chocolate is getting more expensive, here’s why

[@answerinprogress]

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[@Zooiest]

How does it protect my device from malware?

[@flymypg]

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[@Zooiest]

@@flymypg yeah, but I can just not download the malware and be fine, right? Neither of those apply to me, btw, so I'd like to hear the rest of the list too.

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[@il0vewikipedia]

Claiming that you need a VPN protecting you against malware in 2024 is just dishonest. I hope you get better sponsorships in the future.

[@arimanwd]

Hi. I'm from Ghana (one of the west African countries farming Cocoa). Everything you've mentioned as ways to sustainably farm cocoa is good and correct. However there's another significant issue in the country plaguing cocoa farming, and that's illegal gold mining (aka: galamsey) that isn't being addressed. The TLDR of this is that farmers are selling their land to illegal miners because they make more money from this than from farming. This is because the price of cocoa isn't controlled by the farmers, and so they don't make enough money to sustain themselves from their farming. These miners use harmful chemicals and leave behind heavy metal byproducts that affect neighboring areas, local resources and other farms. The impact of this is that there is a high degree of deforestation, farming area is reduced, and existing farms are effectively poisoned. There are other impacts of this issue (galamsey) that are far more wide reaching. But at least for how it relates to chocolate, I'd appreciate it if you did a video on this topic to make more people aware of how this issue in one country is affecting everyone.

[@manthangadhia]

This is much needed context! Thank you for adding it, I was hoping she would address some of the economics involved at least

[@katiahrvth8483]

Dude 😢

[@squattermelon.]

I find it very frustrating how people from the 1st world can overlook things like this.

[@luigicraveiro]

thanks for the information

[@Calicido]

+

[@PeidosFTW]

why is that that we came up with crop rotation thousands of years ago, and yet we are only now realising its actually good

[@joeburly]

Because we live under capitalism and things that shave profit margins are not done.

[@PeidosFTW]

@@joeburly I completely understand that part but like, it's been what like 200 years of capitalism, how have the farmers not reached the point where their lands have gotten "stale"? You can only have so much monoculture for so long, or am I misremembering what I learned in school?

[@iwantagoodnameplease]

@@PeidosFTW Fertilizer was invented to avoid crop rotation

[@prayagsuthar9856]

@@iwantagoodnameplease I imagine fertilizer is just a band-aid on a giant gash for this monoculture situation 😔

[@damientonkin]

I agree with what others have said, if a capitalist won't see the consequence in the short to medium term then from their perspective there are no consequences to speak of, looking at you climate change. I also don't think forest gardens are a new idea, I think that's more or less what some pre-colonial native Americans were doing but I'm not really qualified to speak on that.

[@MothTide]

I love how answer in progress is just Melissa learning new cooking stuff, Taha learning new tech stuff, and Sabrina showing off their school trauma by overachieving at every single classic method of "measuring" intelligence /t

[@lmelki89]

There's two things you didn't mention that I think could be important to consider: 1. Diversity is very important to sustain healthy plants in general, not only cacao. Monocultures tend to make easier for diseases to spread. Brazil was the main cocoa supplier some time ago, until there was the plague of the "witches' broom", a fungal disease that broke many farmers in the 90's. It can be fought back with organic farming practices, managing shade and drainage, and planting cacao trees among other trees in the forest, keeping tree diversity. This makes the cocoa cost go up, as it becomes more labor intensive when you don't use fungicides and that kind of stuff. It's very hard to compete with cacao from Africa, especially the ones that use slave labor. Big chocolate companies want the cheapest cacao to maximize their profit, so they do everything in their power to disguise their suppliers, confusing lawmakers and consumers about what they are really selling. Meanwhile, consumers keep paying high prices to eat chocolate with a free conscience. 2. Not only there's no government incentive for organic and ethical cocoa farmers, there are companies actively trying to hurt small cocoa farmers without any consequence from the law whatsover. Remember, big companies have the sole objective of maximizing their profits. A common practice is to "coincidentally" import tons of cocoa from Africa exactly in the beginning of the cocoa harverst by local farms. Prices go way down, farmers go broke. That's called "dumping", by the way. So it is not just a matter of "stop eating cheap chocolate", like the fault is all on the consumer. Big corporations need more oversight. We need to stop letting chocolate (and coffee) companies keep making up fake, unregulated ethical programs that have no use but to make their chocolate prices go higher with no benefit for the farmers. There needs to be more actions from governments to stop slavery, stop lobbying from big corpos, and so on. This is a huge, complex problem, with political, economical and social factors involved.

[@trilokdhakad1785]

That sounds like a Mature Audience

[@ailbbe]

I was honestly really bothered by this video for the fact that it doesn't address these issues. I did a double take at her casually glossing over slavery. The whole thing felt like an ad for that one dudes chocolate factory. You can't make a video about the price of chocolate without talking about the predatory business practices the chocolate industry uses. Forest farming is great, but it won't work if the farmers continue to be taken advantage of to the point where monoculture and child slavery become the only viable option for making ends meet. This is not an issue where the solution is to make better consumer choices. Especially when your ability to choose is manipulated so intensely by chocolate companies constantly attempting to deflect their responsibility for destructive agricultural practices and slavery through fake untraceable statements about ethically scourced cacao.

[@two_squared]

As a chocolate person, I’m sad our species is going extinct

[@Sutidamuskun]

I like to imagine that a humanoid Hershey bar frantically typed this :>

[@its_zionthelion]

Me too 😢

[@forest_fire959]

A humanoid snickers typed this. 😭

[@joranvanolphen9892]

Don’t worry, we peanuts will probably be around for a while 💜 😉 😂

[@j.r.3945]

As a milk chocolate person I am unsure how to feel about

[@fingiess]

in permaculture we most often sayfood forests have 7 layers. 1. canopy, like large fruit and nuts trees. 2. understory, like drawf fruit trees. 3. shurb, like berry bushes or otherwise useful shrubs 4. herbaceous, like vegetables, herbs, and flowers. 5. groundcover, plants that often blanket the floor and keep soil healthy 6. rhizosphere, like deep taproots that increase water penetration or large root nets that trap soil from washing away 7. and lastly vertical climbers like vines We can increase yields by cultivating multiple crops in the same space. ideas like companion planting help us to identify which plants thrive together, yielding better results compared to monocultue. The diversity of crops also minimizes the spread of diseases and boosts overall plant health, making them more resilient to what they might face. Furthermore, in the event of a crop failure, the diversity serves as a form of resilience, as we haven't solely relied on a single crop.

