I didn't want to do the nine five.

I was not going to take the normal path.

I'm sitting in a hammock in well paradise if your idea of paradise is kind of the classic one.

Lush rainforests, green hills, clear streams, too many chattering birds and monkeys to count.

At night, the wood swarm with headlight beetles, which are like giant fireflies.

It feels like Pandora.

I wanted to go see some chocolate forests, and I wanted to go catch sneaks and crocodiles and stuff that I did in the hammock.

Beside me is Jacob Marlin, and this is his baby.

The Belize Foundation for Research and Environmental Education or be Free, I one thousand acre preserve in the Maya Mountains, dotted with thatch huts and visiting biologists who come here from all over the world to study what a healthy rainforest is like.

Beefree is right at the juncture of several other huge preserves, including the Bladen Nature Reserve, the crown jewel of Belize wilderness areas, which is why Jacob bought it thirty years ago and has lived here as its conservator ever since.

It connects all the other preserves into one massive wild forest.

Jacob is laid back dude in his fifties.

His long hair parted in the middle.

Kind of reminds me of the actor Crispin Glover.

He came here as the reptile guy on a team of biologists that were exploring the Bladon, which is famously remote and inaccessible.

As he hiked his way through it, Jacob felt like he'd entered a time capsule.

We went to places that no human had been since St.

Chimayah.

We came upon clay statues of monkey and jaguar gods.

We saw barrel grounds of maya stuff.

Clearly no one had been there.

For the next two weeks, Jacob found himself exploring a world straight out of a fantasy novel.

You're like, oh my god, I think I say a cave opening, and then you go in there, and then you walk for nine hours, and then you look down and fifty feet below you there's a massive river flowing.

And then you look over there and there's like mine pottery and skeletons and ship scattered over there.

Then swim out the cave and go over here, and then you find two fifty spider monkeys swinging down.

Then there's a jaguar over there.

That's what our expedition was like.

It's lost the whole time.

I mean, we were all lost.

It was madness, but it was the best kind of madness, the kind he wanted to devote his life too.

When I came out, I was completely blown away, and I was like, Oh my god, this place is incredible.

I wonder if I could get involved in this place.

In fact, the Blatant was so full of wonders that he overlooked one of them entirely.

I remember passing wild cacao trees, which I was like, Oh, it's a wild cocow.

Who cares to Jacob, cocao was agriculture and he was a nature guy.

So he devoted his life to preserving the big nature of the Blatant and forgot all about the cacao.

But little did he know that that particular cocao hiding in plain sight in the Maya Mountains would end up being the key to protecting the very rainforest he devoted his life too, and possibly a whole lot more.

He was living with ancient ghosts that had been waiting centuries to speak their Peace of Kaleidoscope and i Heeart podcasts.

This is Obsessions Wild Chocolate.

I'm Roman jameson chapter five Ghost Chocolate.

The Forest of Belieze contain more than a thousand species of trees, astounding diversity.

To Jacob, pacat was just one of those thousands.

But as he explored his preserved he began catching his eye more and more.

Some of the pods are one color or another color or another color.

Some are yellow when they're ripe, Some are orange when they are oranges, purple when they're right.

Some are green when they're ripe.

Some are multi colored when they're right.

It's different shapes, a little bit different sizes.

The trees had a lot of diversity in appearance, but they had one very important thing in common.

Sometimes you'd walk up to a tree it's and it's a nine percent shade to the middle of the forest shade, and its covered ponds.

To the average person that might not sound like a big deal, but to people who think about sustainable food production, that's the holy grail.

Think about every crop humans have cultivated, corn rice, gale, whatever, They all need full sun.

Same for the modern strains of cacao, we've used for a century, and that means that growing food often means wiping out for us.

And that's been especially true for cacao in West Africa, destroying national parks.

It's eradicating species.

It's uh, I'm like, fuck, caca is horrible, but not this cacao.

