white trees, new jungles,
just wandering around. So I didn't have any GPS, just
my memories. And you're started cutting trialsutting trels on to leg,
(06:47):
you know. And I found it about almost like three
on the trees wild trees here, and it's out of
water place phenotypes. We have harpolo orange, who have guint
to yellow. We have um print to green. Then we
have multiple colors. Those are the four types of trees
(07:08):
they've identified, all named for the colors of their pods
as they ripen. All four are members of the same
shade loving variety, which Jacob hoped could be the engine
of his rainforest revival scheme if, of course, it produced
delicious chocolate. So it was like, well, shut up, man,
let's make some chocolate because if nothing else, we could
chocolate here like chocolate. Yeah, why not, just as like
(07:29):
a hobby. As we tore the preserve, Jacob and Elmer
offered to snag a couple of pods for me to
show me their special qualities. But the pods are twenty
feet up, like three four five. That's like five pods, guys,
most progress, yeah, yeah, because what we do be hardest
(07:50):
do bring along bush stick with h Yeah, gonna. Cahoons
are crazy palms. Their fronts could be thirty ft long,
shooting up from the ground. And these graceful arcs walking
through a Calhoun grove you expect to come upon a
Brontosaurus munging on them. The immense fronds are the go
to choice for roofing, and the sharp and central ribs
(08:12):
make awesome jousting lances for cutting to cow pods out
of trees. Get a catch here, thing you like? Oh
I see, so you just scrape scrape up the drunk
and got it and there it is in my hand.
To cow with some very unusual qualities. The multicolor and
the purple orange had close to like almost six cocoa
(08:33):
butts super high super high rich creamy chocolate. Some people
say it tastes like almost like milk chocolate. It's a
light brownish red shot, zero bitterness, there's nothing bitter about it,
and it doesn't even taste that much like chocolate. What
you think of his chocolate Like at first, Jacob's chocolate
making skills were limited, but he kept dialing it in
(08:55):
and so like every year about this time we go
out there with backpacks and and I'd bring up to
the station and make chocolate with him, and I'd experim him.
I'm learning, I'm trying to figure things out. People would
come through here and it's like that creole. You can't
believe that that stuff is probably really special. That word
creoio is a famous and sacred term in the world
(09:18):
of chocolate. But Jacob was only just discovering the treasure
he had on his hands. I'm learning about creb I
don't really know much about what that meant, but it's like, okay,
so it's it's a relic cocao. It's not prow much.
Creoa was the original cacao of the ancient mile the
variety they cultivated all over their empire and introduced the
Spanish and the fift hundreds. The smooth, creamy flavor of
(09:40):
creoia made chocolate a worldwide obsession. It was the only
chocolate anyone knew until the seventeen hundreds, when it began
to get wiped out by disease. Soon it was replaced
by hardier and more productive hybrid varieties, varieties that didn't
taste as good, but we're easier to draw, and those
varieties took over the world For decades, craft chocolate cares
(10:00):
have been scouring Central America for sources of Creoia. The
best they can usually find are hybrids that have a
percentage of creoo gens and a trace of that original
creole smoothness. Pure creoia. You never see it. But Jacob
began wondering about his three trees if there was anywhere
some old creoio strains could have escaped hybridization that was
(10:21):
in the middle of one of the most inaccessible rainforests
in the world. It's least explored, least disturbed, most unspoiled place.
Everything up there. It just feels like this stuff has
always been here, just old. So he embarked on a
new quest, find someone who would tell him just how
(10:43):
special this stuff was and find out if anyone cared.
I want to taste of some of this God love chocolate.
We got you covered. Kalia Scop has joined forces with
(11:03):
Louise Abram and Stetler Chocolate to make a special box
to go along with its very podcast Taste One has
driven many to near madness at www dot Stetler dash
Chocolate dot com. What I always remember is the smell,
(11:28):
just the smell of my ya Ya's kitchen during the summer.
