Chocolate, The Heartbreaker and Heart Opener
#016 Commune with truly ethical chocolate
Hello Fabulous!
In my last post I wrote about Matcha as a plant teacher. In this post I want to share how you can commune with chocolate or cacao, another beautiful plant teacher thats industry is plagued with heartbreak. By the end, I hope you’ll feel more aware and empowered to commune with more ethical chocolate wherever you live.
Cacao and Cocoa as Food and Medicine
Theobroma cacao, is the name of the tree that produces cacao, which is native to the Amazon rainforest. In Africa, the term for cacao is cocoa. These terms are representative of the language spoken in different regions, but they speak of the same plant.
Currently I am eating a lot of chocolate from Africa, so I often say Cocoa. But when my chocolate is from Latin America or the Caribbean I tend to say Cacao. Hawaii is now growing chocolate too, so I call their chocolate cacao as well.
Chocolate is made through several steps which are highlighted beautifully in this scenic video of Sao Tome below.
Shifting from Confectionary to Food
I am ready to admit that my love of chocolate is not an addiction. Instead, I prefer to lay claim to a few other aspiring titles: Chocolate Sommelier, and Cacao/Cocoa Facilitator.
I began to shift from treating chocolate as a confectionary to both food and medicine beginning in 2013-2014 when I lived at the junction of Culver City and Venice Beach off Washington Blvd in Los Angeles. There I met Patricia Tsai. She’d opened up ChocoVivo where she produced her chocolate, in-store, using cacao directly from a single farmer in Mexico.
Patricia served me a flight of chocolate with a Mayan-like brew of xocolatl, a hot drinking chocolate. The taste was strong and bitter, and I liked it. I liked it in a way that a novice chocolate lover might, and I felt my palate misunderstand all that was new. As a result I felt eager to dive deeper into consciously sourced chocolate, and to capture the depth of taste with pleasure - a taste hurdle I personally struggle with at times when introduced to new foods.
I soon learned that the chocolate that makes its way to us is altered chocolate. Altered chocolate, which is stripped of its butter and filled with substitutes and sugars, is much of what many of us describe as chocolate today. In its altered state this substance has gotten a reputation for being an addictive confection.
But this food is so much more!
Patricia’s shop was a short walk from where I lived back then - a house full of roommates who loved organic fresh produce straight from California farms, delivered to our door in cardboard boxes.
I walked to ChocoVivo often enough, divining in decadent bars of chocolate that made me feel good, not guilty. This was part of what California seemed to want to bring forward from me - to keep asking questions about the origin of things.
What it made me realize is that my claim then, that I loved chocolate, meant that I had to do more than just indulge and savor it. Patricia’s personal ethos taught me that I needed to understand if the brands and go-betweens of cacao commerce and agriculture were sloppy, unethical, and whether that was the kind of chocolate I wanted to put into my body going forwards.
Of course not!
Discovering Ethical Chocolate
Even though I began to investigate where my chocolate came from I remained incredibly ignorant of cacao and cocoa sourcing practices for years. Most people, anyone who’s eaten chocolate in the last twenty years, has more than likely eaten chocolate produced by child slave labor. What’s even more awful is that there are brands of chocolate that use child slavery to slap faux ‘ethical chocolate’ labels onto their chocolate bars.
I felt the weight and guilt of not knowing children were running through dying forests with machetes to chop cocoa pods down instead of going to school. I felt terribly sad to hear the dreams of children who wanted to grow up to become doctors, but were instead doing labor to produce candies to be sold in other countries.
Child slavery drives much of the chocolate industry
Months ago, at the end of 2023, an investigation from CBS reported that there’s still no real solution that’s been brought forward by major brands to stop child slavery. As a result of the public report, these unethical chocolate brands went to the homes of the children, intimidating them to retract their statements.
🛑 Trigger warning for CBS video report viewing child slaves harvesting cacao for chocolate.
