Discovering the Spirit of Wild Chocolate
Co-creation, connection, and collaboration sparked in the heart of the earth.
Save the rainforest — eat chocolate?! Unfortunately, this notion is more romantic than reality.
Cacao is the bean that makes chocolate, a food that brings us so much joy. The cacao plant naturally grows in shaded and diverse forest ecosystems, like the lowland rainforests of South America’s Amazon River basin, where it originated. The plant’s thick branches grow oblong pods containing dozens of thumb-sized beans that are then fermented, dried, and roasted before making their way into the dessert of your choice.
But much of the chocolate we consume has a dark secret. The $100 billion chocolate industry is gobbling up lush forests, from the Amazon to Asia, and was responsible for over 1% of global forest loss from 1988 to 2008. When produced industrially, cacao is typically grown by itself — as a monocrop — in full sun. Why? Because it’s more efficient to produce and transport a crop that’s grown in boxed rows, rather than scattered across miles of forest reachable only by tiny foot trails.
Luckily, not all chocolate is created equal. Partnerships of chocolate makers and harvesters are forming to produce chocolate sourced from naturally grown wild cacao without destroying rainforests.
What’s so special about wild cacao? We traveled to Purus, Brazil, to visit the first production facility for wild cacao to find out. In the process, we learned deeper, unexpected lessons on our journey to the heart of the earth.
Experience the journey for yourself here, in an interactive story from Yellow Seed.
“What happened to these forests?” I asked Nivaldo, our trip coordinator, who worked at the cacao cooperative. It felt like I had just traveled to the remote end of the universe, yet the trees along the riverbanks were not very tall, and the forests didn’t look as diverse or lush as the old growth forests I’d seen only days before in eastern Peru. A combination of the Brazilian rubber boom in the early 1900s and the demand for boats and housing during World War II had wiped out most of Brazil’s old growth forests, I was told. So we were floating past an 80-year old ecosystem, and not many people seemed aware of or concerned about what was missing.
Brazil’s forests are continually under threat. This year more than 4.5 million acres of forests have been lost due to the devastating fires in the Brazilian and Bolivian Amazon.
The fires blazing in Brazil are part of a larger deforestation crisis, accelerated by President Jair Bolsonaro. Fires are a symptom of the underlying policy decisions and private sector development aimed to boost agribusiness — beef, soy, and other commercial agriculture.
After about five hours on the boat, we arrived at the shores of the community of São Sebastião. A tall, slender man wearing muck boots, José Antônio da Conceição Camillo (“Camillo”), the director of the Mapiá and Middle Purus Agroextractivist Cooperative, came to greet us, along with three other members of his community. They dragged a wooden plank to the boat so we could hobble safely to solid ground, avoiding the two-foot-thick river mud.
Once we were on firm ground, Camillo peered at me with crossed arms and asked, “So, who are you and why are you here?”
Our original host, a Brazilian bean-to-bar chocolate maker and her father, were unable to accompany us due to a last-minute family emergency, so our solo arrival was a surprise. Cell service and the Internet don’t reach these remote parts of the Amazon, and it can be hard to communicate when plans change.
I shared our intent: “We are here to make an interactive story about the benefits of wild cacao, including how it can protect the environment. This story aims to create awareness of the value of the work you do and the realities you face day to day. Basically, we hope to build stronger connections between you and the consumers who eat chocolate made from your beans.”
Camillo paused and continued to study me. It was then that I noticed the fierce pitbull emblem sewn on his pants and started to worry that I’d said the wrong thing, or that we weren’t really welcome here.
“Well, I hope you like to suffer,” he said, with a stern face.
“What…?” I turned back to Eduardo, our translator, to see if I’d misunderstood, but he seemed just as bewildered as me. He’d came to the rescue as our translator just the day before and had never been to the Amazon.
Camillo’s face erupted into a brilliant and radiant smile. “Come on,” he encouraged. “Grab your stuff and I’ll show you around. It’s a long hike in.” I laughed, feeling a bit relieved.
I picked up my pack, along with a few bags of supplies, and headed up the hill. After a few minutes — with many more to go — sweat was pouring down my face and my muscles were burning. I finally understood what he meant by suffering.
We passed some newly built wooden cacao drying beds with sliding covers and made our way along narrow foot trails to a lush, dense forest that seemed well tended and glowing with brightly colored fruits and flowers.