[@prosandcons-fl2cc]

Curious, what about pests?

[@lapispyrite6645]

Do you have any idea how they add nitrogen to the soil in these Cocoa forest gardens? Do they use nitrogen fixing plants, or do they still use fertiliser?

[@aldproductions2301]

@@prosandcons-fl2cc a bee farmer was selling honey in town a few weeks ago and happened to give an answer. If you're worried about a pest, you invite a species that goes to war with said pest.

[@Farimira]

​just don't introduce invasive species to manage pests like cane toads for sugar cane pests

[@Gloupyli]

Bring us the shrubery!

[@TS_Mind_Swept]

I like the idea of chocolate prompting better farming practices, I just wish it could be expected to catch hold faster..

[@CorbiniteVids]

Full boycott of the big 4 chocolate companies until it's achieved. You don't tell someone they're doing a bad job by giving them more money, nothing will change unless the companies responsible are forced to. We have the power we just have to choose to use it instead of putting our taste buds first (it's harsh but that's how it is)

[@fiona9891]

​@@CorbiniteVids that's true, but they only work if you actively go out and make people aware of the boycott (and, ideally, why) that means going *out* out, unless you have a large platform people are much less likely to listen to you on the internet (maybe try and get some people together to advocate for it, and so on)

[@CorbiniteVids]

@@fiona9891 I get that but either way I do feel like it's worth asking the question: how comfortable are we even individually, knowingly paying for slavery and buying something that was produced with slavery? Does it ruin our enjoyment of the product at all? If we were all capable of evaluating that question we wouldn't need to organize in a case like this (not to diss organized direct action). And even if the companies aren't starved to bankruptcy, reducing demand still reduces how much gets made down the line.

[@fiona9891]

@@CorbiniteVids i mean, it's not just that people are comfortable with doing that it's hard to ensure everything you buy doesn't come from slave labor because of just how much stuff comes from slave labor and most people don't have the time or energy to track where everything they buy comes from imo, the reason why focusing on stuff you can do individually is counterproductive: deciding not to buy stuff from a company isn't going to make a company reduce their unethical practices *even slightly*, it's going to have so little of an impact they won't notice and it won't change anything, so given it has no material effect i don't think we should append a moral weight to it, because the only thing that's going to do is make people burn themselves out trying to make sure all the stuff they buy is ethical until they're totally apathetic and stop caring now if people are trying to organize a boycott, and you know you're trying to put pressure on a company as a collective, and you still buy the thing (unless you had no alternative) - yes, *that* should make you feel bad

[@GRIMHOOD99]

Chocolate won't prompt it, issue with cocoa going extinct is something that was true ten years ago with other plant virus and nothing changed then, vanilla has a similar issue but vanilla has really decent artificial substitute to off-load some of the demand.

[@ElFlacoV]

As an agricultural engineer from Ecuador, the land of the genetic origin of cacao: I am happy that you guys touch this issue. These kind of problems are always much more complicated than what a 10 minute video can explain. At least, This is taking the first step: Raising awareness to the north hemisphere people that chocolate bars are cheap because the environment and the farmers are taking up the cost..

[@perpetuallyconfused6608]

May I ask where you work? I have family in Ecuador, and we are so proud when we see the chocolate up here in the US. I even went to a chocolate production area once.

[@ElFlacoV]

@@perpetuallyconfused6608 used to work in banana and cacao in Guayas and Los Rios. Currently, I left the country due to the high crime rate in the country. Finding random corpses in sugarcane and banana plantations wasn't unheard-of.

[@antwerpbeertours]

I wrote a long message but I didn't go into the mafias and the companies extortion I heard. That part is more difficult to document but easy to hear.

[@quadstar4382]

So basically capitalism?

[@ElFlacoV]

@@quadstar4382 you could either criticize the system.. or criticize those who abuse the system. There are 5 companies who buys the most out the cacao in the world. These companies together with the retailer companies, refuse to give a bigger share of the profits to the farmers through price manipulation.. if there are millions of cacao sellers, but only 5 cacao buyers.. who has the upper hand?

[@hammerth1421]

With prices this high, some of the money might actually make its way down to the cocoa farmers. Who am I kidding? It's gonna get pocketed along the way while even more children are gonna end up in modern slavery.

[@legosoniclover]

Never heard of modern slavery, that’s really sad. 😢 I’m guessing it’s just making children do very hard work?

[@johndice4067]

​@@legosoniclover hard work, dangerous work. With next to no pay. It also takes away time they could be in school.

[@mark22732]

I'd honestly have no issue paying substantially more for chocolate/coffee/rubber etc, if I knew that it was allowing people out of slavery. But price increases rarely (if ever) result in any change for the conditions of the people struggling the most :(

[@HanneHaugnes]

@@mark22732 look up tonys chocolony :)

[@Luziferne]

Happy Capitalism Everyone! Happy… Effin… Capitalism… I cry, but NOT out of sadness… but out of pur hot rage…

[@sediew]

As an Ecuadorian, where cacao is originally from, I can recommend Pacari. It is our local natural sustainable chocolate producer and among the most ethical brands in the world. Our country is still a very rich country in nutrients and soil. I hope we can maintain it before it’s gone

[@joshpipe7755]

I bought a couple of 100% cacao chocolate bars from Pacari after reading your comment, and our first impression was that the bar isn't bitter at all, unlike 'very dark' chocolate we've tried before. It's good to know that the raw product is available, and like you say, I hope the producers choose sustainability so that people can enjoy chocolate for a long time. Thank you for the recommendation

[@zildiun2327]

If chocolate goes extinct the world will fall to its knees.

[@lorissantarsiero5849]

Truly the single worst event in human history 😔

[@RenéSaussy]

Absolutely devastating.

