October 26, 2022 • 36 mins
Things get off to a rocky start when the team accidentally crashes into a major cocaine flyway. 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.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
I'm in the co pilot seat of this small Cessna
plane and we're circling the Bolivian Amazon. Beside me, pilot
sweating because we're looking for a place to land and
we can't find one. The weather was bad and and
the pilot was nervous, and it was it was quite exciting.
(00:38):
Behind me. Is this guy just been a day ago?
This German accou hunter named Volker Lahman. Bolker looks a
bit like the German director Werner Herzog. Sounds like him too.
The more dangerous or tricky the situation dance of the
kalmar Get. It's two thousand ten, and Folker's letting me
tag along. If you searches for a holy grail while
(00:59):
cocao tree that gives us chocolate. Coco's native to the Amazon,
and now it's farmed all over the tropics, mostly in Africa.
A few years before our trip, Focus stumbled upon an
incredible variety of wild cow in Bolivia and he turned
it into this mind blowing chocolate. So now there's a
gold rush for these magic beans, and Volker's hope is
to stay one step ahead. There's an indigenous group in
(01:22):
the forest of the Europare. Rumor has it they have
a ton of wildcata cell So the plan is fly in,
find a landing strip, take a dugout canoe to the
Eurokari village, strike a deal below us. The jungle looks otherworldly.
(01:43):
The whole thing is steaming, miss rising to form these
immense thunderheads, and the thunderheads are dropping ropes black rain
back to the forest. At one point we punched through
a storm and water comes spitting through the vents of
the plain. Shoot a glance at the pilot, like what,
but he just waves me off. It's getting hard to
(02:05):
tell what to worry about and what not to worry about.
For that, all I can do is counting vulgar because
he's been navigating the Amazon for twenty years. This part
of Olivia is all rainforests and grasslands. It's also a
major cocaine flyaway. The rivers are dotted with these homemade
landing strips and small planes swoop in, pick up the drugs,
(02:25):
and head for Brazil. Those landing strips are super convenient
if you need to get into the deepoots quickly, which
we do, but it's also super dangerous. Hundreds of people
get shot in the Amazon every year for all sorts
of reasons. Just being an environmental activist is enough, But
stumbling upon a cocaine lab that's one of the surest
(02:46):
ways to make it happen. But when you need a
landing strip, you need a landing strip. The problem is
that it's the rainy season and everything is fly it.
The rivers have risen like thirty feet, The trees are
in standing water, the ground is gleaming like a mirror.
(03:08):
At last, there's a strip near a small cabin on
the river, but it's really short. The rain swamped part
of the landing strip, and the landing strip was homemade. No,
it's not official landing strip. The pilot swoops down to
get a closer look, and he doesn't like what he sees,
and neither do I. He pulls back up and circles
(03:31):
the area looking for alternatives, but there are no alternatives.
The pilot keeps circling back to that original strip. He's
trying to psych himself up, and for all I know,
we're running well on fuel. Get vulcars still sitting there
like it's another day in the park. And that is
making me more nervous because I can tell that his
(03:51):
appetite for risk is a lot higher than mine. And
then the pilot banks the plane towards that strip. For second,
I think, well, this must be another reconnaissance run, because
nobody would. Oh no, he's going for it right now.
The ground is rising in front of us fast. So
I grabbed the handle above the door, tucked my head
(04:13):
and brace and we hit actually hits the wrong word.
It's super soft thanks to all that spongey ground. So
we break hard and slammed the stop spraying puddles, and
I'm like, holy sh it, we made it. So I
(04:37):
grabbed my back and hop out. Vulkers behind me and
it's like, hello Amazon. It's a cathedral. When you're on
the ground, there's these massive trees that are dripping thick fines.
There's flocks of actual parrots screeching through the canopy. And
then from that little cabin up ahead, four guys emerge
and they're holding rifles. There were like one guy coming,
(05:01):
and then the second, and the third and the fourth,
and then they were surrounding us. And I was looking
at the pilot and he said, I have to leave
because of the weather, and you know, nobody said anything,
and so he turned around this plane and off he
off he went, and then I realized, oh, we are
(05:22):
in the middle of some people we don't know. I
was nervous. I am trying not to make any fast
moves because these guys are twitchy. Everything they say confirmed
my worst fears. They're watching the place for their boss,
who's a Columbian man, and we've just landed on his
private runway without permission. And I've been in the Amazon
(05:43):
for all five minutes, and I'm starting to wonder if
maybe I'm not really cut out of this cacao anything.
And all I can do is look over vulgar and think,
I hope the hell you got this from Kaleidostoe and
I podcasts. This is Obsessions Wild Chocolate. I'm Rowan Jacobson,
(06:06):
Chapter one, The Hunt. So one thing I should explain
(06:35):
is that I'm a food writer, but not a normal
food writer. I don't write cookbooks or restaurant reviews. Instead,
the thing I do is harder to explain. This is
All Things Considered from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block. Listen
to how Rowan Jacobson describes a temperamental mollusk. I kind
of think of these as the Sean pen of oysters
(06:56):
like very intense and memorable, but you wouldn't want have
him every day. Rowan Jacobson talks about oysters the way
a lover might recall his favorite conquests. You have to
think about the after globe. See what I mean. My
call is to bring amazing ingredients to life, to use
intense sensory experience as a wormhole to jump into a
(07:18):
universe of exotic landscapes, diverse traditions, revelations, and obsessions. Back
in two thousand nine, I was writing a book about
the world's best ingredients, and I was working on chapter
about chocolate. Chocolate, of course, is on anybody's shortlist of
great ingredients, as it should be. It's our most complex food.
(07:39):
It has more than six hundred different flavor components. If
you think of flavor as a kind of language away
the world communicates to us through our senses, then chocolate
is like epic poetry. It speaks in these lush, rhythmic
phrases that sweep over us and sometimes sweep us away
at good chocolate does. But the stuff you find in
(08:02):
your typical candy aisle that's more brain fart than epic poem.
There's just not that much chocolate in your average chocolate bar,
and the quality is nothing special. Just like great wine
requires great grapes, epic chocolate requires the very best cacalbeans,
and those are really hard to find. For decades, nobody
outside the Amazon was really looking for them. Now that's change.