Remember Matt Capoda, the Salt Lake, Delhi guy who became
America's heirloom chocolate champion. Matt credits his Greek grandmother for
his passion for rare ingredients and unusual flavors. She had
a tiny little plot in Salt Lake City. She grew
her own potatoes, dandylion greens. You know, her produce didn't
(11:51):
taste like the produce you could buy in the grocery store.
So I became accustomed to looking for flavors that don't
really exist in you know what has become a pretty
monoculture food system. Taste and smell are some of the
first most important ways that we make meaning of the
world around us. They're the raw material of experience, the
(12:12):
scaffolding upon which we hang our memories. They're the way
each generation passes its passions to the next. No matter
where you're from in the world, we have beautiful traditions,
delicious foods, incredibly rich ingredients that are disappearing at an
alarming rate over the years. Matt had built Caputos into
(12:32):
a show house for these cultural Touchsdownes, but he'd also
watched in dismay. As those flavors disappeared, it was harder
and harder to get, you know, a raw milk, pecorino, romano.
And I would see this trajectory in every category, not
just cheese, of things getting more and more homogenized, more
and more flavorless. As he watched industrial agriculture set fire
(12:56):
to the world's libraries of flavor, Matt became convinced that
he had to be a kind of librarian, preserving as
many of the great flavor manuscripts as he could, and
cacao seemed like a special case, with some of the
most endangered masterpieces of all he wanted to help. Then
he heard about a new initiative that captured his imagination,
the Heirloom Cacao Preservation Fund. The goal of the project
(13:18):
was to identify the world's great cocaws with an expert
tasting panel and to prove their uniqueness through genetic testing.
That certification would be the stamp of approval, drawing the
attention of Beam to Bar chocolate makers. The first designee
was an easy call, Volker Lehman and his Tranquilidad beans.
Soon other designees were added, including Emily Stones my Mountain
(13:40):
cocao in sen Jacob submitted the be free beans, hoping
they had enough Creoo parentage to be something special, and
soon enough he heard back from the committee congratulations, your
beans have made the cut. I heard that from one
of their board members. Oh, We're going to be announcing
this your pure CREOLEO in San Francisco at this big
(14:03):
chocolate event. And I was like, you are. I mean,
that sounds I'm coming. Thanks for not inviting me, but
I'm like, I'm sucking going to San Francisco. God damn it.
So he attends the awards ceremony. The audience is student
in fifty well dressed people in the world of chocolate,
and the m C is Ed Sege, a legend in
(14:23):
the fine chocolate industry, and to Jacob's amazement, ed is
getting all worked up over Jacob's beans and he's talking
about pure Creoo. It's the only pure cacao known in
the world. The tasting parils never tasted anything quite this
Araban before pure creator Parentidge blah blah blah, and I'm like,
(14:45):
what what does that even mean? And and then he's done,
and I was like, wait a minute. So I stand
up and I said, wait, a minute. I'm the guy
that submit of those means you're not gonna invite me up.
(15:06):
Jacob was just looking for a little love, but he
got a lot. After the ceremony, it was swarmed by
chocolate makers. Could they get some samples of those beans?
How about a few tons? Did he need a business partner?
He soon found out why. The expert tasting panel had
tasted Jacob's submission and found it to be a paragon
of smooth and silky chocolate. Then the genesis of the U. S.
(15:29):
D A did their thing and came away and shocked.
These beans weren't high in preoil content. They were a
hundred percent kreoia. In other words, this was the original
cow of the Maya, a direct line back to the
one that existed before Europeans ever got involved. Somehow, it
had hold up in the Maya Mountains for a thousand years,
(15:52):
and now it was ready for re entry. The panel's
declaration gave Jacob all the incentive he needed to try
to make that delicious, shade loving cow a flagship of
rainforest restoration, and those original three trees became sacred to him.
You know, we all touched these trees. Yeah, I don't
do anything. All we do is harvest pods, collect data,
and collect budwood. That budwood super important. Budwood is the
(16:16):
newly formed tips of branches that are used to grow
an exact duplicate of the mother tree. When Jacob returned
from his trip to the States, he's set to work planting.