[@GermanSausagesAreTheWurst]

You think that's bad, wait until coffee goes extinct.

[@zildiun2327]

@@GermanSausagesAreTheWurst That’ll be the apocalypse. Also your name is amazing 😂

[@luigitho9560]

@@GermanSausagesAreTheWurst liked for the comment and the username

[@Roy5202]

As a backyard vegetable gardener, forest gardens sound like companion planting to me. I can imagine using low-growing herbs like mint and oregano as a living mulch that can help retain water in the soil. Forest gardens sound like the most extreme and beautiful version of companion planting as a backyard gardener would do with basil and tomatoes

[@kaitlyn__L]

Those gardening techniques are inspired by these larger forest gardens, yeah. Until us Europeans turned it into desert for cattle, almost all of Australia was managed like that. What’s left of the Amazon Rainforest is a forest garden too. European explorers thought it was all natural and “God’s bounty” and so on, when actually it was painstakingly engineered agriculture which mostly looked after itself and merely required harvesting (with a few rules of thumb for what to pick) when hungry.

[@cuaura]

THIS IS WHAT ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE IS!!! YES !!! IM SO EXCITED BC I NEVER SEE MY FIELD FRAMED IN AN INTERESTING WAY BUT THIS IS WHAT ITS ALL ABOUT!!!

[@stealtbadge2877]

Your video was so informative, thank you! just a little criticism, VPN don’t protect you against data leaks, viruses and other stuff. It just encrypts your traffic between 3 different branches of nodes, your home computer, the server it sends the traffic to and the place you are trying to send data to.

[@Grated_Gold-kw5nr]

I dont think I could handle it if chocolate dissappeared, chocolate is too important

[@Chevalier_de_Pas]

Well, I have GERD, no more chocolate in my life

[@oceanbearmountain]

12:33 composting the husks is cool ofc but one thing i've wanted to try is the fruit. the fact that there is a whole edible fruit from which the beans are extracted i think is not known by 99% of chocolate consumers. there's a good reason it isn't itself sold: the farmers consume it themselves, and the way the beans are extracted by hand doesn't leave a pretty-looking, intact fruit that could be sold as a unit itself. i have wondered however whether it can't be made into some kind of sauce or jam, although if this were to come at the price of a vital and free source of nutrients to those working the harvest -- many of whom have not only never tried chocolate, but aren't fully aware of the final form it ends up taking -- i would pray such a use never to come to fruition if it meant eating into the workers' eating. but it makes think of kale, which for so long was almost treated as though merely a weed, at best usable as decoration, before being transformed into the supposed so-called superfood being sold at 10,000% [this is a completely made up number] its price-point a decade prior we all can no longer afford today [i actually have no idea how much it goes for these days but i used to make some killer kale chips back in the day. as a torontonian i just can't afford ... anything..? lol] also remember resenting chocosol back in the day, first encountered them as a barista at Caffiends at victoria college, thinking it like ETHOS water's cocoa-y equivalent. had read too much zizek. now i can appreciate their work. regardless, in all cases we _should_ be asking how farmers and harvesters are compensated and whether increases in prices for consumers correlate in any way with increases in wages for workers, or with corporate profits. in canada at least the answer, vis-a-vis pretty much every agricultural product, has of course been across the board the latter in recent years

[@kaitlyn__L]

The kale craze has died down thankfully. I was able to buy a giant bag of kale for only £2 recently, to use instead of (a £3!) cabbage in a vegetable soup.

[@hugocortizo6993]

On top of all the worldwide daily atrocities, I don't think I'll ever forgive our predatory ways for slowly stripping the world out of whimsy and wonder: polar bears are more in danger by the day, I haven't seen fireflies in literal decades and now this 🤦🏻‍♂️🤦🏻‍♂️🤦🏻‍♂️🥺😢

[@luigitho9560]

I saw fireflies the last couple summers so their not completely extinct yet

[@Funkensturme]

99,9% of species that ever existed went extinct and it was not because of humans. Even if we tried our best to eliminate species we couldn't make a dent in those numbers.

[@jonathangmallender]

A quote from Dr who "humans make everything boring" and that's what we, as a species, will end up doing. A lifetime of work, eating cold vegetables, and no fun, on a dying planet.

[@abyssaljam441]

Omg the fabled triple whammy of organic, fair trade, and rain forest alliance. I actually thought that was legally impossible but clearly not

[@Ixarus6713]

The (legally) purest morality chocolate. 😮 I need me some of that.

[@FarisSalman]

So happy the things I learned way back as a Forestry student finally entered mainstream media. Thank you for making the concept of forest garden easily understandable by the masses.❤❤

[@wavesofbabies]

8:20 I feel Neil's "are you really doing this right now" expression

[@L-Invictus5775]

Nah, I was honestly just caught off guard and trying to think of an answer, that's all. 😅

[@outof_simshead]

Wait, is this Neil? ​@@L-Invictus5775

[@MajoraZ]