(08:25):
A new wave of extreme chocolate makers is seeking out
the best of the best and using it to make
the most intensely delicious chocolate that has ever been made,
chocolate that is so different from what has come before
that the experience is like some sort of drug. In
two thousand nine, I was tasting my way through these
trippy bars from my book, and it kept coming across
(08:46):
rumors about the trippiest of them all. Supposedly it was
the first bar in history that wasn't made out of
farm to cacab This one was all wild, sourced from
the Amazon rainforest itself, and it tasted like nothing that
had come before. Well. Summoning all of my journalistic skills,
I managed to track down a bar. I had to
order it from Switzerland and it cost me twenty six
(09:07):
bucks was shipping, but a week later the FedEx truck
dropped the hot little box on my porch and I
tore it open. The bars cloaked in snazzy Swiss wrapping,
slid off the sleeve and part of the gold foil
to reveal a thin plank of chocolate embossed with a feather.
I snapped off a shard, placed it on my tongue,
(09:29):
and the bottom fell out of the room. It melted
like silk, not a trace of bitterness. There's these notes
of dried fruit and pipe smoke dancing through my sinuses.
It was like finding an old chest in your grandparents
attic and sticking your nose inside and breathing in the centuries.
(09:53):
It was delicious, for sure, but that was almost beside
the point for something else going on, something metaphysical. I
don't really have the word for it. All I can
say is, compared to all the chocolate I've known, this
one tasted real. I wanted more of this wild chocolate,
this wild experience, and I resolved to find someone who
(10:15):
could lead me into this thicket of flavors. What I
couldn't have known at the time was that seeking the
answers to those questions was going to lead me into
the rainforest again and again in the shadowed laws, civilizations,
and in the company of some extraordinary people obsessed with
(10:36):
making god level chocolate. It was frequently going to leave
me soaked, bitten, miserable, and miles from the nearest bed.
It was going to expose me to chocolate's dark history
of exploitation and environmental destruction. But it was also going
to show me cocow's sacred side and how can we
used to protect the rainforest. But on that day in
(10:58):
two thousand nine, I just wanted to know if the
story was true, if this mythical wild cacao really existed.
The chocolate maker said it was being supplied from Bolivia
by a man named Vulgar Layman. And that's how I
met the Herzog of coco hunting over Skype. Hello. Hey.
(11:19):
When I told him that people I asked had never
heard of wild cacao, he just laughed. He said, most
people in the business have never even seen a cocountry,
much less step foot in the rainforest. Basically, they were idiots,
not close to being on his level. I go at
ahead of the pank. Everybody behind me, No, still trying
to catch me. Somehow not possible. I like the intensity
(11:49):
he seemed to have swagger. He said, he was taking
a trip into your car a territory in search of
new sources. So why not come and see for myself
what type of details you want me tool send you?
Maybe the plant, the logistics. Yeah, I just want just yeah,
where you want me and when? Basically, um, and then
(12:09):
I'll run it by the podcast people who are interested.
They give you money, yeah, hopefully they I'll make sure
that they can cover my my flights and so on. Yeah,
and then little money and for the steaks and beers
and oh yeah, okay, yeah, I pictured that's paddling up
(12:30):
a river, joining in wild chocolate ceremonies, rivers of molten
deliciousness pouring down our chins. That was the plan anyway,
Are there snakes to worry about? They are? Okay. That
was age very large crocodile, which brings me back to
(13:03):
that landing strip. We're staring at these twittery guys with guns,
and I know what they're thinking. For two white dudes
to drop out of an airplane in this region means
one of two things. Either they think we're undercovered DA
or they think we're traffickers, and either way is not good.
It seems like that it was close to the weekend
(13:24):
and they needed some money to buy food and booze.
So I said myself, okay, they have a need to
give money, and we have the need to get out
of it. So he says, no problem with guys, what's
the landing feed and the guys just look at each other,
and finally one says five thousand bolivianos, which is about
seven fifty bucks. And I'm thinking, oh my god, that's
(13:48):
a pretty good deal. We've definitely got enough to swing that.
And before I can get there, Bulker says, stone faced, sorry,
we don't have that much. I said, look, I am myself.
I'm poor. And he started looking at me and like, well,
what what a story, you know? And they said, okay,
(14:09):
you know, look, I represent a small project and and
we're doing with Cacao. We're dealing with the indigenous Jura
care people. I'm listening to Votres explanation and I can't
tell how persuaded these guys are. Just then Vulgar pulls
out five hundred bilianos, which is only seventy five bucks,
(14:32):
and offers it up. I take a deep breath and watch,
and the guy relaxes and takes the money, and then
his buddies relax and suddenly the whole five changes and
they invite us to sit down and have a drink.
So we're making small talk. He actually want a tool,
(14:53):
give me as a gift a book. It was a
beat up John Grisham paperback someone had left behind. It
was in English. So they us part and I said, no,
keep it. You know, we want to travel light until
use the money and think of her much and see
you there you go how to win friends and influence
people in the Amazon. After paying off our new friends,
(15:15):
Bolker and I make our way down to the river.
Two guys are waiting for us in a long, skinny
dugout with an outboard on the back. Aurelio has a
white gambler hat, a mustache, a cigarette, and a rifle.
Talked into the bow of the canoe full cowboy vibe.
In the back of the boat, the pilot Dante, a
(15:36):
big guy with the scruppy beard, a huge wad of
coca leaves stuffed into his bulgian cheek. We threw our
stuff into the middle of the canoe and wedge ourselves
in between, trying not to capsize the thing. All right,
here goes nothing. Any last words before we launched the voyage,
I don't never have last words. This is not the
(15:56):
end at all. I want to taste of some of
this god level chocolate. We got you covered. Kaliscope has
joined forces with Louise Abram and Stetler Chocolate to make
(16:18):
a special box to go along with its very podcast
taste what has driven many to near madness at www
dot Stetler dash Chocolate dot com. Chocolate is a Mayan
(16:40):
thing a thousand years before Europeans crossed the Atlantic, the
Maya we're already growing cacao all over Central America and
using it for rituals and ceremonies. Maya people are the
forced people. Known people used it, concurvated, domesticated it and
for us. But it's a gift from the heavens above.
(17:01):
That's Julio's the key. He's a man and elder. I
met and belieze. Julia has a chocolate company, but he
also does demonstrations of traditional Mayan chocolate making. There's a
way of teaching others what cacow means to his people.
