Shame on me for not posting this sooner. Don't miss David Leibovitz's 4,000 word interview with Frederick Schilling of Dagoba chocolates. They cover quite a lot of ground, and generally geek out on all things choc-organic. One highlight is when David asks about cacao being sprayed with agri-chemicals. You often hear that because cacao is grown on small family farms it isn't sprayed. To which Frederick replies,

"...the vast majority of cacao is grown on small family farms and yes, most of them are too poor to afford chemicals. It's on the larger plantations that spraying will occur and most often it's the "premium" brands that will buy plantation grown cacao because it's often of better quality. I believe the government of Ghana will do aerial sprayings from time to time, as cacao is such as important export to that countries economy.

Methyl Bromide is the fumigant of choice for cacao, and this is where the pesticide gets applied. The cacao doesn't get sprayed on the farm level; it's at the ports where the cacao gets sprayed. When a container of cacao leaves a countries port, there's gonna be insects in that cacao, so they fumigate. When the container arrives into port, say in the US, and there is any sign of insects, they fumigate again. I've heard that cacao is actually one of the most heavily fumigated commodities in the world. I have a friend in the industry that used to work at a very large chocolate company and his job was to, every Thursday, fumigate the cacao warehouse with Methyl Bromide. He had to have a special handling license to carry out this task. I hear murmur in industry that methyl bromide may be getting phased out of use, which is a good thing, as it's nasty stuff."

Read the entire interview...

Comments (0) | October 3 - 5:52 PM

category: Interviews/Profiles