I think you all should have talked about the development and use of chocolate by Indigenous cultures and civilizations before jumping European adoption of it when talking about Chocolate's history. I actually just helped Ancient Americas with his video on Cacao/Chocolate from 2 months ago, and that will have more info and is even more updated then my comment here (since i'm going off of an older writeup of mine for this comment), but to talk about it a bit here: Firstly, while Chocolate's main area of widespread use as of Spanish contact with the Americas was in Mesoamerica (the bottom half or so of Mexico, all of Guatemala and Belize, etc; which had urban civilizations like the Aztec, Maya, etc), Cacao's domestication or at least first use by humans actually did NOT take place in Mesoamerica or Central America, but rather down in South America, in Ecuador: This is the result of a few studies published in 2018, which found traces of Cacao in ceramics at Santa Ana-La Florida in Ecuador, alongside genetics research which pinned down the Criollo variety as the first domesticated form of Cacao which is likewise found first in Ecuador. (South America itself, too, had highly developed urban civilizations in Peru and bits of adjacent countries; and then some nomadic ones and town building semi-complex cultures in the areas around that: We now know that even the Amazon rainforest had agricultural societies that built large irrigation networks and large towns, for example). Chocolate use then spread up through Central America and into Mesoamerica, where it's most known for today (and from Mesoamerica, it was traded further north, past Northern Mexico and it's Aridoamerican nomadic societies and with the town building agricultural ones of Oasiamerica like the Pueblo, Hohokam, Salado, etc in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, etc). I believe there was also some even more recent search I saw from working on the video with Ancient Americas which found that there was genetic flow back down to South America and up to Mesoamerica, as well as some extra ambiguities with the exact timeline and locations of different milestones in the domestication process, but off the top of my head I don't recall for sure. Again, watch that video. In Mesoamerica, it was used by pretty much every major civilization: The Olmec had it, who were one of Mesoamerica's first civilizations around 1400-600BC, it's use by the Maya and Aztec is extensive, it shows up in surviving books from the Mixtec civilization which shows it's use by Mixtec and Zapotec rulers and nobles, there's ceramic depictions of it on vessels at Teotihuacan, etc. However, widespread USE does not mean widespread availability: Cacao requires pretty tropical growing conditions, and as such a lot of the civilizations in the more temperate to arid hills and valleys in Central Mexico, Oaxaca, etc often were not able to grow it themselves. A good example of this is how the very furthest out the Aztec Empire did conquests was at Xoconochco / Soconusco, an area in Chiapas around 800 kilometers away from the core of the Aztec empire, which they specifically secured as a Cacao production area, despite the fact that Cacao was a regular economic resource they demanded as taxes from other conquered and vassal provinces. Therefore, Cacao's wide use within Mesoamerica is less a credit to extensive and widespread cultivation, but how robust and extensive trade networks were. (as was the fact that it, Macaws, rubber balls, etc were traded by the Maya 2000+ kilometers to Oasisamerica) My area of interest is primarily Mesoamerican urbanism/city planning, architecture, water management systems, and general society and politics, so admittedly in depth information on Cacao's cultural symbolism and culinary use isn't something I have a ton of information about off the top of my head: But I know that the Maize god in Classic Maya religion had connections to Cacao as well, with trees being a symbol of rebirth and regeneration often associated with the tombs of rulers or dead mythical hero's such as in the Popol Vuh, where such trees sometimes are depicted personified as the Maize god and with Cacao fruit. Cosmic World Trees are also a big deal in Maya cosmology, where they are often tied to Crocodiles and we have many depictions of Crocodillian cacao trees, which in turn also are tied to the Maize god. I'm not aware of any connections between Maize deities in Central mexico to Cacao, but Xipe Totec, the Aztec god of Rebirth and regeneration, absolutely had connections to maize, where the husking of maize was likened to a rebirth and was tied to sacrifices of skin flaying, mirroring the process (In general, Mesoamerican creation myths often involve people being made from ground maize or magic bones representing corn meal mixed with divine blood). There's also a pan-mesoamerican symbolic tie to Cacao and blood, and while the evidence of blood actively being mixed into chocolate drinks is pretty spotty, certainly specific ingredients like achiote was used in different chocolate drink blends to produce a rich red color. Also, while Cacao and chocolate beverages were absolutely something associated with nobility, rulers, etc, where Classic Maya art and Cacao drinking vessels depict the beverage being served at royal feasts and meetings between royals and diplomats, and where textual sources on the society and culture of the Mexica of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan insist that the beverage was limited and not available to commoners, the reality is more complicated: We know from analysis of various ceramic vessels that Maya commoners would have had access to and consumed chocolate as well, and at Yautepec, a Aztec ("Aztec" can refer to the Mexica specifically, the broader Nahua civilization they come from, or the "Aztec Empire", which included both Nahua and non Nahua states) city of moderate size located a bit outside the political core of the empire, we see that commoners had access to chocolate too: This is perhaps not that surprising, though, considering that the Mexica are pretty widely known to be sort of classist prudes. Even in Tenochtitlan, however, we know that Cacao beans were a common sort of "pocket change": Men, women, and children at a market would carry some beans with them and use it as an exchange unit in small quantities, in addition to more valuable, larger bartering units like standardized bartering textiles (quachtli, depending on the grade could be worth anywhere from 5 to 100 beans), copper/bronze axe-monies, etc: A turkey or hare was worth 100 beans, while an egg, a tomatoe, chilli, cactus fruit, advocado, tamale, etc were variously worth 1 to 5 beans. We even know of merchants mixing in counterfeit beans into their stock! Again, Ancient America's video goes into a lot more depth and explores other stuff I don't mention here, and I highly suggest checking that out. I'm obviously a bit biased since I help him out with his Mesoamerican videos, but he does great work.

[@yurisei6732]

Why? The use of cocoa by indigenous Americans isn't really relevant to the topic, which is the overconsumption of cocoa by the modern world. It's not even really relevant where chocolate came from except as a bit of bonus exposition to the point about cocoa plantations being a big thing.

[@sltysailor]

"Labor Issues" in cocoa farming? I think you mean very prominent problems of modern-day slavery! You should not have just glossed over that fact.

[@johnk6757]

Most people don’t actually care as long as they don’t have to see it

[@cruncyart]

I haven't got very far into the video, but does she really not talk about the rampant slavery in the cocoa industry? What the hell?

[@hilal_younus]

Aka Capitalism

[@Pistolsatsean]

I hate corporations, prices endlessly go up and producers continue to get less

[@exosproudmamabear558]

And world ends up a worse place,global warming rise and ecological system fucked up. Governments get instable. It is a bad processes fpr everyone except ceos and shareholders who wants to have money quickly

[@gabedarrett1301]

I'm guessing it's not a coincidence that this was released on Valentine's Day? Anyway, I'm looking forward to buying heavily discounted chocolate tomorrow, BUT I'll look for chocolate that mentions where it's made, as per your advice

[@JaccoSW]

There is a famous Dutch manufacturer of sustainable fairtrade chocolate bars that used to claim 100% slave free chocolate. A few years ago they stopped doing so because it turns out they simply could not reliably guarantee there was no slavery nor illegal child labour. The supply chain was simply too complex for that. So keep that in mind.

