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From James Beard Award-winning author Rowan Jacobsen, the thrilling story of the farmers, activists, and chocolate makers fighting all odds to revive ancient cacao and produce the world''s finest bar. When Rowan Jacobsen first heard of a chocolate bar made entirely from wild Bolivian cacao, he was skeptical. A childhood of waxy mass-market chocolate had left him indifferent to the sweet, and most experts believed wild cacao had disappeared from the rainforest centuries ago. But one dazzling bite was all it took. Chasing chocolate down the supply chain and back through history, Jacobsen explores the abandonment of wild and heirloom cacao in the 19th and 20th centuries in favor of the high-yield, low-flavor varietals preferred by "Big Chocolate"-the handful of giant corporations that control the industry and have historically paid its five million developing-world farmers less than a dollar per day.In Wild Chocolate , Jacobsen journeys deep into the rainforests of the Amazon and Central America with the chocolate makers, activists, and indigenous leaders who are bucking the system, pulling the last vestiges of ancient cacao back from the edge of extinction and forging an alternative system in the process-one that brings prosperity back to local economies, returns fertility to the land, and protects it from the rampages of cattle farming. Serendipitously, the rediscovery of these heirloom and wild strains has also triggered a chocolate renaissance, as a new generation of "bean-to-bar" chocolate makers races to get their hands on these rare varietals and produce extraordinary chocolate displaying a diversity of flavors no one had thought possible. Chock-full of unforgettable characters, hallucinatory landscapes, hair-raising encounters, and surprising history, Wild Chocolate promises to be as rich, complex, bittersweet, and addictive as good chocolate itself.>
About the author
Rowan Jacobsen is the author of the James Beard Award-winning
A Geography of Oysters as well as
American Terroir,
Apples of Uncommon Character, and other books. His books have been named to numerous top ten lists, and he has been featured on
All Things Considered,
The Splendid Table,
Morning Edition, and
CBS This Morning, and in the pages of
Bon Appétit,
Saveur, the
Wall Street Journal, the
Washington Post, and elsewhere. He lives in Vermont.
