ISSUE VOL. 3 ー Cacao, Biocultural Diversity, and Sustainability
- Jun 24
- 6 min read
Updated: Jun 25
Gastronomy is not Haute Cuisine
Every February, Japanese department stores are transformed into showcases for chocolates from around the world. Long queues form for Valentine's Day fairs. People are drawn to rare brands and the stories of celebrated chocolatiers, willingly paying premium prices for a single piece. In Paris and Brussels, jewel-like bonbons are displayed in elegant boutiques. In the United States, multinational companies have built entire theme parks around chocolate. Across the world, chocolate has acquired a cultural value that extends beyond confectionery.
In recent times, growing attention has been paid to deforestation and labour issues associated with cacao production. At the same time, the bean-to-bar movement has encouraged consumers to look beyond the finished chocolate and towards its origins: the varieties of cacao used, fermentation practices, and relationships with producers. This marks a significant departure from an era in which chocolate was largely consumed as a uniform industrial product.
Yet we remain surrounded by an overwhelming number of choices. Information about products continues to expand. Even so, many of us still find ourselves relying on popularity, reputation, or attractive packaging when deciding what to buy.
In this month's article, we return to a broader question: what is gastronomy?
This time, I would like to approach that question through cacao itself.
What We Imagine Chocolate Tastes Like
The chocolate we know today is, in many ways, a modern processed food. It was largely shaped by technological innovations that emerged in nineteenth-century Europe.
Simply roasting and grinding cacao beans does not produce the smooth texture we associate with a chocolate bar.
A crucial development was the ability to separate cocoa butter from the beans.
Because cocoa butter melts at around body temperature, adding it back into the chocolate mass made it possible to create moulded bars with the characteristic sensation of melting on the tongue.
Another breakthrough was the invention of conching.
This process involves kneading chocolate for hours at a controlled temperature. It reduces particle size, eliminates grittiness, and softens the acidity and bitterness that develop during fermentation, producing a milder and more rounded flavour profile.
Much of what we now expect from chocolate—its silky texture and effortless melt-in-the-mouth quality—was not an inherent property of cacao itself. It was carefully engineered through modern food technologies.
The Journey of Cacao
The origins of cacao are thought to lie in the upper Amazon basin, in what is now Ecuador and Peru. From there, cacao culture gradually spread northwards and flourished within Mesoamerican civilisations.
Roasted cacao beans were ground into a paste, mixed with water and spices, then poured repeatedly from one vessel to another to create a frothy, bitter drink. Cacao was far more than a pleasurable indulgence. It played a central role in sacred rituals and ceremonies, and in some societies even circulated as a form of currency. Its significance was social, cultural, and spiritual.
The sixteenth century marked a profound shift in the history of cacao. With the expansion of European colonialism, cacao gradually ceased to be a crop embedded in local food cultures and became a commodity destined for global markets. As demand for chocolate increased across Europe, cacao cultivation was introduced to West Africa, where large-scale production systems geared towards export began to take shape.
The Diverse Food Cultures Sustained by Cacao
In Latin America, cacao is far more than a raw material for making chocolate.
In the markets of Oaxaca, Mexico, older women can still be seen ladling out tejate from large earthenware bowls to passers-by. This traditional fermented drink is made from cacao and maize and remains embedded in everyday food culture. Cacao is also indispensable to mole, a rich sauce that combines dozens of ingredients, including chillies, spices and nuts. Here, cacao functions not as a sweet ingredient, but as a seasoning, lending dishes depth, complexity and a subtle roasted aroma.
In Brazil, the white pulp surrounding cacao seeds is enjoyed fresh or transformed into juices, liqueurs and jams. I was introduced to another side of cacao by Brazilian colleagues, who would regularly prepare brigadeiros whenever friends gathered together. Made simply from condensed milk, chocolate and butter, these small sweets seemed less like confectionery and more like a gesture of hospitality.
In other words, before becoming chocolate, cacao was already many things: a drink that quenched thirst, a seasoning that enriched everyday meals, a fruit gathered from the forest, and a food resource that sustains daily life, hospitality, and social relations.
Communities Living with the Forest
An Ecuadorian colleague once told me, ‘The Amazon rainforest feels very close to me because my father spent much of his working life there.’ A Brazilian colleague also showed me photographs from a trip to the Amazon, describing the landscape simply as beautiful. Their words and expressions have stayed with me.
For many people, the Amazon exists primarily as a distant place encountered through maps, documentaries, or news reports about environmental degradation. For them, however, it was part of a lived landscape, intertwined with family histories and childhood memories. These conversations made me realise that, for many people with roots in Latin America, the relationship between cacao and the forest is far more immediate and personal than I had imagined.
In the Brazilian Amazon, there are people who are already putting sustainable cacao production into practice. I would like to introduce two examples.
The first is Dona Nena, owner of Filha do Combu, a small enterprise based on Combu Island. Her agroforestry plot is home to more than eighty species of plants, including cacao, açaí, cupuaçu and medicinal herbs. Rather than relying on pesticides or chemical fertilisers, she cultivates cacao within a forest ecosystem and produces chocolate using only three ingredients: cacao, sugar and fruits from the forest.
In an interview, she remarked, ‘Nature cannot give us more than what it is willing to offer.’ The statement reads almost like a quiet critique of modern agriculture, which has long pursued productivity through plantation systems and monocultures. In her family, roasted cacao beans were traditionally ground together with sugar and wrapped in cacao leaves to make simple cocoa bars, served to guests or prepared for special occasions such as Christmas. Today, Dona Nena is committed to passing these recipes, skills and food traditions on to younger generations.
Another example is the bean-to-bar company Luisa Abram.
The brand works with wild and semi-wild cacao harvested by communities living along six river basins in the Amazon, developing fermentation techniques together and producing chocolates that express what Abram calls the 'terroir of the rivers'. The idea is rooted in the geography of the Amazon itself. Rivers, rather than roads, have historically connected communities, facilitated trade and shaped everyday life. Cacao, too, acquires distinctive characteristics according to the ecological conditions and cultural practices of each watershed. By creating a market for wild cacao, these initiatives suggest a different economic logic. In this case, keeping the forest standing becomes not an obstacle to livelihoods, but the very foundation of a sustainable one.
What these two initiatives share is a way of understanding cacao not simply as an export crop or the raw material for a luxury product, but as something deeply integrated into people's lives, memories, and long-term relationships with the forest.
Rethinking Our Relationship with ‘Sustainable’ Products
There is no shortage of products marketed as sustainable.
They are often more expensive, their stories can be difficult to understand, and concerns about the planet can feel distant compared to the immediate realities of our own budgets and daily lives.
Perhaps, before paying for something, let’s try to imagine the lives of the people who made it.
In the case of cacao, this means imagining the forest as someone's home. It means thinking about people who live alongside the forest, process cacao with their families, welcome guests with homemade cocoa bars, and pass recipes inherited from grandparents on to the next generation.
What we need to engage with is not the label 'sustainable' itself. If we can imagine the lives and relationships that sustain a community, our choices may become more sustainable as a result.
These practices in cacao-producing regions are, in many ways, expressions of biocultural diversity, embodying the idea that gastronomy is not confined to haute cuisine. We should savour more than the texture of melting chocolate; we should savour the time of the forest, the memories of those who live there, and the relationships connecting people to each other and the natural world.
Follow our journey @movimento.metropolitano.