[@Jeffur2]

This is why I hope Ghana succeeds in carving out their own part of the market in chocolate production, because they're more likely to give a damn and invest in their future as both the growers and producers of chocolate

[@BRAINGUTZZ]

it's fuckin what

[@sadzpea]

I love that this is one of the few hearted comments in this comment section so far

[@schemage2210]

Forest Gardens are a boutique solution for boutique stores that sell hand made chocolate. It doesn't solve the commercial scale demand that exists, that requires far more product then forest gardens can provide.

[@maksiksq]

Tom Scott was right.

[@YOEL_44]

Always has been

[@hollyrose9336]

I’m not informed, what was he right about exactly?

[@SporkleBM]

someone elaborate? QuQ

[@akshay-kumar-007]

@@SporkleBMyeah man, please elaboraate

[@maksiksq]

Tom Scott made a video on a laboratory that specifically quarantines cocoa diseases where he said that chocolate price might go up over the years.

[@YoungGandalf2325]

A world without chocolate would be so boring, so bland, so... _vanilla?_ 😔

[@imveryangryitsnotbutter]

Getting real tired of this vanilla slander. It's delicious

[@伏見猿比古-k8c]

Vanilla is in the same boat as chocolate so we don't even get vanilla we get artificial vanilla.

[@Funkensturme]

Where I live, chocolate's biggest flavor competitor is strawberries.

[@trajectoryunown]

Vanilla is not plain. It just grew to such immense popularity that in modern times we just automatically add it to most baked goods without even thinking about it. The only seasoning which has a more prominent role in recipes is salt itself. Cinnamon rolls, breads, cupcakes, cookies, granola bars, and pies... Is it necessary? Not necessarily. While vanilla is a nice flavoring by itself, it is far from your average occupant of the spice rack. Adding just a small amount of this subtle yet potent wonder actually enhances a myriad of other tastes as well. Together, salt and vanilla act as the conductor and sheet music which herald the processions of the flavor symphony's booming orchestral radiance straight through your _blasphemous_ mortal tongue, directly into your woefully darkened mind. There a seed of light hath been planted. So when next you catch wind of its coming, the coming of the Lord's bean, cease your heresies! Recall these words and give praise! "Hail, unworthy mortal, to the wonders of its majesty! Humble yourself that your senses might be allowed to bask in the regal exuberance of its aromatic bouquet. Let your lips greet its presence with fear and trembling, and your tongue with eager anticipation, for before you is that which to none could compare! It is the subtle yet potent, the mighty yet humble, the inimitable culinary king, to whom we are forever gracious, *_VANILLA_*

[@foxpokemonforever4775]

Vanilla is FINE and I’ll eat it but chocolate just has a richer taste I like better

[@JasonBA96]

After watching this video and MatrickPatrick's Food theory about quitting sugar, I will try to see dessert as a weekly treat instead of a daily snack

[@NeroPop]

that guy who gave her the tour has the best energy. Clearly in love with what he's doing and its so wholesome.

[@kaitlyn__L]

The fact that the same land can produce coffee, cocoa, AND vanilla yet isn’t… that annoys me. I knew coffee and tea wanted a bit of shade, so I’d often wondered about crop colocation. But the fact that farmers could get three high value crops (instead of just bulking out the ground with other basics) makes the wastefulness of our current system all the more infuriating.

[@yurisei6732]

It's just a matter of space though, why grow three different crops together when growing those crops separately is more efficient? Why be annoyed by efficiency?

[@kaitlyn__L]

@@yurisei6732 you must’ve missed the part of the video where it’s much less efficient by many other key metrics

[@ferjo3192]

Here in Philippines we also used to have chocolate farms, however since the farmers have to sell their produce to only a few (three big companies) processors effectively making a cartel controlling the price of buying cacao, farmers were not able to make ends meet and have had to switch crops to survive. You guys should look into who actually has commercial hold of the processing from cacao to choco and you will see they are the ones making big money, forcing illegal labor, unsustainable practices, and controlling the trade.

[@esdrascaleb]

We used to produce Cocoa in Brazil. But someone made a bioterror attack here 30 years ago. And now 90% of our production is gone forevere...

[@pascolol5044]

Damn…

[@ori9830]

Something not touched on in this video that is contributing to the rising prices of chocolate is the cosmetics industry using cocoa butter which is being used in a lot of cosmetics these days, so - at least at large companies - it is being replaced with alternate oils so that the companies can sell off large batches of cocoa butter for extra profit. I'd assume, but have no proof or experience, that this is going to be less of a problem with artisnal/smaller chocolatiers because their focus is on the chocolate itself.

[@omnio2043]

This is a good point!

[@jerrik-415]

I've been living with a forest garden for 5 years and let me tell you: There is no way for it to grow fast enough to be commercially viable. It is absolutely still an excellent idea, self sustaining, self repairing, and you can have 60+ micro-harvests every year forever, but only enough for a family. Since most families move more often than it takes trees to grow, it's not realistic for the masses. Maybe several working together can create a co-op, but there's just too much manual labor required to harvest that no company would want to pay for it when turn-and-burn mono-cropping is still a legal and financially viable process.

[@LoxyTheReindeer]

Counterpoint: If we start adopting it *now* and start growing these forest gardens now, and do what we can to maintain them, they could at least have a chance to become commercially viable by the time we need them. That and perhaps we can combine the forest garden idea with other approaches, such as rooftop gardens, to make it more viable. We as a world need to not only start producing things more sustainably, but also more ethically, if we don’t want to have some kind of disaster/apocalypse in our kids lifetime. The biggest hurdle is pressuring big corpos to actually make a change and care about something other than profit margins.

[@kathryn9207]

The most useful way we can implement food forests now is in public shared spaces and parks community run gardens that offer extra food and small food forest variations in our own back yards that can provide other crops to individual families. With large community run gardens it introduces important plants to pollinators and green spaces that can help improve the community and offers larger amounts of each crop that is available for those that need or could benefit from it. Large scale would look more like a variety of trees and undergrowth on cocoa farms. Instead of acres of the same tree with little to no other plant species below the trees to introduce other fruiting species to help improve soil health. It's to reduce monocropping.