We have almost ten thousand trees of this material now growing,
ten thousand trees, ten thousand baby creas, a forest of
ancient mind CaCO rising up in the Belize wilds, and
(16:38):
they are just the beginning. If Jacob has his way,
those ten thousand trees will give birth to a million more,
not just a bee free but anywhere anyone wants to
grow new rain forests and figure out a way to
pay for it. As a bonus, we'll all get to
experience this ghost of chocolate past. Jacob also became the
volunteer president of the air Land could Cow Preservation Fund,
(17:01):
which is now designated sixteen of the world's cocaos as
essential cultural heritage. That's helped bring recognition and a decent
income to the farmers who are keeping these masterpieces alive.
But it isn't always enough. Ironically, it couldn't save the
very first DESIGNI Vulgar Layman. After years of dodging bullet
(17:21):
after bullet in the jungle, he was about to take
one right in the heart. Everything went just upside down,
and all from one moment to the other. I thought
I was doing the good things, and all of a
sudden I was in turmoil. You know, the sky was
(17:42):
falling on my head. One thing I noticed right away
(18:11):
when I came back to Bolivia in was that whatever
romance the jungle had once held for Vulgar, it was
long gone. It seems like that the birds in in
the in the jungle, in the Amazone and in the
tropical here, they don't know how to sing. It seems
(18:33):
like they never went to singing school. And it most
and most of it is it's like more like shouting noise.
Uh like this, And there's one I maybe we're here.
We're here. It's like a like a dying sound. It's
(18:58):
it's like somebody is strangling the bird while he tries
to sing. Like that sounded like a different guy from
the one I had left on top of the world.
After our visit to the euro Care, they'd agreed to
provide fifteen tons of cacao, which meant he'd be delivering
(19:19):
forty five tons to felsh Lean three shipping containers. But
he needed serious capital. He needed to build a fermentation
center in the jungle, He needed boats, and he had
to hire people to do the buying and transporting for him.
Most of all, he needed cash to pay all the harvesters,
so he took on investors. It was a huge gamble,
(19:40):
but the first year it worked great. He produced more
cal than ever. The quality was awesome. Felsh Lean was
thrilled and he made his payments. It worked the next
year too. He felt like the system he'd always envisioned
in his mind was finally up and running. But in
three years into his business, the rains came even harder
than usual. The mom Rae flooded badly. I wasn't in
(20:04):
very good terms with the people, so I trusted them
and I asked him, would that be cacao? Yeah? Yeah,
there will be a lot of cacal, you know, but
give you us so much and repay you don't worry.
So he flashed fifty into the jungle, expecting to get
twice that much in cacao out of it. For weeks later,
(20:25):
the harvest trickled in just twenty worth of cocao. Vulker
was understanding despite the knot in his stomach. He said, fine,
whatever things get weird in the jungle, just give me
back the rest of the money. And his buyers said, well,
here's the thing. We gave the money to the pickers
(20:46):
and they spend it all. Sorry, thirty grand just evaporated
into the bush. What was he going to do? Bring
a legal case against the whole forest. He decided to
eat the losses himself. Liked the guys and they've had
a good track record until then. I said, that's not
a problem. Okay, you owe me so for the next year. Yeah,
(21:08):
next year, and so we we leveled this out. It's
not such a great deal. In other words, no worries.
Consider it an advance on next year's Kao. He comes
so close, and he just really didn't want to see
this one go down the tubes. He was now fully
emotionally invested. But then it was time to talk to
(21:28):
his lenders and explained that he couldn't make his payment
this year, and they were not emotionally invested. I said, okay,
this year I present a loss, and they said what
is the loss? Um, please explain you know, I said, yeah,
loss is when you don't have earnings. You know you
(21:50):
you're on the negative. Yeah. Negative is no good? Yeah.
Oh could we sue you? Yeah? Yeah, you have to
give us the money back. I said, the money is
with the people in the jungle. I explained it again
to you if you want, I'm happy to explain it again.