We stood in his dashed hut just off the highway
while trucks rattled by as he toasted cacow beans over
a wooden fire, then ground them between two stones to
(17:23):
form a paste. Then he mixed the paste with hot
water and whipped the drink into a froth. This is
how his mother did it before him, and her mother
before her, sharing the drink and burning the beans on
an altar is believed. This is our belief that the
prayers that we're seeing, the tanks that we're saying, to
the jungle, to the rainforest, to the wind, to the breeze,
(17:44):
to the mountains, to the soil, our ancestors would feel
it would take it. And this is what we strongly
believe the connection is with between the upper world on
the the lower world where we are to it. So
for usc is essentially it's food. He's like talking about
food being a religious experience, but traditionally the creation and
(18:06):
consumption of chocolate is just that. Needless to say, that
was lost on the first European to encounter cacao, a
guy named Christopher Columbus. It was August and Columbus was
on his fourth and final voyage to the New World.
(18:29):
He'd blown it on the whole passage to India. Thing
he hadn't found any big stores of gold, his ships
were in tatters, and after his last voyage he'd been
carted back to Spain and shackles. He needed a big score,
and miraculously, off the coast of Honduras he got it.
A huge mind trading canoe more than a hundred feet long,
(18:50):
laden with cloth axes, war clubs, corn beer, and what
looked like almonds. Columbus hauled them eye on their cargo
on board, and when some of those alm and spilled,
the mind merchants freaked. Glumbus's son wrote that they scrambled
for them as if their eyeballs had fallen out. Obviously,
to the Maya, these weird almonds were precious. If you're
(19:13):
a master explorer desperate defined treasure, wouldn't you go ashore
and see if there's any more of these things lying around?
If Colemus had, he'd have learned that the eyeballs rolling
around his deck were cacao beans, and they were the
lifeblood of Mayan culture. Everybody had a few trees in
their backyard, some people had whole forests. No wedding or
(19:34):
holiday was complete without a round of hot chocolate whipped
into a froth with a nice head of phone. The
dried beans could last for years, so they were the
coin of the realm. According to records from the fift hundreds,
one coco bean to get you it to molly, three
an avocado for a salamander, and eight a rabbit or
a prostitute. Cocaw is still used as currency in some places.
(19:58):
Julio Saki says that when he was growing up and
believe in the nineteen seventies, cacao was cash. My mom
mused to send me as she heard that somebody just
got a fresh neat coming in from the jungle. She
would send me over to treat to buy that meat,
essentially with that half kilo of coca beats, and the
(20:21):
owner never refuses it. They would say, oh wow, yes, yes, yes,
here's here's your meat. The point is cocao was the
sacred heart of Mine society and Aztec society. The Aztec
emperor Montezuma was known to drink fifty cups of chocolate
over the course of a single meal. When Spanish conquistadors
rated his treasure vaults, they found nine hundred and sixty
(20:44):
million cacal beans sitting inside. It was the Fort Knox
of the New World, and Spanish quickly claimed it as
their own. Soon they'd taken over the whole cocao operation.
But they never learned to love chocolate until they began
pouring sugar into it. Then they introduced it to Europe
and the craze began. Chocolate houses sprang up from England
to Austria. They were basically the Starbucks of their day,
(21:07):
and Spanish controlled the entire trade. For all the talk
of Elderado, the real treasure they found was chocolate. For
a while, all the cocoa in the New World came
from traditional varieties that had great flavor, But as demand exploded,
supplies got tight. The old orchards just couldn't keep up.
So the chocolate industry planted cacou all over the tropics,
(21:30):
especially in West Africa, where labor was unfortunately cheapest of all,
and the industry planted whatever hybrid varieties produced the highest yields,
no matter how they tasted, because back then nobody paid
extra for flavor. A bean was a bean. There's a
saying in West Africa, Mark Christian, one of the world's
(21:52):
leading chocolate critics, there's no cemetery for cocoa beans, which
means it doesn't matter every single one of them. We
sell them because no matter how good are bad they are,
Nestlee's or whoever, you know, he's gonna get their hands
on them. And then they'll standardize the flavor by smearing
(22:12):
it with big vanilla. Maybe it'll go into milk chocolate
or whatnot. You know, there are lots of ways to
mask it, and they're fine with it because it's about volume, volume,
but not taste. And that's still true. But now a
few Indiana Jones style cocao hunters like Vulgar are trying
(22:32):
something new. They're raising money for expeditions and scouring the
jungles for cacao with real flavor, flavors that have been
lost for centuries, or in some cases, new flavors no
one has ever tasted before. The funny thing is this
new way of thinking about chocolate. It's really just the
(22:53):
old way of thinking about chocolate. It always was the
gold of the forest. We finally got to this city
called Boca, which is mouth of Acre, the Acre River,
and it was dry season. It was August. That's Louisa Abram,
the new rock star of wild Chocolate at twenty two,
(23:16):
fresh out of culinary school, she launched her chocolate company
and began looking around for source of fantastic cacaw. She
heard a rumor that a tiny co op deep in
the Amazon had a stash to sell, so she charted
a skinny boat and made the trip. The river was
so dangerous, Oh my gosh, like I've never saw so
(23:37):
many trunks and so many like obstacles. Rivers in Amazonia
are filled with buried tree trunks just waiting to impale
your boat. It can be treacherous. But they made it
through the big river and then they turned down a
tiny stream just wide enough for the boat, and they
followed it wherever. It was six hours in the little
(24:00):
like stream. Suddenly you see like this big ass bridge.
Humanous if you would, and you're like, something's here. It
was a town of eight people in the middle of
the jungle. It was called Mapia, which means heaven, and
(24:22):
it was a very particular sort of heaven. We had
no idea when we got there. They build the co
op to sustain the Santo Daimi Community Center. DAM is
a religion based in part on ayahuasca, a drink brewed
from psychedelic plants that triggers visions and euphoria. It's part Catholicism,
(24:42):
part paganism. It's practitioners drink ayahuasca in group rituals that
involve chanting and dancing that goes on all night long.
They believe the ayahuasca, or dim as they call it,
brings the spirit of the divine into them. The farest
around Mapia were filled countries, and the beans were one
of the community's main sources of income. It was a
(25:04):
perfect way to make a little money while leaving the forest. Intact,
Louis loved the idea of working with wild cacao and
using it as a way to support the dame A
community and to protect their sacred forest. She began making
regular visits to the community, slowly learning their ways and
winning their trust, but she knew that to really be
in sync with them, she needed to experience the ayahuasca.
(25:27):
I think for them, it was important that I could
see them outside of being a labor force. I could
see them as people. I knew that I was going
to keep on going there, so I said to one
(25:48):
of the leaders in the community, can I be a
part of the ceremony tonight. He was so surprised that
he invited the whole community, eighty people. And I was afraid,
I'm not gonna lie. I was a little bit afraid,
(26:10):
like if I take this, it's gonna mess up my
mind for my whole entire life. That night, the people
gathered in the church with guitars and drums. The church
is not a church that like we know, with like
four walls, nothing like that. It's open, so you can
(26:31):
here the environment. As the night sounds of the forest
filtered into the church. Everyone lined up to receive communions.