[@kaitlyn__L]

Your final sentence is the real kicker. And the same is true for vertical farming with all the electricity and water they require currently. Agricultural practices need to be much better regulated to have any hope of saving the world’s food supply.

[@Carhill]

10:30 - I want to know more about this Tea Grade Utility Cacao. The bucket of mystery beans beacons me!

[@mehp_]

seeing the process of small-scale chocolate making was really interesting! it reminded me of when i went to the dr pepper museum and saw how soda used to be made. they used a gravity-based system too :D

[@Frenzy.64]

This reminds me of the time (I don't remember when don't ask i just heard in a documentary once) when cocoa prices were so high that companies were labelling their chocolate bars as "chocolate flavoured" and not actually using any chocolate inside of them.

[@lucillerenard9019]

I’ve been buying from chocosol for a few years and getting to see their process behind the scenes here was fascinating!

[@dwikiirianto8816]

we need to discover oompa loompaland ASAP

[@Ekornet542]

"I know thats there's other more important things [in the world], but this is important to me" is such an underrated concept for people to understand. (And also a key point to why I love AIP)

[@amacot656]

I saw some similar article claiming the near doom of cocoa. But I am releived that some method exist to continue to produce it in a more durable way.

[@KRYMauL]

Forest gardens were the original version of farming. It's amazing to think that our ancestors had a sort of spooky wisdom when it came to making things that actually last. Yep, I'm quoting Nasim Taleb again because he nailed it. Believe it or not but our ancestors actually knew what they were doing.

[@blossomnessstudios4446]

This video was so wonderful and inspiring. Thank you

[@migueljoserivera9030]

I loved Dr. Sacco's pronunciation. You can tell he has listened to many locals in Hispanoamerica. At last an English speaker saying /kakao/ instead of /koko/.

[@dantheinternetman1]

"Kakao" is the name of the tree, "koko" is the name of the seed, no?

[@migueljoserivera9030]

@@dantheinternetman1 Cacao /Kakao/ is the name of the plant, in general, in most languages (most importantly, in Spanish and Nahuatl). In English Cacao /Kakau/ is used to call exclusively to reference the tree, and Cocoa /Koko/ to call the processed powder. Anyways, I am not saying that there is a better way of referencing anything, just that his pronunciation is noticeably more similar to a Cacao Farmer rather than to a typical English Speaker.

[@ComicDrake]

I legitimately did a spit take when that Folger's clip played. Was not expecting that. 😆

[@JDEstradaWriter]

I’ve shifted my buying to what seem like more ethical companies and although it’s a higher price point, the first bite confirms whether it’s the right call or not. Will definitely be checking out Chocosol to see what I pick up

[@klaernie]

Gotta say: this video feels like a huge step up in videography! Well done, Melissa!

[@owen_nieberlein]

Micheal Sacco's joke cracked me up 😭 I think I'm a child 🤣

[@daniellemhall1358]

I love chocolate so I'm very devastated that this is happening. I live in a tropical area, so we do have cacao, and chocolate factories, but I don't know if our chocolate is affected. I remember when our citrus trees got disease s and it devastated my family's trees. We are only now growing them back. I never knew I could miss trees before this.

[@majibento]

This would’ve made me sad years ago, but I basically cut chocolate out of my diet 3 years ago when I found out it both triggers my anxiety and gives me acne. 😢 I don’t crave it as much these days but it still sucks

[@majibento]

@c0ttage hm… that’s sad 😞 I bet it’s happening with hazelnuts too, I eat hazelnut butter alone to satisfy chocolate cravings sometimes but I heard nuts need a lot of water to grow

[@sophiaisabelle027]

Chocolate going extinct seems like a major crisis unfolding at any given moment. Sure seems like the world has drastically changed a lot.

[@aslandus]

Honestly, cacao getting more expensive might also make people healthier. Chocolate is, after all, meant to be a treat you have a little of sometimes, not a staple of the diet, so making it too expensive for people to eat every day might get people to treat it that way instead of only having their own willpower to stop them from ending every meal with a chocolate bar.

[@amethystdream8251]

Thank you! Lol. There's carob too, and also most chocolate cravings come from magnesium deficiency anyway. I enjoy chocolate myself, but I think there are other things far more vital to life, and better for one's self confidence. If our produce quality and access got better, we'd all be enjoying meals that satisfy as much as chocolate

[@SMCwasTaken]

Ever heard of Dark Chocolate?

[@ryans6442]

I really love this channel! I don’t know how to explain this properly but it’s like if shows I watched on pbs kids grew up with me and made a KZbin channel

[@datarob]

This is a great intro into food forests. Check those out too sometime. People have revitalized dessert village into food oases. Nice video thanks

[@carlosbornes]

This is exactly the same that happens with speciality coffee. Maybe a nice future video

[@katie18976]

Agreed

[@JusticeConstantine]

Great video and topic Melissa. Because this is a duel topic video, I hope the topic of chocolate educates people on sustainability for ALL of agriculture.

[@aaronaustrie]

Very educational vid. Much appreciated!

[@thetrainhopper8992]

The issue with forest gardens or permaculture that got ignored in this video is how labor intensive this is. One of the major improvements we’ve made in agriculture is mechanizations which allows people to do other things. Permaculture is hard to mechanize which means you need more people to grow things. It’s not impossible, I’m not saying that. What I’m saying is we shouldn’t get enamored with one solution without thinking things through. Since we’re are talking the least of humanity having to take the brunt of this transition. Are we willing (if we’re talking about all of humanity) to say that some people will always be less developed and have a worse life than some? Life in the US might not be the dream for everyone, but what tradeoffs are we going to make with these decisions and who’s getting the short end of the stick?

[@zoltantapai3716]

Forest gardens and the idea of having multiple plant and even fungus species be grown together in an agrocultural setting has a lot of potential in my opinion. We started experimenting with it in our garden a few years ago and we managed some promising results from better water retention to less pests and even less damage done by deer and wild bore when otherwise vulnerable plants are paired up with well selected other ones. The issue is that there is very little research out there for what goes well with what so it is a guessing game most of the time. If somebody is researching in this area I think there are significant breakthroughs to be had here.

