A Small World, Made of Chocolate

It was a while ago that my friend Heather told me I should check our her Parisian friend David Lebovitz's blog.  When I did, I realized we sell one of his books at the cooking shop (Ripe for Dessert). 

I then bought his ice cream book The Perfect Scoop and when Heather was last in town, made some of the recipes for her.  I didn't do this for any reason other than to make and eat ice cream, but it was odd for me to realize that she had actually been a taster for the very book I was working from.

Then this weekend, as I was adding the Food and Cooking Reference links to the sidebar, I checked out David's links to see if I had forgotten any links that I use fairly often.  I noticed that he has in his list of links of food sources The Chocolate Man, aka Bill Fredricks, the awesome Seattle-area guy who ran the Chocolate Tasting here in Seattle that I just went to a couple months ago.

I suppose the world of desserts and chocolate is, in fact, just rather small.  Nevertheless, it does all still strike me as funny that two girls who met in high school in the culinary wasteland of Scottsdale, AZ (and whose cooking prowess at the time involved making brightly-colored rice krispie treats) would have these rather random connections in adulthood.

And as I mentioned in the post on that chocolate tasting, the chocolate world is in some ways forced to be small based on some of the specifics about the crop that make it a challenging one to grow.  The Mars company is looking to make that crop a little less tempermental by decoding the chocolate genome.

The Times UK reports:

By analysing the 400 million or so parts that make up the seed of a cacao tree, researchers hope to find new ways to treat crop diseases and protect the world's chocolate supply.

No doubt this will cause some concern for folks worried about genetically-modifed food, and Mars' comments probably won't ease their worry:

Mars has declined to comment on whether the research will lead to genetically modified chocolate — Frankencocoa, as it would be labelled by critics — and whether it believes such products would be acceptable to consumers.

Instead, Mars is focusing on the benefits of genome research to cocoa farmers, about 70 per cent of whom are in West Africa. It is thought that black pod fungal diseases cost the farmers $700 million every year, a price they can hardly afford.

And so far, it would appear they are going to be willing to share the results of the project:

Although the project is being funded privately by Mars — which makes M&Ms, Snickers and other popular brands — its findings will be made public, even to competitors.

Too soon to tell if this is a positive or worrying development, but as The Chocolate Man told us the price of wholesale chocolate went up 30% this year alone, it seems like some kind of new research into affecting supply would be inevitable.  Stay tuned, chocoholics.