Distinguished guests, brothers and sisters, ladies and gentlemen, friends and enemies:

Mona Sternstein-Fernandez here, begging a thousand pardons for my recent absence, but the past few months have been absolutely crazy.  We have been “in the field,” as my research colleagues say, clandestinely touring Prock Chocolate Corporation-operated cocoa plantations of Africa, South America and West Java.

There’s so much I’m dying to tell y’all!

Sadly, we promised our traveling companions—an undercover British TV film crew dispatched by an investigative newsmagazine—that we would “embargo” our pictures and posts until after the documentary film program we collaborated on airs later in the year.

In the meantime, I have secured approval from our new British friends to share these two anecdotes.

Highlight of the trip:

Our first stop was in Venezuela, which produces about 17,000 tons of cacao a year. We infiltrated an 11,000-acre Prock plantation east of Lake Maracaibo, a region once rich in rainforests and biodiversity.

While the “ostensible” purpose of the Prock Chocolate farm is to grow beans, we knew better!  Indeed, it is on this farm that the Company secretly cultivates its most sinister crop:  the mind-altering Datura flower, whose extracts, we believe, are mixed into all Prock Product formulations to stimulate customer dependence (if not necessarily taste buds).

This rare “psychedelic” plant, whose hallucinogenic properties are known to induce a mild state of trance, have been the “secret ingredient” in Prock products for decades. It’s not a coincidence, people, that terms like “addictive” and “euphoric” are so often linked to the Prock product portfolio!

The wily executives at the Prock Chocolate Corporation (who have handed over God-knows-how-many briefcases clogged with $100 bills to FDA officials) have managed to get this “undeclared ingredient” exempted from their product labels, claiming it is some sort of proprietary “trade secret” when it fact  it is a brazen product spike, pure and simple.

Months from now, when our documentary airs, the truth will finally be known.  And let the indictments begin!

But I am ahead of myself; back to the story:

While tangling with the Prock Chocolate Corporation is never an undertaking for those averse to danger, we were in good hands on our field trip.  Indeed, we’d have surely been discovered by the Barons of Big Chocolate were it not for the expert guidance of a lovely group of indigenous Venezuelans, the Yąnomamö People, who taught us camouflaging techniques, how to sleep under water (in shallow creek beds, breathing through reeds), and prepared for us snacks made from manioc root, a popular shrub. (Regrettably, I was unable to bring these natural, tasty treats home to my morbidly over-sized daughter, Tempy, as manioc root is unfortunately high in carbohydrates and altogether devoid of protein.)

The lovely Yąnomamö People of Venezuela

(Note:  The mother and child in this photograph are presented for anthropological/representative purposes only.  Our actual guides’ identities we have sworn not to reveal.)

Lowlight of the trip:

Hands down:  Port Bouet Airport, Cote d’Ivoire.  The country has such lovely and resilient people—except at the airport, where customs officials detained my colleague Jayne Gribble for more than 14 hours.

If we had a traditional, hierarchical structure at COCOH, or were wont to deploy martial language (which we are not), you might say that Jayne is my second in command, though I think of her more as a peer.

I hate it when people judge books by their covers. Which is exactly what happened to Jayne.

Despite being dressed in the native garb—a brightly colored traditional dress, a “pagnes” of red, orange and gold, with matching head scarf—she was nonetheless suspected, based solely on her appearance, of either trafficking heroin or being addicted to the drug.  The customs agents claimed that she was hiding her eyes (when in fact she wears stylish bangs).  Her teeth prompted skepticism because they were “insufficiently white.”  [Don't even get me started on that comment, people!]  We had to secure an affidavit from her childhood dentist in Cambridge, Mass., that Jayne’s parents—trailblazers who were 30 years ahead of their time—deliberately prohibited the ingestion of fluoride, which is clinically proven to damage fertility, destroy bones and cause early puberty in females.  Eleven hours into her detention, a local physician insisted Jayne’s was an “unhealthful pallor.”  Hello!  Anybody here ever heard of a vegan?!!

Despite evidence that Jayne is a productive and valued member of/contributor to Civil Society, the customs officials insisted on treating her like doped-to-the-gills Keith Richards trying to board a Swiss aircraft circa 1977.

It was infuriating!

Fortunately, Jayne was a better sport about the fiasco than I would have been.

“Every country has its rituals, traditions and superstitions,” she said when we caught a flight out the next morning.  “And it’s our job to respect those—even if we disagree.”