From Wild Chocolate, by Rowan Jacobsen:
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"Cacao is ridiculously rich. Coffee beans have about 12 percent fat. Whipping cream has 35 percent. Cacao beans have 55 percent, and these Criollo beans top out around 60. They are butter bombs. That makes them extra delicious, and it also helps the chocolate to defy gravity in the right hands."
Book Review: Wild Chocolate: Across the Americas in Search of Cacao's Soul
This is an adventure story. The quest? To find the source of the world's finest chocolate bars. Rowan Jacobsen takes us into the dangerous, darkest corners of the Amazon rain forest searching for wild cacao trees, and the men and women who struggle to harvest them and bring the beans to market. B+
"Wild Chocolate" is the 2025 selection for "Richardson Reads One Book". It is available from the Richardson Public Library. :-)
Grade: B+
Rowan Jacobsen is the author of books on science, nature, and food — oysters, honey bees, apples, truffles. Here he details his hunt for the source of the world's finest chocolate bars — those made from wild cacoa trees in the Amazon and central America.
Chocolate production goes back as far as 4,000 years in places like Oaxaca, Mexico, but today, almost all of the world's chocolate (think Hersey's) comes from African cacao plantations, full of a hybrid variety developed for bulk bean production, not flavor. But cacao's historical origin is in the Amazon rain forests of Bolivia.
The wild cacao trees aren't exactly extinct, but some thought they were. Big Chocolate had no interest in producing chocolate from such low-yield, wild cacao trees. A few years ago, a few entrepreneurs showed how amazing heirloom chocolate tastes compared to the mass-produced product that consumers found on grocery shelves around the world. Rowan Jacobsen traveled deep into the Amazon in search for wild cacao and the businesspersons who tried (and are trying) to make a profitable business from harvesting heirloom cacao beans and bringing them to market. In the process, they hope to protect ancient forests from being clear cut for modern agriculture and cattle production. This story is about chocolate sure, but it's about so much more. My biggest caveat about it is that it's a work in progress. The future of wild chocolate is not assured.
Reviews of prior selections for "Richardson Reads One Book":
- 2024: "Symphony of Secrets" B+
- 2023: "Remarkably Bright Creatures" B+
- 2022: "Behold the Dreamers" B+
- 2020, 2021: "This Tender Land" B+
- 2019: "Bluebird, Bluebird" B+
- 2018: "The Circle" Didn't read the book. Saw the movie first. That review explains all.
- 2017: "Sing for Your Life" C+
- 2016: "Spare Parts" C+
- 2015: "We Are Called to Rise" C+
- 2014: "Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore" B-
- 2013: "The Book Thief" A-
- 2012: "One Amazing Thing" C+
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