It's a thick drink, almost like a smoothie, and you
take it like a shot, and it tastes earthy, bitter.
At first, you don't feel nothing, and then it started.
(26:58):
I started really feeling different, feeling lighter, feeling happier, feeling
more aware of the sounds of the forest. There was
this frog making this sound, everyone singing, moving to rhythms,
(27:22):
them dancing, and closing my eyes and feeling that union
with all the women singing and the men playing the guitar.
The noises start becoming a sea of colors, different colors,
and like a brushstroke of like purple, pink, and then
(27:47):
green neon and then light bloom. It's just synestisia, the
waves of color coming towards to me and going backwards.
And then fourty minutes later we take another shot. I
(28:08):
took three shots. Hour after hour. They keep saying, keep dancing,
and the dime is rising within them. It starts becoming
like more fluid, and you just like feel euphoria. But
at the same time, you know that your energy is
(28:32):
resignating towards the person that it's by your side, and
the same with that person, and you're dancing the whole time,
and you don't feel higher. And then the dima is everywhere,
flowing through everyone and everything, emerging, the people and the
animals and the vines and the trees into one unified being.
(28:54):
Everyone surrounding you, and the forest they were one. Afterwards,
she lay in her hammock, floating in the darkness, and
she knew she had been changed forever. Here's a confession.
(29:34):
There are times on this journey when I thought, hold on, now,
what are you people doing? What am I doing? Usually
these moments come when I'm hanging in some hammock in
the jungle, nursing my bug bites and dreaming about a
shower or facing down another dinner of dry fried paranya.
Let's face it, this is a crazy way to make
a living loan sharks on one end, jaguars on the other,
(29:58):
and even if you do everything right, you could better
money waiting tables. Sometimes I think a cow is edible gold,
and sometimes I think it's fool's gold. But you know what,
people keep committing their lives to this and it has
nothing to do with money. So what's the draw. Well,
that's an easy one. I remember when I first chocolate
(30:21):
in my mouth, it was like it was like a drug.
They were like, oh my god, Like I was just
so amazed. This was like, you know, a classic symphony orchestra.
When it's really good chocolate like that, the world screeches
to a halt and the heavens let loose. Kind of
(30:47):
crazy that a bunch of crust seeds can do that
to you. But like I said, chocolate is epic poetry.
It gives voice to the rainforest in the language your
senses understand perfectly. I never had a chance to experience
the sense of dimes eremony like Louisa, But the more
time I spent chasing chocolate in the Amazon, the more
I realized I didn't have to ayahuasca. It was all
(31:09):
part of the well spring, all part of the library
of transcendence that this most endangered and mysterious of places
still holds. So we took off and we were just
(31:39):
floating on on the river of the river was quite
high and calm. The turtles normally sit on the on
the river bank, on a on a on a little
trunk and jump in the water when you passed. I'm
in a dugout canoe with Vulkers sitting behind me. We're
headed to the Urquari village, three hours downstream. It's our fixer,
(32:00):
Ralio's recommendation. He's been selling the vulcan for a while,
and when Volker said he was looking for new supplies,
Ralio suggested we meet with the uk Arre. We glide
over the brown water, leaving the heat and bugs behind
at least for the moment. Pink river dolphins surface around
us with little gasps. At last, I have time to breathe.
(32:20):
Around a bend, we come upon a surreal scene. There
were people going with canoes into the forest which were
flooded and tried to get the pods from the trees,
and so I I saw it, and I saw, oh, well,
this is a very unusual situation. We pick a couple
of pods ourselves and crack them open on the side
(32:41):
of the boat and scoop the white pulp into our mouths.
It's delicious, sweet and sour, like lemonade. We spit out
the raw seeds, which won't taste like chocolate until they
get fermented and roasted. Ulcer's eyes are shining as we
passed more boats and trees in the flooded forests, and
I start to understand why he's here chasing chocolate, Why
(33:03):
anyone would take on such an impossible challenge, Because this
place is unlike anywhere else, and he wants to protect it.
And in wild cocao, he thinks he's found away. Dante
hands me his coca pouch and I stuff a fistful
leaves into my cheek and has the alkaloids trickle into
my bloodstream and feel like God just bumped up the
pop on my monitor. Thunder rolls over the jungle. Howler
(33:27):
monkeys roar in response, and as we melt into the forest,
I wedged myself into the bow of the boat next
to Aurelio's rifle and lean back against the curved wood.
Somewhere around the next bend lies revelation, the essence of
the Amazon. And I'm not wrong, but be careful what
(33:47):
you ask for. So the rain has just been pounding
all my long, and the river is now as the
rivers reclaimed all the land like, there's just water everywhere.
There's no dry land to little walk on. We're supposed
to head back up river and very just gonna be
(34:10):
full of massive trees tearing down stream. Um and said,
moving so fast. I'm not sure the boat's gonna be
able to do it, but we'll see. This season on Obsessions,
(34:36):
wild chocolate, chocolate sort of forms this vortex that sucks
you in. I had no idea what this is going
to be, and you keep getting deeper deeper into it.
We're lost. What should we do. I can conquer chocolate
like I can be the Queen of wild chocolate. There's
always this risk of complete boss. It wasn't always money, yeah,
(35:00):
but now there's no more money. Basically this like disgruntled
guy and his family surrounded the building armed with machetes.
We've heard all sorts of things that you know, somebody
got shot over this, and I don't like guns, but
I mean you saw the stacks of cash in our office.
Sometimes I think all this for a damn bar of chocolate.
(35:21):
Wild Chocolate is a Kaleidoscope production with I Heart Podcasts,
hosted and reported by me Ron Jacobson and produced by
Shane mckeit at Nice Marmot Media. Edited by Kate Osborne
and Gesh how To Goudar, sound design and mixing by Soundboard.
Original music composition by Spencer Stevenson, a k a Botany
production help from Bahi ni Short from My Heart Are.
(35:43):
Executive producers are Katrina Norval and Nikki Etart. Special thanks
to Laura Mayor Costas, Lenos Oswallas and Aaron Kaufman, Will Pearson,
conel Burne, Bob Pittman, Daria Daniel and the team at
Statler 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.
(36:06):
Visit www dot Stetler dash Chocolate dot com to taste
it for yourself. That's www. Dot Stetler dash Chocolate dot com.