“This is our permaculture forest,” Camillo explained, as he gestured toward the trees and started to name the fruits. “Here you’ll find buriti, patuá, the murumuru, the aricuri, the piqui, and the andiroba — oh, and Brazil nuts.” He continued with pride: “We’re setting up a factory to make oil, and we already have the machines.” I remembered a pamphlet I’d once seen about how communities like these harvest and sell oils for soap and other products.
We arrived at a small wooden house with a white-and-black tiled floor and green painted walls, where we’d be staying, and were touched by the warm welcome and spirit of generosity of Camillo and his family. Camillo had offered to clear his schedule for the next few days to accommodate us. “Consider us at your service. We’ll do all we can to make your visit worthwhile.”
After setting up for the night, we went out to look at the new cacao drying platforms. “Last year, we had a much larger production than this year, but we weren’t prepared,” Camillo explained. “We had fewer boats, and we didn’t have these drying platforms, so we couldn’t take full advantage of the harvest.”
“This year, we were ready,” he said, motioning to the platforms. “But production was minimal. Mother Nature said to us, ‘you are very eager, go slowly.’” He cracked a big smile and chuckled. “It was time for her to rest, to recover and fertilize her plants. She does this herself.”
Mother Nature said to us, ‘you are very eager, go slowly.’ He cracked a big smile and chuckled. “It was time for her to rest, to recover and fertilize her plants. She does this herself.” — Camilo
Working in harmony with nature
Camillo showed a deep respect for nature and its rhythms. He spoke about the importance of reciprocity and working with nature as a partner, a philosophy that seemed so unlike that of commercial cacao farms I’d visited in the past. Most of today’s industrial food supply is designed with output and productivity in mind, often at the sake of the soil, future harvests, or even the producers themselves.
“We are very happy to have Mother Nature, because if it weren’t for her, I don’t know what would become of us. Because it’s from her that we get our food, our water without pollution, and a life of peace,” said Camillo.
“We do have to learn how to survive in the forest, however,” Camillo explained. “You have to work with nature and make an agreement with it and with what has to be done.” He smiled and continued, “And you have to share with it, too, and help it to produce and progress. Do not hurt or taunt Mother Nature. Always take care of her, so she can provide you with the love and affection you seek.”
Nature does not hurry yet everything is accomplished — Lao Tzu
It started to rain, so we grabbed our video gear and headed into the small but empty fermentation shed to wait it out. We huddled as a team and reflected on what we’d just learned. “Mother Nature resting” meant that cacao season had ended a full month earlier than usual, so there were no cacao pods in the trees. Wait — how would we produce a story about wild cacao without footage of cacao pods in the trees?
Earlier that day, we’d heard that a boat carrying the last bounty of pods was expected to arrive any day. “Oh good,” I thought, “at least we can film the breaking of the pods tomorrow.”
As the rain hammered on the roof, Camillo shared more about how he and the other members of the community had arrived here, 30 years ago. “We saw that, up and down the Purus River, there was a lot of cacao and no one was taking advantage of it. The forest provided this cacao, and we knew we could harvest it without further destruction.”
Purity and small-scale
Wild cacao is the ancestral native plant cacáos, which has existed for millennia. This means there is a purity to its genetics. Each original variety has its own genetic signature — linked to a singular location and endowed with a unique, independent genotype. Genetics departments fully geek out on this stuff: through a simple DNA test, it’s possible to identify the origin of a single bean.
The plant has created a livelihood for an entire community, opening the doors for other products grown and processed here to reach markets. “Here, cacao production gives work to people who have never had a chance to earn a penny, except for a little fish that they catch in the river or bananas that they plant on land,” Camillo said.
Wild cacao is as precious as it is rare. The harvest is constrained by the natural limit of the watershed. For example, this region produces about 25–50 metric tons of cacao annually, with cacao trees scattered across hundreds of miles of forest and multiple communities. A harvester may hike up to 10 miles a day collecting pods. A typical cooperative supplying to a major brand may produce thousands of tons of cacao each year
Connection, community, and co-creation
“How else has cacao affected life here?” I asked Camillo.
“Cacao producers now have good houses that they would have otherwise never owned,” he explained. “As well as good engines, canoes, and machines. So this is something that honors us.”