My growing awareness of these brands has driven me away from them. They’ve failed to meet their deadlines to improve outcomes, and while I understand the issue is complex, sometimes corporations, living entities they are, can be self-deceptive about their efforts. Even with all the extra time, and upwards of a $10 Million annual salary for transnational CEOs to resolve the issue, there has yet to be any deep creativity to resolve this serious humanitarian issue that’s affecting children, their families, and the plants themselves.
At this point, you might be wondering how you can buy chocolate with more intention. And this is my aim - not to throw guilt onto anyone - just to ask that we become more choosier about the chocolate we consume, to want chocolate that isn’t destroying a forest or a child.
In my journey I have been discovering chocolates, both in-store and local shops, that are committed to sourcing responsibly. If chocolate is a food you want to explore, I sincerely hope that you can embark on a journey to uncover a new favorite brand or taste that’s grown consciously, and not exploitative of plants and people.
To start, you can research the brands in your store, check your town’s chocolate shop and sourcing, or run those brands across the scorecard or list below, where possible:
The Energetics of Cacao and How to Commune with Chocolate
Just as one can commune with many other plants, one can also commune with chocolate. You can eat a bar, or piece, or you can melt it down into a drink. My preferred method and ritual is to drink my chocolate prepared at home or in a responsible shop. If you’re planning to do the same, I want to emphasize three additional tips.
🍫 #1 Source Ethically: the source of the chocolate really matters. Communing with a chocolate that has been put under chemicals and slave labor means that the plant will also have absorbed the particular energy or the energetics of that commercial and human labor exchange. The ‘teacher’ from these types of harvests, will not be in ‘teacher mode’ at all.
🍫 #2 Avoid being duped by ‘Ceremonial’ references: There are many products with the label ‘ceremonial’ grade and while some producers of these types of cacao have special attention and care that are highly ethical - this type of label can create a bit of a misnomer in our psyche. You can commune with Theobroma cacao beans from many cacao plant varieties and from different types of chocolate. Writer Chris Christou asks a question that I appreciate: “Let me ask you, what is the consequence of calling something ceremonial before the “ceremony” takes place?”
🍫 #3 Avoid burning chocolate: Plants can burn! Chocolate’s burning point is 200°F/100°C. Unfortunately, I’ve seen people take a kettle right from boiling (~ 211°F/99°C) and pour that scalding hot water onto chocolate to melt it. This burns many components of the chocolate, effectively silencing your dear plant teacher, completely. As for me, I melt my chocolate inside of a glass above a skillet filled with water.
This drinking chocolate from Bettina Corallo is so stupidly delicious. There’s nothing but chocolate, a little brown sugar, and water.
🍫 What is my ritual? I speak into the cup and ask for guidance or help of some kind. Or I just tell the chocolate, thank you. Once, I told the chocolate (with added warm almond milk) to please just do whatever it felt like doing because I felt so much at a loss for words. I don’t take cacao near or around food. It’s usually on an empty stomach, or two hours after a meal.
🍫 What is the effect? Cacao/Cocoa is a heart opener. In the first few instances, the impact may be subtle and in the heart space. Over time, as I have strengthened my relationship, I have felt my entire body buzz head to toe.
Chocolate has surfaced dear friends up and into my heart space, and helped me to craft messages for them. It has surfaced family members for me to check on. It’s released stored memories (that I thought I’d forgotten) right when I needed them the most.
As I continue to explore chocolate, and commune with this teacher, I just remain grateful that the natural world has treasure troves of plant allies for us humans.
Currently I commune with chocolate about three or four times a week and I find that it brings relations with others to the surface (and sometimes self-love). I’d love to know about your experience, or a new brand of chocolate you’ve discovered, so please feel free to share below.
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Thank you for the invitation to commune with chocolate, Danver. I have had an inkling of its power but haven't really leaned into it. I am looking forward to doing that now. And I appreciate the information about finding an ethical source. The slavery is heartbreaking.