Wild Chocolate: Across the Americas in Search of Cacao’s Soul

From James Beard Award-winning author Rowan Jacobsen, the thrilling story of the farmers, activists, and chocolate makers fighting all odds to revive ancient cacao and produce the world’s finest bar.

When Rowan Jacobsen first heard of a chocolate bar made entirely from wild Bolivian cacao, he was skeptical. A childhood of waxy mass-market chocolate had left him indifferent to the sweet, and most experts believed wild cacao had disappeared from the rainforest centuries ago. But one dazzling bite was all it took. Chasing chocolate down the supply chain and back through history, Jacobsen explores the abandonment of wild and heirloom cacao in the 19th and 20th centuries in favor of the high-yield, low-flavor varietals preferred by ＂Big Chocolate＂-the handful of giant corporations that control the industry and have historically paid its five million developing-world farmers less than a dollar per day.

In Wild Chocolate, Jacobsen journeys deep into the rainforests of the Amazon and Central America with the chocolate makers, activists, and indigenous leaders who are bucking the system, pulling the last vestiges of ancient cacao back from the edge of extinction and forging an alternative system in the process-one that brings prosperity back to local economies, returns fertility to the land, and protects it from the rampages of cattle farming. Serendipitously, the rediscovery of these heirloom and wild strains has also triggered a chocolate renaissance, as a new generation of ＂bean-to-bar＂ chocolate makers races to get their hands on these rare varietals and produce extraordinary chocolate displaying a diversity of flavors no one had thought possible. Chock-full of unforgettable characters, hallucinatory landscapes, hair-raising encounters, and surprising history, Wild Chocolate promises to be as rich, complex, bittersweet, and addictive as good chocolate itself.

Rowan Jacobsen is the author of eight books, including the James Beard Award-winning A Geography of Oysters and 2021’s Truffle Hound. He has written for the New York Times, Harper’s, Outside, Food & Wine, Forbes, Mother Jones, Scientific American, Smithsonian, Vice, and others, and he appears regularly in Best American Science & Nature Writing and Best Food Writing. He has been an Alicia Patterson Foundation fellow, a McGraw Center fellow, and a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT. The creator and host of the 2022 podcast series ＂Wild Chocolate,＂ he lives in Vermont.