And if 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'm in the co pilot seat of this small Cessna
plane and we're circling the Bolivian Amazon. Beside me, pilot
sweating because we're looking for a place to land and
we can't find one. The weather was bad and and
the pilot was nervous, and it was it was quite exciting.
(00:38):
Behind me. Is this guy just been a day ago?
This German accou hunter named Volker Lahman. Bolker looks a
bit like the German director Werner Herzog. Sounds like him too.
The more dangerous or tricky the situation dance of the
kalmar Get. It's two thousand ten, and Folker's letting me
tag along. If you searches for a holy grail while
(00:59):
cocao tree that gives us chocolate. Coco's native to the Amazon,
and now it's farmed all over the tropics, mostly in Africa.
A few years before our trip, Focus stumbled upon an
incredible variety of wild cow in Bolivia and he turned
it into this mind blowing chocolate. So now there's a
gold rush for these magic beans, and Volker's hope is
to stay one step ahead. There's an indigenous group in
(01:22):
the forest of the Europare. Rumor has it they have
a ton of wildcata cell So the plan is fly in,
find a landing strip, take a dugout canoe to the
Eurokari village, strike a deal below us. The jungle looks otherworldly.
(01:43):
The whole thing is steaming, miss rising to form these
immense thunderheads, and the thunderheads are dropping ropes black rain
back to the forest. At one point we punched through
a storm and water comes spitting through the vents of
the plain. Shoot a glance at the pilot, like what,
but he just waves me off. It's getting hard to
(02:05):
tell what to worry about and what not to worry about.
For that, all I can do is counting vulgar because
he's been navigating the Amazon for twenty years. This part
of Olivia is all rainforests and grasslands. It's also a
major cocaine flyaway. The rivers are dotted with these homemade
landing strips and small planes swoop in, pick up the drugs,
(02:25):
and head for Brazil. Those landing strips are super convenient
if you need to get into the deepoots quickly, which
we do, but it's also super dangerous. Hundreds of people
get shot in the Amazon every year for all sorts
of reasons. Just being an environmental activist is enough, But
stumbling upon a cocaine lab that's one of the surest
(02:46):
ways to make it happen. But when you need a
landing strip, you need a landing strip. The problem is
that it's the rainy season and everything is fly it.
The rivers have risen like thirty feet, The trees are
in standing water, the ground is gleaming like a mirror.
(03:08):
At last, there's a strip near a small cabin on
the river, but it's really short. The rain swamped part
of the landing strip, and the landing strip was homemade. No,
it's not official landing strip. The pilot swoops down to
get a closer look, and he doesn't like what he sees,
and neither do I. He pulls back up and circles
(03:31):
the area looking for alternatives, but there are no alternatives.
The pilot keeps circling back to that original strip. He's
trying to psych himself up, and for all I know,
we're running well on fuel. Get vulcars still sitting there
like it's another day in the park. And that is
making me more nervous because I can tell that his
(03:51):
appetite for risk is a lot higher than mine. And
then the pilot banks the plane towards that strip. For second,
I think, well, this must be another reconnaissance run, because
nobody would. Oh no, he's going for it right now.
The ground is rising in front of us fast. So
I grabbed the handle above the door, tucked my head
(04:13):
and brace and we hit actually hits the wrong word.
It's super soft thanks to all that spongey ground. So
we break hard and slammed the stop spraying puddles, and
I'm like, holy sh it, we made it. So I
(04:37):
grabbed my back and hop out. Vulkers behind me and
it's like, hello Amazon. It's a cathedral. When you're on
the ground, there's these massive trees that are dripping thick fines.
There's flocks of actual parrots screeching through the canopy. And
then from that little cabin up ahead, four guys emerge
and they're holding rifles. There were like one guy coming,
(05:01):
and then the second, and the third and the fourth,
and then they were surrounding us. And I was looking
at the pilot and he said, I have to leave
because of the weather, and you know, nobody said anything,
and so he turned around this plane and off he
off he went, and then I realized, oh, we are
(05:22):
in the middle of some people we don't know. I
was nervous. I am trying not to make any fast
moves because these guys are twitchy. Everything they say confirmed
my worst fears. They're watching the place for their boss,
who's a Columbian man, and we've just landed on his
private runway without permission. And I've been in the Amazon
(05:43):
for all five minutes, and I'm starting to wonder if
maybe I'm not really cut out of this cacao anything.
And all I can do is look over vulgar and think,
I hope the hell you got this from Kaleidostoe and
I podcasts. This is Obsessions Wild Chocolate. I'm Rowan Jacobson,
(06:06):
Chapter one, The Hunt. So one thing I should explain
(06:35):
is that I'm a food writer, but not a normal
food writer. I don't write cookbooks or restaurant reviews. Instead,
the thing I do is harder to explain. This is
All Things Considered from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block. Listen
to how Rowan Jacobson describes a temperamental mollusk. I kind
of think of these as the Sean pen of oysters
(06:56):
like very intense and memorable, but you wouldn't want have
him every day. Rowan Jacobson talks about oysters the way
a lover might recall his favorite conquests. You have to
think about the after globe. See what I mean. My
call is to bring amazing ingredients to life, to use
intense sensory experience as a wormhole to jump into a
(07:18):
universe of exotic landscapes, diverse traditions, revelations, and obsessions. Back
in two thousand nine, I was writing a book about
the world's best ingredients, and I was working on chapter
about chocolate. Chocolate, of course, is on anybody's shortlist of
great ingredients, as it should be. It's our most complex food.
(07:39):
It has more than six hundred different flavor components. If
you think of flavor as a kind of language away
the world communicates to us through our senses, then chocolate
is like epic poetry. It speaks in these lush, rhythmic
phrases that sweep over us and sometimes sweep us away
at good chocolate does. But the stuff you find in
(08:02):
your typical candy aisle that's more brain fart than epic poem.
There's just not that much chocolate in your average chocolate bar,
and the quality is nothing special. Just like great wine
requires great grapes, epic chocolate requires the very best cacalbeans,
and those are really hard to find. For decades, nobody
outside the Amazon was really looking for them. Now that's change.