“And it’s created another way of life. We are more united, now that we’re harvesting and processing cacao together. There are four communities up river and four down river. Without cacao, we wouldn’t have met otherwise. We always work as a family, and we’ve become a community like one big family.”
Forest surprises
The sun was starting to set, so we packed up our gear and headed to dinner.
On the way back, I started to limp from a pain on the bottom of my foot. I rolled down my sock to find a large blister in the arch of my foot. How did that get there? I decided to show Nage, our cook and fearless community guide. Her eyes widened, then she gasped: “That’s the largest Peekie I’ve ever seen. Come here, let’s have Francesca take a look.”
“What? OMG.” I had just traveled from an expedition in Peru where I noticed that people got sand flies in their feet from walking barefoot or in sandals. Therefore I never took off my socks and shoes. Apparently there is great value in always checking! After 10 days, the egg sac that the insect had left in my arch had grown to the size of a pea. I looked up, horrified.
“We can get it out. It’s no problem,” Francesca said. I was relieved at having discovered the sore here, safe in the hands of local experts, instead of alone in my hotel room without support.
Francesca worked on my foot with a sterilized needle for just under an hour, while others half-looked, half turned away, with grimaces on their faces. Dillon, our 360-degree videographer and editor, was probably the most freaked out. I sealed up the wound with antibiotic cream that I’d been carrying and a bandage to keep any other opportunistic tiny things at bay.
Medical isolation
The event sparked an interesting conversation about the dangers and benefits of living deep in the forest, hours from the nearest city and medical care.
“Being sick here is bad,” said Nage. “I had a sister who fell ill with hepatitis. She first got malaria, then hepatitis, and there was no doctor to treat her.” Francesca nodded, and added, “Often there are no boats or not enough gas to travel to the city. We just have to wait till we see a boat pass.”
Despite the insect-borne dangers and other risks, their life here was a chosen one. At a small gathering after dinner that evening, each person shared stories from a previous life in the city, where things felt far worse. “It is safe here. I don’t have to hide in a small apartment for fear of being robbed, held by gunpoint or threatened by gangs,” said Francesca.
The land of ‘the formers’
“This is the land of the formers,” Camillo explained. “I was a former miner, and there are former drivers, former fisherman. We moved back to nature and joined together, becoming a piece of this whole.” Hearing Camillo’s story, and those of others, it became clear to us that most of this community had purposefully opted to leave their former lives behind.
“Here, we entered the reality of living from and with the earth. It has become a place of peace to raise my grandchildren, where there aren’t kidnappers or gangs that can destabilize my family,” said Camillo. “Here, I feel safe because all of the people are my brothers. Everyone suffers the same as I suffer and has the same as I have, and no one here is considered more or less than another person. We are all equal.”
Day 2
At breakfast the next day, we learned that the boat of cacao pods had yet to arrive. Leo, our director of photography, suggested that we film some beauty shots of cacao, even though only a few pods were left hanging on the trees. We set off on a day adventure to explore the forest.
After about a half hour of pacing back and forth to film one of the few remaining cacao pods through the dense brush, we heard a loud crackle of lightning, and it started to downpour. We took cover under some trees to wait it out.
Several hours later, with soggy equipment and contrived video footage, we made our way back to the boat, feeling somewhat defeated. As I descended the steep clay riverbank, I heard wood crack behind me, then watched Leo slide past me into the river. On his way down, he did an epic twisting maneuver to save his camera and pack from getting submerged. Well played — or so we thought. Dillon had been filming us from the bank, and the slow-mo replay revealed that the camera had dipped fully underwater.
Back at camp, we took stock of our trip:
–There was no cacao left on the trees.
–There was no sign of the boat carrying the last cacao pods of the season.
–We had shot several great interviews, but now we no longer had a working camera.
I felt like the forest was trying to tell us something, and I wasn’t getting the message. What’s the riddle here? Unlock the spell, please, dear forest.
Then I remembered what a Guatemalan man I’d met, who called himself the “cacao shaman,” had said about the spirit of the plant. “Cacao is a plant teacher and a facilitator of connection, community, and co-creation.”
Emphasis on the word facilitator. Oh!
“Hey guys, check this out,” I said to the team. “So maybe cacao is our guide in this story. Meaning, she facilitated a connection to this place and to the community, but the real focus of the story is not about her.”
