Lexie Carroll’s Reviews > Bread, Wine, Chocolate: The Slow Loss of Foods We Love > Status Update

For a long time coffee was only grown in Africa, with beans being par-boiled or roasted before export to maintain growing monopoly of the Ottoman Empire. A Muslim cleric eventually smuggled 7 viable seeds to India on his pilgrimage to Mecca. Coffee moved from Ethiopia to Yemen, then on to India & Indonesia.

Ethiopia is one of the world’s 34 biodiversity hot spots- the center of origin & diversity for nearly 40 crops, including coffee, barley, millet, durum wheat, black-eyed peas & sesame. Ethiopia has never been colonized, and twice drove out Italy (the only country to try & occupy it).

CCN51 was bred for yield and disease resistance, not flavor. It needs a longer ferment (7 days) than Nacionale (3-4). When properly fermented it has a good basic chocolate taste, but is relatively flat, lacking floral notes and overall complexity of Nacionale. Because its creator died in a car accident before it could be patented, it ended up being grown widely in Ecuador with little planning or oversight.

Ecuador’s heritage cacao, Nacionale, is also called Arriba (“up”) because it comes from the upper basin of the Guayas River.
In the 1920s, 70% of Ecuador’s cacao was wiped out by frosty pod & witch’s broom. Agronomist Omero Castro created CCN-51 in 1965 from collections from Trinidad & Peru. He died tragically in a car accident in 1988 B4 he could patent CCN-51, leading it to be planted w/ little oversight.

Big (chocolate) companies aren’t interested in exploring diversity of taste because (big) brands demand consistency, and consumers don’t want to pay a lot for a bag of M&Ms.
“Nothing changes until people are willing to pay more for a unique flavor experience.” IF customers demand it, then companies will start to provide it.

French wine researchers at the University of Bordeaux found that students (in the wine program!) described a red-tinted white wine with the same descriptors as real red wine, and then described the same untinted white wine differently.
People also rate the same wine as tasting better when it has a posh label or is presented as being expensive. Taste perception is the result of many cues, not just flavor molecules.