(08:25):
A new wave of extreme chocolate makers is seeking out
the best of the best and using it to make
the most intensely delicious chocolate that has ever been made,
chocolate that is so different from what has come before
that the experience is like some sort of drug. In
two thousand nine, I was tasting my way through these
trippy bars from my book, and it kept coming across
(08:46):
rumors about the trippiest of them all. Supposedly it was
the first bar in history that wasn't made out of
farm to cacab This one was all wild, sourced from
the Amazon rainforest itself, and it tasted like nothing that
had come before. Well. Summoning all of my journalistic skills,
I managed to track down a bar. I had to
order it from Switzerland and it cost me twenty six
(09:07):
bucks was shipping, but a week later the FedEx truck
dropped the hot little box on my porch and I
tore it open. The bars cloaked in snazzy Swiss wrapping,
slid off the sleeve and part of the gold foil
to reveal a thin plank of chocolate embossed with a feather.
I snapped off a shard, placed it on my tongue,
(09:29):
and the bottom fell out of the room. It melted
like silk, not a trace of bitterness. There's these notes
of dried fruit and pipe smoke dancing through my sinuses.
It was like finding an old chest in your grandparents
attic and sticking your nose inside and breathing in the centuries.
(09:53):
It was delicious, for sure, but that was almost beside
the point for something else going on, something metaphysical. I
don't really have the word for it. All I can
say is, compared to all the chocolate I've known, this
one tasted real. I wanted more of this wild chocolate,
this wild experience, and I resolved to find someone who
(10:15):
could lead me into this thicket of flavors. What I
couldn't have known at the time was that seeking the
answers to those questions was going to lead me into
the rainforest again and again in the shadowed laws, civilizations,
and in the company of some extraordinary people obsessed with
(10:36):
making god level chocolate. It was frequently going to leave
me soaked, bitten, miserable, and miles from the nearest bed.
It was going to expose me to chocolate's dark history
of exploitation and environmental destruction. But it was also going
to show me cocow's sacred side and how can we
used to protect the rainforest. But on that day in
(10:58):
two thousand nine, I just wanted to know if the
story was true, if this mythical wild cacao really existed.
The chocolate maker said it was being supplied from Bolivia
by a man named Vulgar Layman. And that's how I
met the Herzog of coco hunting over Skype. Hello. Hey.
(11:19):
When I told him that people I asked had never
heard of wild cacao, he just laughed. He said, most
people in the business have never even seen a cocountry,
much less step foot in the rainforest. Basically, they were idiots,
not close to being on his level. I go at
ahead of the pank. Everybody behind me, No, still trying
to catch me. Somehow not possible. I like the intensity
(11:49):
he seemed to have swagger. He said, he was taking
a trip into your car a territory in search of
new sources. So why not come and see for myself
what type of details you want me tool send you?
Maybe the plant, the logistics. Yeah, I just want just yeah,
where you want me and when? Basically, um, and then
(12:09):
I'll run it by the podcast people who are interested.
They give you money, yeah, hopefully they I'll make sure
that they can cover my my flights and so on. Yeah,
and then little money and for the steaks and beers
and oh yeah, okay, yeah, I pictured that's paddling up
(12:30):
a river, joining in wild chocolate ceremonies, rivers of molten
deliciousness pouring down our chins. That was the plan anyway,
Are there snakes to worry about? They are? Okay. That
was age very large crocodile, which brings me back to
(13:03):
that landing strip. We're staring at these twittery guys with guns,
and I know what they're thinking. For two white dudes
to drop out of an airplane in this region means
one of two things. Either they think we're undercovered DA
or they think we're traffickers, and either way is not good.
It seems like that it was close to the weekend
(13:24):
and they needed some money to buy food and booze.
So I said myself, okay, they have a need to
give money, and we have the need to get out
of it. So he says, no problem with guys, what's
the landing feed and the guys just look at each other,
and finally one says five thousand bolivianos, which is about
seven fifty bucks. And I'm thinking, oh my god, that's
(13:48):
a pretty good deal. We've definitely got enough to swing that.
And before I can get there, Bulker says, stone faced, sorry,
we don't have that much. I said, look, I am myself.
I'm poor. And he started looking at me and like, well,
what what a story, you know? And they said, okay,
(14:09):
you know, look, I represent a small project and and
we're doing with Cacao. We're dealing with the indigenous Jura
care people. I'm listening to Votres explanation and I can't
tell how persuaded these guys are. Just then Vulgar pulls
out five hundred bilianos, which is only seventy five bucks,
(14:32):
and offers it up. I take a deep breath and watch,
and the guy relaxes and takes the money, and then
his buddies relax and suddenly the whole five changes and
they invite us to sit down and have a drink.
So we're making small talk. He actually want a tool,
(14:53):
give me as a gift a book. It was a
beat up John Grisham paperback someone had left behind. It
was in English. So they us part and I said, no,
keep it. You know, we want to travel light until
use the money and think of her much and see
you there you go how to win friends and influence
people in the Amazon. After paying off our new friends,
(15:15):
Bolker and I make our way down to the river.
Two guys are waiting for us in a long, skinny
dugout with an outboard on the back. Aurelio has a
white gambler hat, a mustache, a cigarette, and a rifle.
Talked into the bow of the canoe full cowboy vibe.
In the back of the boat, the pilot Dante, a
(15:36):
big guy with the scruppy beard, a huge wad of
coca leaves stuffed into his bulgian cheek. We threw our
stuff into the middle of the canoe and wedge ourselves
in between, trying not to capsize the thing. All right,
here goes nothing. Any last words before we launched the voyage,
I don't never have last words. This is not the
(15:56):
end at all. I want to taste of some of
this god level chocolate. We got you covered. Kaliscope has
joined forces with Louise Abram and Stetler Chocolate to make
(16:18):
a special box to go along with its very podcast
taste what has driven many to near madness at www
dot Stetler dash Chocolate dot com. Chocolate is a Mayan
(16:40):
thing a thousand years before Europeans crossed the Atlantic, the
Maya we're already growing cacao all over Central America and
using it for rituals and ceremonies. Maya people are the
forced people. Known people used it, concurvated, domesticated it and
for us. But it's a gift from the heavens above.
(17:01):
That's Julio's the key. He's a man and elder. I
met and belieze. Julia has a chocolate company, but he
also does demonstrations of traditional Mayan chocolate making. There's a
way of teaching others what cacow means to his people.
We stood in his dashed hut just off the highway
while trucks rattled by as he toasted cacow beans over
a wooden fire, then ground them between two stones to
(17:23):
form a paste. Then he mixed the paste with hot
water and whipped the drink into a froth. This is
how his mother did it before him, and her mother
before her, sharing the drink and burning the beans on
an altar is believed. This is our belief that the
prayers that we're seeing, the tanks that we're saying, to
the jungle, to the rainforest, to the wind, to the breeze,
(17:44):
to the mountains, to the soil, our ancestors would feel
it would take it. And this is what we strongly
believe the connection is with between the upper world on
the the lower world where we are to it. So
for usc is essentially it's food. He's like talking about
food being a religious experience, but traditionally the creation and
(18:06):
consumption of chocolate is just that. Needless to say, that
was lost on the first European to encounter cacao, a
guy named Christopher Columbus. It was August and Columbus was
on his fourth and final voyage to the New World.
