ChocoSomm
After I left South Korea I landed in Los Angeles with a house full of roommates - a DJ, master-craft seamstress, yoga teacher, and a cat named Maggie. Around the block was Culver City where a new chocolate shop opened up called, Choco Vivo. The owner, Patricia Tsai served me a flight of dark to milk chocolate with drinking chocolate, which she said was consumed by the Mayans before war. The tastes were soft, intense, and I liked them. I walked to and from home to her shop regularly, buying bars of chocolate that had been formed right there in her shop from her huge maize grinder.
Her bean-to-bar cacao from Mexico showed me that so much of what I’d been served in the name of chocolate was a manipulation. I learned that the essential nutrients in cacao and cocoa had been stripped away, and the chocolate I thought I’d been eating was some modification. From Patricia I consciously became choosier about the chocolate I put into my body.
Years later, in the Dominican Republic I found myself at a chocolate museum with a dear friend, sampling a cacao variety that was not prevalent in the global market. It felt so special to taste the deliciousness that not a lot of the world had known.
My Cacao and Cocoa Lineage
A decade after I waltzed into ChocoVivo, I found myself in the jungle of Colombia drinking chocolate prepared by locals as part of a meal in the bigger part of a healing retreat I’d joined. A few months later, I sat in Oaxaca, Mexico with Cacao facilitator, Azalea, who describes herself as a city girl with Indigenous roots to Mexico. She served some twenty or so of us in a ritual Cacao ceremony, the first I’d ever experienced. Azalea taught me how to be so reverent, and to re-connect with the land as an integral part of the ceremony.
After these back to back experiences I noticed that my love for chocolate had expanded ten-fold. I was pickier, choosier, but still ignorant about chocolate’s source.
Then I met Bettina Corallo. She served me flower dipped chocolate while I was on the hunt to eat more flowers. I learned that she was the daughter of former Portuguese Ambassador to the Democratic Republic of Congo. There, in her teenage years she met Claudio Corallo, an Italian who had a passion for chocolate. It is important to note that Claudio is the only producer in the world who grows and produces his chocolate in the same location. They married, had children, and moved to SĂŁo TomĂ© and PrĂncipe, an African island nation. In visiting her shop and indulging in their chocolate and sourcing practices I got a window into how she and Claudio lived on the island and crafted a whole new way to produce chocolate. This is a stunning video production of showing how cocoa is formed into chocolate.
But even with this knowledge I was still ignorant about chocolate sourcing and quality. The Corallo family, I learned, were keenly aware of the terrible, horrific conditions within the chocolate industry. Mega-chocolate sellers that sourced chocolate right from the island and mainland Africa in ways that exploited locals and harmed families. While things have been done to reduce the harm, there is still ongoing exploitation towards the plant and the people and children enslaved into laboring to produce chocolate. I’d assumed the industry had cleaned up by 2024 - that many brands could be trusted again, but I was so very wrong.
View chocolate brands that are committed to slave-free chocolate here and see which ones are not ethical purchases. Below is an important investigation from CBS news, published Nov. 2023. It traces where giant chocolate confectionary makers’ CEOs are paid in the billions to create chocolate on the backs of child slavery.
I have experienced the profound magic of chocolate, and I don’t say this word lightly either. Chocolate is a known heart-opener, and it often has so much wisdom and pleasure to reveal when we can intentionally consume it.
My style of consuming chocolate incorporates the reverence I’ve since learned in South America, and from both Tsai and the Corallo’s methods of preparation. Outside of ethical sourcing, preparation is key. My biggest advice for preparation right now? Avoid scorching or burning chocolate. Its various components have a range of melting and burn temperatures, so I do my best to stick with melting temperatures when I prepare it for rituals at home. Coupling chocolate together with other plants for heightened journeys are also an amazing way to enjoy in chocolate too.
I have been trained by the IICCT for tasting chocolate, and to better understand this plant, its properties, and health benefits, and how I can responsibly consume more of it without supporting child slavery and the other horrific conditions that exist within the chocolate industry. How global leaders can treat children inhumanely is absurd - and I don’t want you to be part of this if you’ve landed here.
For more reading and details on how to better select chocolate, please see this article.