This stuff is weird.

It is, it's weird.

The trees are different.

These are not hardy, robust plants.

These are rainforest play they want you know, don't don't put them in the sun.

Don't give them any sun.

These trees do best in shade, and if you give them, lestie die good.

I know, I know.

It's amazing, amazing because a tree that could flourish and produce fruit in the deep shade of the jungle that requires rainforests over its head, well, that could turn farming into a way to grow new rainforests and pay for it.

So Jacob got super curious about these cocoa trees, and the first step was to find out how many he had.

So in two thousand twelve he hired Elmer Salama, a local mind, got to map them.

So I did the expedition for I think like two three years.

Find do them white trees, new jungles, just wandering around.

So I didn't have any GPS, just my memories.

And you're started cutting trialsutting trels on to leg, you know.

And I found it about almost like three on the trees wild trees here, and it's out of water place phenotypes.

We have harpolo orange, who have guint to yellow.

We have um print to green.

Then we have multiple colors.

Those are the four types of trees they've identified, all named for the colors of their pods as they ripen.

All four are members of the same shade loving variety, which Jacob hoped could be the engine of his rainforest revival scheme if, of course, it produced delicious chocolate.

So it was like, well, shut up, man, let's make some chocolate because if nothing else, we could chocolate here like chocolate.

Yeah, why not, just as like a hobby.

As we tore the preserve, Jacob and Elmer offered to snag a couple of pods for me to show me their special qualities.

But the pods are twenty feet up, like three four five.

That's like five pods, guys, most progress, yeah, yeah, because what we do be hardest do bring along bush stick with h Yeah, gonna.

Cahoons are crazy palms.

Their fronts could be thirty ft long, shooting up from the ground.

And these graceful arcs walking through a Calhoun grove you expect to come upon a Brontosaurus munging on them.

The immense fronds are the go to choice for roofing, and the sharp and central ribs make awesome jousting lances for cutting to cow pods out of trees.

Get a catch here, thing you like?

Oh I see, so you just scrape scrape up the drunk and got it and there it is in my hand.

To cow with some very unusual qualities.

The multicolor and the purple orange had close to like almost six cocoa butts super high super high rich creamy chocolate.

Some people say it tastes like almost like milk chocolate.

It's a light brownish red shot, ero bitterness, there's nothing bitter about it, and it doesn't even taste that much like chocolate.

What you think of his chocolate Like at first, Jacob's chocolate making skills were limited, but he kept dialing it in and so like every year about this time we go out there with backpacks and and I'd bring up to the station and make chocolate with him, and I'd experim him.

I'm learning, I'm trying to figure things out.

People would come through here and it's like that creole.

You can't believe that that stuff is probably really special.

That word creoio is a famous and sacred term in the world of chocolate.

But Jacob was only just discovering the treasure he had on his hands.

I'm learning about creb I don't really know much about what that meant, but it's like, okay, so it's it's a relic cocao.

It's not prow much.

Creoa was the original cacao of the ancient mile the variety they cultivated all over their empire and introduced the Spanish and the fift hundreds.

The smooth, creamy flavor of creoia made chocolate a worldwide obsession.

It was the only chocolate anyone knew until the seventeen hundreds, when it began to get wiped out by disease.

Soon it was replaced by hardier and more productive hybrid varieties, varieties that didn't taste as good, but we're easier to draw, and those varieties took over the world For decades, craft chocolate cares have been scouring Central America for sources of Creoia.

The best they can usually find are hybrids that have a percentage of creoo gens and a trace of that original creole smoothness.

Pure creoia.

You never see it.

But Jacob began wondering about his three trees if there was anywhere some old creoio strains could have escaped hybridization that was in the middle of one of the most inaccessible rainforests in the world.

It's least explored, least disturbed, most unspoiled place.

Everything up there.

It just feels like this stuff has always been here, just old.