(18:29):
He'd blown it on the whole passage to India. Thing
he hadn't found any big stores of gold, his ships
were in tatters, and after his last voyage he'd been
carted back to Spain and shackles. He needed a big score,
and miraculously, off the coast of Honduras he got it.
A huge mind trading canoe more than a hundred feet long,
(18:50):
laden with cloth axes, war clubs, corn beer, and what
looked like almonds. Columbus hauled them eye on their cargo
on board, and when some of those alm and spilled,
the mind merchants freaked. Glumbus's son wrote that they scrambled
for them as if their eyeballs had fallen out. Obviously,
to the Maya, these weird almonds were precious. If you're
(19:13):
a master explorer desperate defined treasure, wouldn't you go ashore
and see if there's any more of these things lying around?
If Colemus had, he'd have learned that the eyeballs rolling
around his deck were cacao beans, and they were the
lifeblood of Mayan culture. Everybody had a few trees in
their backyard, some people had whole forests. No wedding or
(19:34):
holiday was complete without a round of hot chocolate whipped
into a froth with a nice head of phone. The
dried beans could last for years, so they were the
coin of the realm. According to records from the fift hundreds,
one coco bean to get you it to molly, three
an avocado for a salamander, and eight a rabbit or
a prostitute. Cocaw is still used as currency in some places.
(19:58):
Julio Saki says that when he was growing up and
believe in the nineteen seventies, cacao was cash. My mom
mused to send me as she heard that somebody just
got a fresh neat coming in from the jungle. She
would send me over to treat to buy that meat,
essentially with that half kilo of coca beats, and the
(20:21):
owner never refuses it. They would say, oh wow, yes, yes, yes,
here's here's your meat. The point is cocao was the
sacred heart of Mine society and Aztec society. The Aztec
emperor Montezuma was known to drink fifty cups of chocolate
over the course of a single meal. When Spanish conquistadors
rated his treasure vaults, they found nine hundred and sixty
(20:44):
million cacal beans sitting inside. It was the Fort Knox
of the New World, and Spanish quickly claimed it as
their own. Soon they'd taken over the whole cocao operation.
But they never learned to love chocolate until they began
pouring sugar into it. Then they introduced it to Europe
and the craze began. Chocolate houses sprang up from England
to Austria. They were basically the Starbucks of their day,
(21:07):
and Spanish controlled the entire trade. For all the talk
of Elderado, the real treasure they found was chocolate. For
a while, all the cocoa in the New World came
from traditional varieties that had great flavor, But as demand exploded,
supplies got tight. The old orchards just couldn't keep up.
So the chocolate industry planted cacou all over the tropics,
(21:30):
especially in West Africa, where labor was unfortunately cheapest of all,
and the industry planted whatever hybrid varieties produced the highest yields,
no matter how they tasted, because back then nobody paid
extra for flavor. A bean was a bean. There's a
saying in West Africa, Mark Christian, one of the world's
(21:52):
leading chocolate critics, there's no cemetery for cocoa beans, which
means it doesn't matter every single one of them. We
sell them because no matter how good are bad they are,
Nestlee's or whoever, you know, he's gonna get their hands
on them. And then they'll standardize the flavor by smearing
(22:12):
it with big vanilla. Maybe it'll go into milk chocolate
or whatnot. You know, there are lots of ways to
mask it, and they're fine with it because it's about volume, volume,
but not taste. And that's still true. But now a
few Indiana Jones style cocao hunters like Vulgar are trying
(22:32):
something new. They're raising money for expeditions and scouring the
jungles for cacao with real flavor, flavors that have been
lost for centuries, or in some cases, new flavors no
one has ever tasted before. The funny thing is this
new way of thinking about chocolate. It's really just the
(22:53):
old way of thinking about chocolate. It always was the
gold of the forest. We finally got to this city
called Boca, which is mouth of Acre, the Acre River,
and it was dry season. It was August. That's Louisa Abram,
the new rock star of wild Chocolate at twenty two,
(23:16):
fresh out of culinary school, she launched her chocolate company
and began looking around for source of fantastic cacaw. She
heard a rumor that a tiny co op deep in
the Amazon had a stash to sell, so she charted
a skinny boat and made the trip. The river was
so dangerous, Oh my gosh, like I've never saw so
(23:37):
many trunks and so many like obstacles. Rivers in Amazonia
are filled with buried tree trunks just waiting to impale
your boat. It can be treacherous. But they made it
through the big river and then they turned down a
tiny stream just wide enough for the boat, and they
followed it wherever. It was six hours in the little
(24:00):
like stream. Suddenly you see like this big ass bridge.
Humanous if you would, and you're like, something's here. It
was a town of eight people in the middle of
the jungle. It was called Mapia, which means heaven, and
(24:22):
it was a very particular sort of heaven. We had
no idea when we got there. They build the co
op to sustain the Santo Daimi Community Center. DAM is
a religion based in part on ayahuasca, a drink brewed
from psychedelic plants that triggers visions and euphoria. It's part Catholicism,
(24:42):
part paganism. It's practitioners drink ayahuasca in group rituals that
involve chanting and dancing that goes on all night long.
They believe the ayahuasca, or dim as they call it,
brings the spirit of the divine into them. The farest
around Mapia were filled countries, and the beans were one
of the community's main sources of income. It was a
(25:04):
perfect way to make a little money while leaving the forest. Intact,
Louis loved the idea of working with wild cacao and
using it as a way to support the dame A
community and to protect their sacred forest. She began making
regular visits to the community, slowly learning their ways and
winning their trust, but she knew that to really be
in sync with them, she needed to experience the ayahuasca.
(25:27):
I think for them, it was important that I could
see them outside of being a labor force. I could
see them as people. I knew that I was going
to keep on going there, so I said to one
(25:48):
of the leaders in the community, can I be a
part of the ceremony tonight. He was so surprised that
he invited the whole community, eighty people. And I was afraid,
I'm not gonna lie. I was a little bit afraid,
(26:10):
like if I take this, it's gonna mess up my
mind for my whole entire life. That night, the people
gathered in the church with guitars and drums. The church
is not a church that like we know, with like
four walls, nothing like that. It's open, so you can
(26:31):
here the environment. As the night sounds of the forest
filtered into the church. Everyone lined up to receive communions.