[@corventum]

If chocolate falls off the face of the earth, I reckon everyone will go bananas

[@the_black.glitch]

I literally just ate some chocolate then saw this notification-

[@vigilantcosmicpenguin8721]

Enjoy it while it lasts, eh?

[@Subbestionix]

thanks for this video! I think this is a really important issue and you presented it very well. That being said, though I find the jump cuts really distracting at times . Maybe they could be reduced a bit?

[@ItzMiKeKirbY]

I could listen to Melissa talk to me about how dire our citation can become about my favorite indulgent treat all day.

[@arshiaojha9732]

I can attest to this! Chocosol makes AMAZING chocolate!! Gifted a bunch of it this past Christmas...let's just say I had some very happy family members

[@aimeeontheharp]

Thanks for bringing our attention to this. Also I love the song!

[@ChrisgammaDE]

Forest gardens sadly sounds like something that's hard to operate farming equipment in

[@whatreallyisart5898]

50 to 100 years of cutbacks in production seems like an absurd statistic to me and isn't in either of the two sources listed in the description (maybe I'm wrong though, I just didn't really see it and it probably wouldn't even be within the scope of either paper to mention). I don't doubt that it takes that amount of time to establish a fully fledged forest garden or agroforest or argroecosystem that includes trees (like cocoa farming necessarily would) whatever you want to call it, but that doesn't necessarily mean cutbacks in production especially when we are starting with an already established cocoa farm. if you are starting from scratch and trying to guess how much cocoa will be produced without a focus on cocoa, sure I'd say that that sounds like a reasonable number, but that's not got anything to do with any part of reality. and like is there any actual research or even just case studies on how cocoa production rates change while switching to regenerative farming practices over 50 to 100 years? it is a fairly new thing to be studied and I doubt a stat saying 50 to 100 years is much more than speculation. I know that shorter term studies exist for other crops (and I've seen cattle studies too), and for a lot of farms switching to methods which focus on soil health will often increase production within 3-5 years and some see production increases immediately, it depends on a lot of different factors but I reckon cocoa farms would be looking at similar numbers. some of these studies are just on soil health without much in the way of intercropping either. I just mention this because I encounter a lot of people with really ridiculous ideas about the impracticality of introducing these methods, when the reality isn't that bad at all. the biggest barriers are colonialism and capitalism in the ways those systems maintain exacting violence on others for labor, not time or money or land use or anything like that in my opinion. beyond that though, the idea that production always needs to go up is a faulty premise. I also hate to say it because I know it upsets a lot of people to hear but things like chocolate don't need to be a ubiquitous flavor, especially when large portions of it is coming from overseas. there are probably a very large amount of great tasting plants that grow natively in your local area that you've never even tried and maybe never even heard of and yet many of us in Western countries are used to vanilla grown in Madagascar and chocolate grown in the Ivory Coast, both of which are often incredibly exploitative (as briefly mentioned in the video) and are plants that come from the Americas (although more southern than the US). eating locally grown food is one of the most sustainable things to do in the case of food. there was also a mention of sustainable methods being cost prohibitive, often for farmers they are more labor prohibitive than cost prohibitive, but even that's not necessarily true and will vary depending on a plethora of factors, not to mention that a lot of the green revolution farming practices that have been and are being coerced into other countries by the West, are being subsidized by the West, it costed us globally a lot to get where we are. in modern days, that is literally our corporations spending money to "teach" and give equipment and our GM seeds (that they'll have to keep buying) to people in poorer countries to replace their traditional farming methods with things that will bring their resources to the Western hegemony. green revolution farming would very literally be otherwise cost prohibitive for them, and often even with the funding it'll further impoverish them because the new farms no longer focus so much on community subsistence and plants that were previously easy to grow staples have a hard time in the new soil that doesn't keep in water (uses more of the local water supply) and lacks a lot of the fungus and nematodes and many other species that were previously there and would naturally be present. the green revolution by the way wasn't started too long ago and was funded by Rockefeller, Ford, and various chemical warfare companies (and those chemical warfare companies are often still the ones profiting off of agrochemicals and GMOs). it hasn't been around for long and it won't be sticking around for long, things can change a lot quicker than many might think.

[@macsnafu]

Well, I actually prefer white chocolate, but that still needs cocoa butter as an ingredient, so that doesn't really help me. Yes, I can kind of cheat with vanilla almond bark, but it's not quite the same.

[@sappypunz]

i watched a video like 7 years ago talking about foods that are rapidly going extinct, and one of them was chocolate, can't believe it's actually coming true

[@dasmensch2317]

Thanks for the video

[@The9thDaisy]

I literally can't browse the net these days with a VPN. So many sites don't allow access to visitors using one anymore. Definitely doesn't work with any of my streaming services. Just don't connect to public anything and get a browser guard.

[@amai_zing]

it's always a good day when we get to see Melissa cook

[@foxpokemonforever4775]

A world without chocolate chip cookies, chocolate chip banana bread, and chocolate ice cream will be a sad world indeed. I hope we can find a sustainable and kinder way to produce chocolate in the near future!

[@exosproudmamabear558]

I have a rare autoimmun ensefalite that changed my apetite completely. I am unable to eat chocolate unless it has only fructose in it and it is bitter(which was completely opposite of what I liked btw) so I am glad at least it has one perk.

[@user-zw5jj2uf1p]

Are there any quantitative studies on the effects of crop rotation / forest farms etc?

[@joe-skeen]

It almost sounded like you were quoting the Tubby Nugget Chocolate Chip Cookie song there at the beginning.

[@skylark.kraken]

My method of coping is that I got extremely and violently ill after eating tainted chocolate, so now I can’t stand the stuff. My uncle got me a present of wrapped chocolates (celebrations to be exact) and he’s an architect and when he wraps presents he doesn’t use tape he uses model glue. This hasn’t been an issue before except my brother’s birthday is a month after mine and when I opened my present there was a card in it for my brother mentioning his previous birthday. So the chocolates had been wrapped with model glue for 11 months. It took until the 3rd chocolate to understand that the smell of model glue wasn’t just on the box but that the chocolates smelt like model glue. Days of projectile everything from both ends, extreme stomach pain, and mentally doing very poorly. So chocolate is forever linked with that and when I smell or taste it it takes me back to that week and I want to chunder

[@frankpower97]

8:20 I see, by Neil face, that this is not the first time he made that dad joke, the guy need a raise asap !

