Ultimate Origins: The Word From Bittersweet
Seneca Klassen cares deeply about where his chocolate comes from. At the two branches of his Bay Area shop, Bittersweet, he does a good trade in all manner of bars marked "70 percent," "Organic," and "Single Origin." He carries brands like Domori, El Rey, the Grenada Chocolate Company, and Platations, and San Francisco chocolate lovers show up in droves to buy them. It's a pretty good deal. But in recent months Seneca has been working harder—he's been calling in favors from friends in Hawaii, Madagascar, and the Dominican Republic; he's been doing the laboriously sweaty work of roasting cacao beans in a back-room convection oven; and he's been grinding those beans in home-baked machinery that he put together with parts ordered from ChocolateAlchemy.com. He's been doing all of this so that he can make a set of bars that he has ultimate confidence in: Bittersweet Origins.
Herein, Seneca explains what all the chocolate terminology being bandied about means to him.
Seneca on 'Percentage'
Cacao mass percentage is a problematic metric for chocolate, primarily (in my retailer experience) because consumers expect a number like 64 percent or 70 percent or 85 percent to be reflective in some way of quality (i.e., the higher the number, the better the chocolate). That said, it is a useful tool, since it does deliver some basic information about sugar content, and we can confidently say that the higher the percentage of cacao mass, the lower the glycemic index of the bar. The main way we make use of percentage labeling at Bittersweet is as a tool for ordering tastings, and I think in general it's certainly not the end-all be-all piece of consumer information about chocolate, but rather one tool among many for determining what kind of chocolate experience is right for you.
On 'Organic'
Without a direct connection to the agricultural experience of cacao, it's difficult to explain to people how fundamentally organic (in both legal and generic terms) a cacao orchard is. The midges that pollinate cacao live in the leaf litter directly beneath the trees, and use of pesticides and herbicides within an orchard is impossible without killing your pollinators. The majority of chemical use in cacao happens around the margins (clearing access roads with roundup, etc...), rather than on the crop itself. That said, I do believe that organic certification is a useful and important tool and process for the future of cacao and chocolate, although at the moment there is definitely something of a quality gap in the availability of fine eating chocolates that are certified organic.
On 'Origin'
This is the area of chocolate/cacao definition that's most important to me personally, and that I feel has the strongest downstream potential to really change the marketplace. Consumers have a preexisting understanding of origin and terroir from their experiences with other varietal products like wine and coffee, and insofar as it's possible to tap into that existing framework of understanding, we can really ramp up people's quality of experience and comprehension of cacao quite quickly. The main difficulty in this area is the lack of a formalized appellation system in cacao, so that claims of origin can be either overbroad ( i.e. National), or not entirely trustworthy (witness the number of products labeled "Chuao" on the market...). Still, I think those developments will come, and in the end that interaction between genetics/varietal and place/appellation will (I think) form a fundamental underpinning for those consumers interested in a really compelling and revelatory experience of chocolate.
About the author: Emily Stone, proprietor of Chocolate in Context, is a chocolate enthusiast, itinerant traveler, and a lover of literature who lives in Pittsburgh. She's been a movie reviewer, a reproductive health researcher, and an independent bookstore owner. Her writing has appeared in the magazines Budget Travel, Travel + Leisure, and Time Out New York, as well as on the websites World Hum and Epicurious.
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2 Comments:
I can understand why Seneca Klassen would like his customers to believe that all cocoa is organically grown, but unfortunately he's totally mistaken on this point.
Perhaps he has never heard of cocoa pod borer, or mirids. Both of these major insect pests pose significant financial risks for cocoa growers. These insects have traditionally been (and in many places still are) controlled by spraying with dangerous organochlorine insecticides, such as Lindane (a chemical which is restricted or banned in the West). To give just one example: in Ghana - the world's second-largest cocoa producer - pesticides are provided by the government.
In 2006, more than 150,000 hectares of cocoa was sprayed with pesticides in Ghana alone!
Klassen may well have visited an organic cocoa plantation somewhere, but his assumption that all cocoa plantations throughout the world are managed in exactly the same way is ridiculous.
I am an agricultural scientist and small-scale chocolate manufacturer in Australia. I care about the welfare of the cocoa growers I work with. I am so tired of people like Klassen spreading this kind of misinformation that I have written a detailed article on the subject, which can be found at:
http://www.tava.com.au/article_chemicals.html
The use of pesticides in the cocoa industry not only results in residues of these chemicals turning up in the chocolate that we eat, but it can also harm the environment where these chemicals are applied, and worst of all, poison the people who work with them.
Klassen (who has a vested interest in making his concerned customers believe that all of the chocolate he sells is organically grown) does nobody but himself any favors by pretending that the entire cocoa industry is organic.
Samantha Madell at 9:46PM on 12/10/07
I certainly did not mean to intimate that fully Organic-certified practices are the norm in the cacao industry, and in fact I agree that they do instead represent a small fraction of overall growth. We are always very clear about this with our customers at Bittersweet. On the other hand, I do want people to understand the holistic natural process that brings them these wonderful finished products, and I think this kind of alarmist posting actually does nothing at all to help consumers understand the real environment in which their chocolate originates. The world of cacao is simply much more complex and variable than you indicate.
To begin with, different cacao growing regions have very different pest profiles. Pod borer is a fairly common problem in Indonesia, Mirids common in west Africa, Frosty pod, Black Pod and Witches’ Broom in Latin America, etc. All these regions have very different organic and chemical responses to these various pests and diseases, and to suggest (as your posting clearly does--to me anyway) that pesticides and fungicides are used broadly and year-round everywhere in the cocoa growing world is overly simplistic to say the least. In my experience (having visited more than a few cocoa farms, some organic/pesticide-free, many not), the use of pesticides and fungicides is pretty responsible and quite limited in the vast majority of cases, and contrary to the article on your site, I have yet to encounter a biological control that is more expensive than chemicals for the farmer. (See, for example, the use of ant nests as pod borer prevention in Sulawesi—an organic method of control that is far cheaper than chemical alternatives, and therefore more widely used.) I would be comfortable eating cacao from non-organic farms I’ve visited in places like Peru, Venezuela, Trinidad, Jamaica and Mexico, but I’m also very happy with organic cacao that we source from Madagascar, and fairtrade cacao we source from Ghana. In short, there are simply lots of grey areas in the world of cocoa, and I believe that what people need is to learn more about the life cycle of their chocolate from start to finish, rather than simplistic scare tactics.
If you want to support change in the industry and you’re worried about pesticide and fungicide use, then by all means buy chocolate (or cacao, if you’re a chocolate maker) that is certified Organic! There’s plenty of good stuff out there, and I would like to point out that the Bittersweet Origins chocolates we make--what this posting is really all about in the first place--are crafted with organic or pesticide-free cacao, organic fairtrade cocoa butter, and organic cane sugar (and organic dried milk where applicable). That’s all. I agree that organic processes represent the best future for cacao and chocolate, and we certainly manifest that belief in the products we manufacture here at Bittersweet.
seneca at 1:00PM on 02/08/08