It's a thick drink, almost like a smoothie, and you
take it like a shot, and it tastes earthy, bitter.
At first, you don't feel nothing, and then it started.
(26:58):
I started really feeling different, feeling lighter, feeling happier, feeling
more aware of the sounds of the forest. There was
this frog making this sound, everyone singing, moving to rhythms,
(27:22):
them dancing, and closing my eyes and feeling that union
with all the women singing and the men playing the guitar.
The noises start becoming a sea of colors, different colors,
and like a brushstroke of like purple, pink, and then
(27:47):
green neon and then light bloom. It's just synestisia, the
waves of color coming towards to me and going backwards.
And then fourty minutes later we take another shot. I
(28:08):
took three shots. Hour after hour. They keep saying, keep dancing,
and the dime is rising within them. It starts becoming
like more fluid, and you just like feel euphoria. But
at the same time, you know that your energy is
(28:32):
resignating towards the person that it's by your side, and
the same with that person, and you're dancing the whole time,
and you don't feel higher. And then the dima is everywhere,
flowing through everyone and everything, emerging, the people and the
animals and the vines and the trees into one unified being.
(28:54):
Everyone surrounding you, and the forest they were one. Afterwards,
she lay in her hammock, floating in the darkness, and
she knew she had been changed forever. Here's a confession.
(29:34):
There are times on this journey when I thought, hold on, now,
what are you people doing? What am I doing? Usually
these moments come when I'm hanging in some hammock in
the jungle, nursing my bug bites and dreaming about a
shower or facing down another dinner of dry fried paranya.
Let's face it, this is a crazy way to make
a living loan sharks on one end, jaguars on the other,
(29:58):
and even if you do everything right, you could better
money waiting tables. Sometimes I think a cow is edible gold,
and sometimes I think it's fool's gold. But you know what,
people keep committing their lives to this and it has
nothing to do with money. So what's the draw. Well,
that's an easy one. I remember when I first chocolate
(30:21):
in my mouth, it was like it was like a drug.
They were like, oh my god, Like I was just
so amazed. This was like, you know, a classic symphony orchestra.
When it's really good chocolate like that, the world screeches
to a halt and the heavens let loose. Kind of
(30:47):
crazy that a bunch of crust seeds can do that
to you. But like I said, chocolate is epic poetry.
It gives voice to the rainforest in the language your
senses understand perfectly. I never had a chance to experience
the sense of dimes eremony like Louisa, But the more
time I spent chasing chocolate in the Amazon, the more
I realized I didn't have to ayahuasca. It was all
(31:09):
part of the well spring, all part of the library
of transcendence that this most endangered and mysterious of places
still holds. So we took off and we were just
(31:39):
floating on on the river of the river was quite
high and calm. The turtles normally sit on the on
the river bank, on a on a on a little
trunk and jump in the water when you passed. I'm
in a dugout canoe with Vulkers sitting behind me. We're
headed to the Urquari village, three hours downstream. It's our fixer,
(32:00):
Ralio's recommendation. He's been selling the vulcan for a while,
and when Volker said he was looking for new supplies,
Ralio suggested we meet with the uk Arre. We glide
over the brown water, leaving the heat and bugs behind
at least for the moment. Pink river dolphins surface around
us with little gasps. At last, I have time to breathe.
(32:20):
Around a bend, we come upon a surreal scene. There
were people going with canoes into the forest which were
flooded and tried to get the pods from the trees,
and so I I saw it, and I saw, oh, well,
this is a very unusual situation. We pick a couple
of pods ourselves and crack them open on the side
(32:41):
of the boat and scoop the white pulp into our mouths.
It's delicious, sweet and sour, like lemonade. We spit out
the raw seeds, which won't taste like chocolate until they
get fermented and roasted. Ulcer's eyes are shining as we
passed more boats and trees in the flooded forests, and
I start to understand why he's here chasing chocolate, Why
(33:03):
anyone would take on such an impossible challenge, Because this
place is unlike anywhere else, and he wants to protect it.
And in wild cocao, he thinks he's found away. Dante
hands me his coca pouch and I stuff a fistful
leaves into my cheek and has the alkaloids trickle into
my bloodstream and feel like God just bumped up the
pop on my monitor. Thunder rolls over the jungle. Howler
(33:27):
monkeys roar in response, and as we melt into the forest,
I wedged myself into the bow of the boat next
to Aurelio's rifle and lean back against the curved wood.
Somewhere around the next bend lies revelation, the essence of
the Amazon. And I'm not wrong, but be careful what
(33:47):
you ask for. So the rain has just been pounding
all my long, and the river is now as the
rivers reclaimed all the land like, there's just water everywhere.
There's no dry land to little walk on. We're supposed
to head back up river and very just gonna be
(34:10):
full of massive trees tearing down stream. Um and said,
moving so fast. I'm not sure the boat's gonna be
able to do it, but we'll see. This season on Obsessions,
(34:36):
wild chocolate, chocolate sort of forms this vortex that sucks
you in. I had no idea what this is going
to be, and you keep getting deeper deeper into it.
We're lost. What should we do. I can conquer chocolate
like I can be the Queen of wild chocolate. There's
always this risk of complete boss. It wasn't always money, yeah,
(35:00):
but now there's no more money. Basically this like disgruntled
guy and his family surrounded the building armed with machetes.
We've heard all sorts of things that you know, somebody
got shot over this, and I don't like guns, but
I mean you saw the stacks of cash in our office.
Sometimes I think all this for a damn bar of chocolate.
(35:21):
Wild Chocolate is a Kaleidoscope production with I Heart Podcasts,
hosted and reported by me Ron Jacobson and produced by
Shane mckeit at Nice Marmot Media. Edited by Kate Osborne
and Gesh how To Goudar, sound design and mixing by Soundboard.
Original music composition by Spencer Stevenson, a k a Botany
production help from Bahi ni Short from My Heart Are.
(35:43):
Executive producers are Katrina Norval and Nikki Etart. Special thanks
to Laura Mayor Costas, Lenos Oswallas and Aaron Kaufman, Will Pearson,
conel Burne, Bob Pittman, Daria Daniel and the team at
Statler 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.
(36:06):
Visit www dot Stetler dash Chocolate dot com to taste
it for yourself. That's www. Dot Stetler dash Chocolate dot com.
And if 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.
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