[@Foodgeek]

I blame big chocolate and them pushing prices so low 😭

[@maxevocal]

I am once again angry that farmers are screwed over by billion-dillar industries that rely on their work.

[@Funkensturme]

Many farmers in America are pretty spoiled and subsidized. In fact, they should not be and this affects negatively the other farmers. Big producers of corn and soy, for instances, have many benefits that livestock, fruit and vegetable producers do not have.

[@maxevocal]

@@Funkensturme while i agree, this is not an America-centered problem, and American farmers being treated better does not solve this issue in other countries' farmers.

[@CorbiniteVids]

​​@@Funkensturmeyeah, in America "farmer" is basically just the PC term for a wealthy landowner who exploits other people's labor for capital. It has a salt of the earth connotation that is not reflected in reality, which is why politicians talk so much about supporting farmers (it's a way to praise wealthy campaign donors and industry lobbyists without sounding corrupt, basically). Even small farmers in America are usually upper middle class at the very least. That said, the other commenter is correct that that's more of an American thing and doesn't always translate outside of that context

[@Somebodyherefornow]

@@Funkensturmethis is like explicitly false Immigrant farmworkers make up an estimated 73% of agriculture workers in the United States. Most farmers arent "white rural hardworking americans" According to a report by the Environmental Working Group, from 1995 to 2021, the top 10% of farm subsidy recipients received 78% of all subsidies, while the bottom 80% received only 9 percent. These subsidies are often allocated based on acreage, which favors larger farms over smaller ones. As a result, the number of small to mid-sized has decreased since 1982, while the number of large farms has doubled. (i cant link in youtube, but littereally google this and put it between quotation marks)

[@Funkensturme]

@@Somebodyherefornow Calm down, buddy. Take a deep breath and read my comment again. Pay attention to the words I explicitly used.

[@bird5119]

if humanity fails to maintain something so valuable like chocolate, then i'm wondering what else we'll fail to keep around that has hundreds of billions of dollars on the line

[@jankoch267]

I'm a big Coffee Nerd, and Chocolate is really similar to Coffee in many ways. I would love a video about specialty coffee, and why 90% of people don't even know what good coffee could taste like because of Starbucks & Co.

[@katie18976]

Do you mean 90% of people from USA? Because not all countries have Starbucks and many people have never tasted a single cup of their "coffee" in their lifetime.

[@timbushell8640]

Nice catch on 'forest garden' with its indigenous roots, but the 'food forest' idea also popped up in Europe where a non-gardening Englishman was overwhelmed caring for his neurodivergent brother set out to feed them from their large suburban garden. That said, the description of the food forest idea is very important, and a link to "The Great Green Wall" would be useful to your audience. Spreading the understanding that this form of farming multiple crops is helping to slow and stop the spread of desertification through say Senegal, see multiple vids by Andrew Millison, which help local farmers gain independence from annual cash crops, helps the local biodiversity... including cocoa and improve their local economics. Never forgetting that also looking back to chocolate's origins, the Chinampas of Mexico have a big part to play in food forest/forest gardening. Food forest gardens and farming must be a big thing, everywhere... Chocolate is important, but as others have said with regard the indigenous history, I think, you missed a trick in not extracting more from Dr. Michael Sacco on the farming methods, support, politics and outcomes... it isn't just a candy bar. Finally, thanks for the introduction to Dr. Sophia Carodenuto...

[@lapispyrite6645]

Do they use Nitrogen fixing crops in their forest gardens? Or do they still use fertiliser?

[@film9491]

Forest garden can also be called food forest or permaculture if anyone needs search terms to learn more

[@wallball5]

It's crazy how I went to a cacao farm right around the time this episode came out 😮

[@taifromyea]

Something not talked about in this video that is also a risk to the survival of chocolate is actually the survival of the pollinators, cacao can only be pollinated by a specific kind of fly and climate change and pesticides are becoming a huge problem to insect populations, including them

[@JayneAFK]

I've eaten a cocoa nib before when my family took a trip to a local-ish chocolate factory years ago. Was yummy but very strong, and apparently they're very healthy for you in that form too.

[@alexastrum2792]

CHOCOSOL is my favourite and (one of) the best artisanal chocolate in Canada.

[@alchymist90]

that forest garden process seems interesting but not really scalable right now.. companies won't do it if the cost is so expensive so hopefully, one day someone will find a cost efficient way to work with concepts like this since companies care about the bottom line so we need to get the cost worked out as well.

[@akunbora]

Since last year, my parents have always asked me to harvest cocoa with them every week. I assume this will last a long time. I’m happy for them. the dry cocoa seeds smell really bad, though.

[@zildiun2327]

Anyone had banana chocolate chip bread before? If not, you should make some before chocolate goes extinct!

[@juststatedtheobvious9633]

Also bananas could go extinct - the kind people sang songs about and killed other people for, already nearly died off.

[@perpetuallyconfused6608]

But have you had pumpkin chocolate chip bread?

[@harmonicaveronica]

Not sure if you picked banana on purpose or not, but banana farming has most of the same issues as chocolate. Main difference is that the route went the other way, from Africa to South America

[@vigilantcosmicpenguin8721]

Yes, we have no banana chocolate chip bread.

[@DefNotAiko]

​@@harmonicaveronicathey most likely read the video description.

[@ladyindigo3672]

Forest gardens sound like a great idea, but I imagine that cuts down on the yield of trees a farmers can plant. So they lose money 😥

[@ARBUZIK.dudkin]

I don’t think many people understand that white chocolate even though it doesn’t use cocoa powder it uses chocolate butter that comes from the bean so if there is no cocoa beans there will be no chocolate at all whether it’s regular, dark, white, pink or blonde

[@carllelendt5452]

There's also a similar situation going on with bananas right now. -A fungal disease.

[@ThomasTheThermonuclearBomb]

I've got to say, ending it with La Cucaracha was amazing