Leo seemed amused, so I continued: “Maybe cacao is a bridge and a catalyst. I once met a guy who suggested cacao was a plant teacher, who called it the ‘food for the shift.’ He told me about an ancient myth and prophecy that he believed is now playing itself out: ‘When man and earth are out of balance, cacao will come out of the rainforest to open up the hearts of man, connecting him with himself, each other and nature.’”
“When man and earth are out of balance, cacao will come out of the rainforest to open up the hearts of man, connecting him with himself, each other and nature.” — A Mayan Myth passed on by the Cacao Shaman
“So here in Purus, that’s clearly what happened,” I went on. “We learned that cacao enticed and even catalyzed many families to return to the forest, enabling them to connect and unite as one community. The nature of harvest and production strengthens these connections over time. And it is now officially making its way out of the rainforest into markets all over the world.”
It was all becoming clear to me. If it’s cacao’s nature to foster connections and to catalyze co-creation, then the same should be true in different contexts — both within the forest and outside it. In an ecosystem, the cacao plant facilitates biodiversity by attracting various types of birds, which eat the fruit and then disperse its seeds far and wide.
Similarly, when we eat chocolate, it sets off a chain of cascading reactions from the various flavonoids and alkaloids — such as anandamide and phenylene — that trigger the release of neurotransmitters, leading to states of bliss and joy. If we were to extract and consume only a single alkaloid from cacao, it would not create the same effect. The teaching here is about how all the components work together to create synergies. And when we feel bliss and love, we tend to connect and collaborate better.
“You guys!” I exclaimed, as my brain was firing. “This is what the story is about — connection and community. Cacao is our guide.” I told them about a medicine man I’d met the previous week in the community of Monte Salvado, in Peru, who had said that the potency of plants harvested in the natural ecosystem is much stronger than for plants grown in nurseries or controlled environments — as much as 10 times stronger. “So we’re actually at ground zero of the story — the first production center of wild cacao, and hopefully a catalyst for many more to come.”
Day 3
On the third day, our camera unexpectedly came back to life. We absolutely rejoiced and gave thanks.
With a renewed focus on what connection, community, and co-creation look like in the heart of the earth, we were able to get a deeper look at the realities that these communities face every day.
Our inquiry led us to learn more about the relationship that the local people have to other plants — such as the ones used in the hallucinogenic brew, ayahuasca — that provide a strong sense of connection to the land and spirit, as well as a source of education and sustained livelihood. Residents of Brazil’s Mapia region are known for practicing the Daime religion, which uses rituals based on ayahuasca as a means to experience the divine. The main Daime church was another seven hours up river.
At the end of the day, after several interviews and video sessions, I asked Camillo if he had anything he’d like to personally share with the world. I was moved by the power of his message: “Have compassion and have mercy on the planet. Stop the destruction, start to reforest, start to pay attention to what is good on the planet and stop harming it.”
He explained that he, and others who live from nature, feel inside their own blood what runs in the blood of the planet. So, every single tree that falls is a wound in the heart of those who feel it.
The people of São Sebastião hold keys to remembering our interconnectedness to nature and to each other. They show us what’s possible when those relationships are valued and nurtured along the way. Even people from diverse communities — folks who once struggled in the disconnect of cities, and experienced mistrust and violence — can recover again by connecting to nature and to one another. The system, and the people within it, can begin to heal, to regenerate, and to return to a healthier state. But we need to intentionally facilitate and nurture these connections, to enable them to grow.
What’s next for Yellow Seed
The food on our tables today comes with a story, and both people and planet benefit the better we tell it. Learn more about this incredible journey to the heart of the Amazon through the Wild Cacao interactive story, an immersive experience that offers different perspectives from bar to bean, with the spirit of cacao as our guide.
Yellow Seed is launching its Global Farmer Voices project to reconnect people with where their food comes from, by sharing stories from farmers around the world. Interactive stories weave together farmer-led content (photos and videos), with data visualizations, social and environmental statistical insights, and spatial and temporal maps.
Our mission is to amplify the voices of farmers, to raise awareness around global inequalities, and to bring to light the work that farmers do as caretakers of our planet’s most vital ecosystems.
About the Author:
Nancy Zamierowski co-founded Yellow Seed and served as the executive director until 2018. She now supports Yellow Seed in an advisory and midwife role through its transition. You can follow her work via her personal website or Collective Transitions.
