Consider The Source

What's hot in chocolate is cocoa whose roots we know

FOR ALMOST AS long as humans have been eating chocolate candy, people have been trying to make the product as consistent — and as profitable — as possible. Since every year's harvest of cocoa beans is slightly different, and since the harvest some years is more abundant in one place than it is in another, chocolate makers regularly blend cocoa beans from different sources.

Perhaps this preference for consistency reflects our Machine Age values. In the industrialized world, where a particular food is more often the product of a factory than it is an element of the natural world, consistency is proof that the product was made according to certain standards. Consumers take comfort in the safety of sameness. But in a post-industrial culture like the one that's emerging, novelty and originality are at a premium.

We want to know what farmer grew our lettuce, and which hillside bore the grapes that went into our wine. Now we want to know which plantation yielded the cocoa beans that went into our chocolate bars, and we want to be able to taste the difference.

The first time I encountered vintage chocolate, chocolate from a particular harvest in a particular place, was about 10 years ago in Hawaii. At Alan Wong's restaurant on Oahu, he served chocolate from the Big Island in a crème brûlée. I learned it came from the first commercial cocoa plantation in the United States, and that the very limited production was sold according to its vintage.

The inquiry prompted a sampling of several vintages and several styles of chocolate from the same plantation. As it turned out, the "vintage" was less significant than the fact that this chocolate was not made from a blend of beans; it came from a single origin, and it wasn't long before I started noticing other single-origin chocolates.

The vast majority of chocolate candy is made from blends of cocoa beans that come from many different countries to factories in Europe and North America. Since cocoa beans are a commodity, prices are set not by the costs of growing cocoa beans but by the world market, and often, the price does not cover the costs of producing the product, so most workers on cocoa plantations are trapped in a cycle of poverty and debt — if not outright slavery.

Steve Wallace of Omanhene chocolate company in Ghana says "the only way to assure slave-free chocolate is to buy chocolate bars made from beans grown solely in a slave-free country, such as Ghana." Wallace, an American who fell in love with Ghana when he went there as an exchange student, returned to the country to establish a company where the chocolate is grown and processed at the source.

Greg Atkinson is author of "Entertaining in the Northwest Style." He can be reached at greg@northwestessentials.com. Barry Wong is a Seattle-based freelance photographer. He can be reached at barrywongphoto@earthlink.net.