So he embarked on a new quest, find someone who would tell him just how special this stuff was and find out if anyone cared.

I want to taste of some of this God love chocolate.

We got you covered.

Kalia Scop has joined forces with Louise Abram and Stetler Chocolate to make a special box to go along with its very podcast Taste One has driven many to near madness at www dot Stetler dash Chocolate dot com.

What I always remember is the smell, just the smell of my ya Ya's kitchen during the summer.

Remember Matt Capoda, the Salt Lake, Delhi guy who became America's heirloom chocolate champion.

Matt credits his Greek grandmother for his passion for rare ingredients and unusual flavors.

She had a tiny little plot in Salt Lake City.

She grew her own potatoes, dandylion greens.

You know, her produce didn't taste like the produce you could buy in the grocery store.

So I became accustomed to looking for flavors that don't really exist in you know what has become a pretty monoculture food system.

Taste and smell are some of the first most important ways that we make meaning of the world around us.

They're the raw material of experience, the scaffolding upon which we hang our memories.

They're the way each generation passes its passions to the next.

No matter where you're from in the world, we have beautiful traditions, delicious foods, incredibly rich ingredients that are disappearing at an alarming rate over the years.

Matt had built Caputos into a show house for these cultural Touchsdownes, but he'd also watched in dismay.

As those flavors disappeared, it was harder and harder to get, you know, a raw milk, pecorino, romano.

And I would see this trajectory in every category, not just cheese, of things getting more and more homogenized, more and more flavorless.

As he watched industrial agriculture set fire to the world's libraries of flavor, Matt became convinced that he had to be a kind of librarian, preserving as many of the great flavor manuscripts as he could, and cacao seemed like a special case, with some of the most endangered masterpieces of all he wanted to help.

Then he heard about a new initiative that captured his imagination, the Heirloom Cacao Preservation Fund.

The goal of the project was to identify the world's great cocaws with an expert tasting panel and to prove their uniqueness through genetic testing.

That certification would be the stamp of approval, drawing the attention of Beam to Bar chocolate makers.

The first designee was an easy call, Volker Lehman and his Tranquilidad beans.

Soon other designees were added, including Emily Stones my Mountain cocao in sen Jacob submitted the be free beans, hoping they had enough Creoo parentage to be something special, and soon enough he heard back from the committee congratulations, your beans have made the cut.

I heard that from one of their board members.

Oh, We're going to be announcing this your pure CREOLEO in San Francisco at this big chocolate event.

And I was like, you are.

I mean, that sounds I'm coming.

Thanks for not inviting me, but I'm like, I'm sucking going to San Francisco.

God damn it.

So he attends the awards ceremony.

The audience is student in fifty well dressed people in the world of chocolate, and the m C is Ed Sege, a legend in the fine chocolate industry, and to Jacob's amazement, ed is getting all worked up over Jacob's beans and he's talking about pure Creoo.

It's the only pure cacao known in the world.

The tasting parils never tasted anything quite this Araban before pure creator Parentidge blah blah blah, and I'm like, what what does that even mean?

And and then he's done, and I was like, wait a minute.

So I stand up and I said, wait, a minute.

I'm the guy that submit of those means you're not gonna invite me up.

Jacob was just looking for a little love, but he got a lot.

After the ceremony, it was swarmed by chocolate makers.

Could they get some samples of those beans?

How about a few tons?

Did he need a business partner?

He soon found out why.

The expert tasting panel had tasted Jacob's submission and found it to be a paragon of smooth and silky chocolate.

Then the genesis of the U.

S.

D A did their thing and came away and shocked.

These beans weren't high in preoil content.

They were a hundred percent kreoia.

In other words, this was the original cow of the Maya, a direct line back to the one that existed before Europeans ever got involved.

Somehow, it had hold up in the Maya Mountains for a thousand years, and now it was ready for re entry.