So I gave the money. The horfus was low. So
(22:11):
now we have to recover the loss. Oh loss, no no, no, no, no,
you have to give us a monthay, I said, I
have no money. Oh yeah, then we seize your as
it Okay. I ended up in a lawsuit, total fucking disaster,
(22:32):
leans on his house and on his business. He had
to declare bankruptcy. His marriage crumbled. Later, as we were
driving around Bolivia looking for a cowdibi, Walker confessed just
how devastating it all was to his life and his psyche.
I mean, it seems like it must have been hard
just personally to walk like when you just gotten all
(22:53):
that recognition, you knew you were making one of the
best chocolates in the world. It took me, um, you know,
from basically from fourteen to until last year actually to
recover um financially or personally, spiritually entirely. Yeah, everything, everything
(23:21):
a little bit because everything is interlinked, and you know,
and and I wanted to save ton Kilda, and I
wanted to save at least you know this part. Yes,
his creditors were coming for his glove and the cow
forest man. You must have been furious at a lot
of people. I had a little it was a section
(23:48):
of rage and now a pure rage. I would now
with a gun in my hand, I would have killed
some people. Maybe. Fortunately he didn't. In fact, at the
moment of maximum rage, when he thought he might explode,
he just let it all go. The lawsuits, the frustration,
(24:11):
the fury gone. The guys who just lost all his
money in the jungle. He knew they were hard up,
so we said, why don't you just live in my
house and trided ad for free until you get back
on your feet. Ever since, I'm calm. I'm much calm,
was than be far much more. Oh off, Budda is
(24:33):
is nothing. You know. I'm more calm than the river
Sitata was sitting at. Have you ever been in touch
with those guys? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you know
I saw. Yeah. Yeah, once in a while I remind
them to pay me and then they laugh and say, yeah, yeah,
(24:54):
we do. Is that just kind of how things work here? Yeah? Yeah,
Just forget about it and go off. It's like a
pant divorce. You know, you cannot suffer forever, you know,
you have to go on with your life. And he did.
In fact, he pulled a full Siddartha. He just decided
(25:18):
to walk away from Tranquila Dad, from Bolivia, from Cacao,
from everything, a new start. But he did need to
make good on his debts, so he took a job
as a consultant with Conservation International in Costa Rica, living
like a hermit, saving every penny. And with that, it
seemed like the dream of wild Cacao had died. Perhaps
(25:40):
it was just too hard, too remote, too iffy. A
successful coco business requires predictability, and Amazon eats predictability for breakfast.
But unbeknownst to Vulcar, even as he struggled to put
Coco out of his mind for good, the seeds were
taking hold on new ground, and the next crop of
cocaw lenders was about to blossom the same year he
(26:06):
was walking away from the Amazon Louisa Abraham was plunging
in year by year, just coming and just showing them
that I was not gonna be defeated, like I was
going to persist, And she wasn't going to let European
chocolate makers or loan sharks tell her how to operate.
(26:30):
She was going to do it all on her own terms.
A new hope next week on Obsessions Wild Chocolate. Wild
Chocolate is a Kaleidoscope production with I Heeart Podcasts, hosted
and reported by me Rowan Jacobson and produced by Shane
(26:51):
McKeon at Nice Marmot Media, Edited by Kate Osborne and
my Guest out of Kudor. Sound design and mixing by Soundboard.
Original music composition by NCER Stevenson, a k a Botany
production help from Baheeny Shorty from My Heart. Our executive
producers are Katrina Norbelle and Nikki Etre. Special thanks to
Laura Mayor, Costaslinos Ozwalash and Aaron Kaufman, Will Pearson, codel Burn,
(27:16):
Bob Pittman, Daria Daniel and the team at Stetler who
are helping us make a very special chocolate of our own.
That's right, we're working with Louisa and others to protect
the rainforest and make delicious Amazonian chocolate. Visit www Dot
Stetler dash Chocolate dot com to taste it for yourself.
That's www. Dot Stetler Dash Chocolate dot com And if
(27:39):
you want to hear more of this type of content.
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