Heart of Dark Chocolate by Rowan Jacobsen

Author:Rowan Jacobsen [Rowan Jacobsen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781612300306
Publisher: New Word City, LLC
Published: 2014-03-04T05:00:00+00:00

The Swiss Connection

Volker Lehmann’s father was a sharpshooter for the SS in World War II. After the Germans were defeated in the Battle of Stalingrad, he evaded capture - which would have meant certain death when the Russians found the small SS tattoo under his left arm - and made his way to Austria, where he found work on a farm. After the war, he returned to Berlin and discovered that his parents had been brutalized and killed by the Russian army. He started a family and spent the next twenty-five years working double shifts in the coalmines - the only job available at the time. At the end of a sixteen-hour day, he would be so tired that sometimes his spoon would drop into his soup as he ate. His only leisure activity was gardening on Sundays, and that was Volker’s best chance to spend some time with him. Volker has been growing things ever since.

He got his degree in tropical agriculture and began working for the German Volunteer Service in the Dominican Republic in the 1980s. He planted cacao and tree farms, then got put in charge of a rabbit breeding program. “That was the weirdest thing I ever did. The idea was that the women there all have home gardens and grow vegetables. And you always have leftovers from the vegetables. These vegetables could go to the rabbits, and there would be extra protein for the family. That was the theory. In reality, though, the people there won’t eat rabbits because they are too close to rats. Same long teeth.” The program ended with Volker throwing a party for his friends and grilling eighty rabbits.

The Volunteer Service moved him to Bolivia in 1991, where he discovered wild cacao and wrote his report. He then returned to Frankfurt for a number of years. When he came back to Bolivia in 2000, he was amazed to find that still no organization was pursuing wild cacao. He worked in the Bolivian Amazon as a consultant to a number of organizations, evaluating the sustainable harvest potential of everything from rubber trees and Brazil nuts to palm oil and a red tree latex known as dragon’s blood. But wild cacao captivated him.

He was engaged by a company called Rainforest Exquisite Products, S.A., or REPSA, which sold chocolate-covered coffee beans and Brazil nuts using local chocolate bought in La Paz. Volker went to Trinidad - the source - and began establishing relationships with the locals. As he tasted more of the beans, he became probably the first person on earth to come to a staggering realization: Bolivia had a vast supply of some of the most delicious chocolate on earth, and no one knew it.

Convincing the gourmet chocolate industry to work with him, however, was another story: “Nobody even knows that Bolivia has cacao. They think we grow llamas.” Part of the problem was that the wild beans were only half the size of farm-raised beans and wouldn’t work with standard equipment. “I was running around with these small beans for two years.

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