The panel's declaration gave Jacob all the incentive he needed to try to make that delicious, shade loving cow a flagship of rainforest restoration, and those original three trees became sacred to him.

You know, we all touched these trees.

Yeah, I don't do anything.

All we do is harvest pods, collect data, and collect budwood.

That budwood super important.

Budwood is the newly formed tips of branches that are used to grow an exact duplicate of the mother tree.

When Jacob returned from his trip to the States, he's set to work planting.

We have almost ten thousand trees of this material now growing, ten thousand trees, ten thousand baby creas, a forest of ancient mind CaCO rising up in the Belize wilds, and they are just the beginning.

If Jacob has his way, those ten thousand trees will give birth to a million more, not just a bee free but anywhere anyone wants to grow new rain forests and figure out a way to pay for it.

As a bonus, we'll all get to experience this ghost of chocolate past.

Jacob also became the volunteer president of the air Land could Cow Preservation Fund, which is now designated sixteen of the world's cocaos as essential cultural heritage.

That's helped bring recognition and a decent income to the farmers who are keeping these masterpieces alive.

But it isn't always enough.

Ironically, it couldn't save the very first DESIGNI Vulgar Layman.

After years of dodging bullet after bullet in the jungle, he was about to take one right in the heart.

Everything went just upside down, and all from one moment to the other.

I thought I was doing the good things, and all of a sudden I was in turmoil.

You know, the sky was falling on my head.

One thing I noticed right away when I came back to Bolivia in was that whatever romance the jungle had once held for Vulgar, it was long gone.

It seems like that the birds in in the in the jungle, in the Amazone and in the tropical here, they don't know how to sing.

It seems like they never went to singing school.

And it most and most of it is it's like more like shouting noise.

Uh like this, And there's one I maybe we're here.

We're here.

It's like a like a dying sound.

It's it's like somebody is strangling the bird while he tries to sing.

Like that sounded like a different guy from the one I had left on top of the world.

After our visit to the euro Care, they'd agreed to provide fifteen tons of cacao, which meant he'd be delivering forty five tons to felsh Lean three shipping containers.

But he needed serious capital.

He needed to build a fermentation center in the jungle, He needed boats, and he had to hire people to do the buying and transporting for him.

Most of all, he needed cash to pay all the harvesters, so he took on investors.

It was a huge gamble, but the first year it worked great.

He produced more cal than ever.

The quality was awesome.

Felsh Lean was thrilled and he made his payments.

It worked the next year too.

He felt like the system he'd always envisioned in his mind was finally up and running.

But in three years into his business, the rains came even harder than usual.

The mom Rae flooded badly.

I wasn't in very good terms with the people, so I trusted them and I asked him, would that be cacao?

Yeah?

Yeah, there will be a lot of cacal, you know, but give you us so much and repay you don't worry.

So he flashed fifty into the jungle, expecting to get twice that much in cacao out of it.

For weeks later, the harvest trickled in just twenty worth of cocao.

Vulker was understanding despite the knot in his stomach.

He said, fine, whatever things get weird in the jungle, just give me back the rest of the money.

And his buyers said, well, here's the thing.

We gave the money to the pickers and they spend it all.

Sorry, thirty grand just evaporated into the bush.

What was he going to do?

Bring a legal case against the whole forest.

He decided to eat the losses himself.

Liked the guys and they've had a good track record until then.

I said, that's not a problem.

Okay, you owe me so for the next year.

Yeah, next year, and so we we leveled this out.

It's not such a great deal.

In other words, no worries.

Consider it an advance on next year's Kao.

He comes so close, and he just really didn't want to see this one go down the tubes.

He was now fully emotionally invested.

But then it was time to talk to his lenders and explained that he couldn't make his payment this year, and they were not emotionally invested.

I said, okay, this year I present a loss, and they said what is the loss?

Um, please explain you know, I said, yeah, loss is when you don't have earnings.

You know you you're on the negative.

Yeah.

Negative is no good?

Yeah.

Oh could we sue you?

Yeah?

Yeah, you have to give us the money back.

I said, the money is with the people in the jungle.

I explained it again to you if you want, I'm happy to explain it again.

So I gave the money.

The horfus was low.

So now we have to recover the loss.

Oh loss, no no, no, no, no, you have to give us a monthay, I said, I have no money.

Oh yeah, then we seize your as it Okay.

I ended up in a lawsuit, total fucking disaster, leans on his house and on his business.

He had to declare bankruptcy.

His marriage crumbled.

Later, as we were driving around Bolivia looking for a cowdibi, Walker confessed just how devastating it all was to his life and his psyche.

I mean, it seems like it must have been hard just personally to walk like when you just gotten all that recognition, you knew you were making one of the best chocolates in the world.

It took me, um, you know, from basically from fourteen to until last year actually to recover um financially or personally, spiritually entirely.

Yeah, everything, everything a little bit because everything is interlinked, and you know, and and I wanted to save ton Kilda, and I wanted to save at least you know this part.

Yes, his creditors were coming for his glove and the cow forest man.

You must have been furious at a lot of people.

I had a little it was a section of rage and now a pure rage.

I would now with a gun in my hand, I would have killed some people.

Maybe.

Fortunately he didn't.

In fact, at the moment of maximum rage, when he thought he might explode, he just let it all go.

The lawsuits, the frustration, the fury gone.

The guys who just lost all his money in the jungle.

He knew they were hard up, so we said, why don't you just live in my house and trided ad for free until you get back on your feet.

Ever since, I'm calm.

I'm much calm, was than be far much more.

Oh off, Budda is is nothing.

You know.

I'm more calm than the river Sitata was sitting at.

Have you ever been in touch with those guys?

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you know I saw.

Yeah.

Yeah, once in a while I remind them to pay me and then they laugh and say, yeah, yeah, we do.

Is that just kind of how things work here?

Yeah?

Yeah, Just forget about it and go off.

It's like a pant divorce.

You know, you cannot suffer forever, you know, you have to go on with your life.

And he did.

In fact, he pulled a full Siddartha.

He just decided to walk away from Tranquila Dad, from Bolivia, from Cacao, from everything, a new start.

But he did need to make good on his debts, so he took a job as a consultant with Conservation International in Costa Rica, living like a hermit, saving every penny.

And with that, it seemed like the dream of wild Cacao had died.

Perhaps it was just too hard, too remote, too iffy.

A successful coco business requires predictability, and Amazon eats predictability for breakfast.

But unbeknownst to Vulcar, even as he struggled to put Coco out of his mind for good, the seeds were taking hold on new ground, and the next crop of cocaw lenders was about to blossom the same year he was walking away from the Amazon Louisa Abraham was plunging in year by year, just coming and just showing them that I was not gonna be defeated, like I was going to persist, And she wasn't going to let European chocolate makers or loan sharks tell her how to operate.

She was going to do it all on her own terms.

A new hope next week on Obsessions Wild Chocolate.

Wild Chocolate is a Kaleidoscope production with I Heeart Podcasts, hosted and reported by me Rowan Jacobson and produced by Shane McKeon at Nice Marmot Media, Edited by Kate Osborne and my Guest out of Kudor.

Sound design and mixing by Soundboard.

Original music composition by NCER Stevenson, a k a Botany production help from Baheeny Shorty from My Heart.

Our executive producers are Katrina Norbelle and Nikki Etre.

Special thanks to Laura Mayor, Costaslinos Ozwalash and Aaron Kaufman, Will Pearson, codel Burn, Bob Pittman, Daria Daniel and the team at Stetler who are helping us make a very special chocolate of our own.

That's right, we're working with Louisa and others to protect the rainforest and make delicious Amazonian chocolate.

Visit www Dot Stetler dash Chocolate dot com to taste it for yourself.

That's www.

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