Chocolate, chocolate everywhere, and not a drop to eat

As I sit and drink my Swiss Miss Instant cocoa to satisfy one of the chocolate cravings I usually ignore here, I can’t help but laugh at the irony. Here I am, in a West African village and surrounded by cocoa trees, and the best I can do is instant chocolate sent from America?

It’s not that Ghana doesn’t have processed chocolate. They do. It’s just not very good and is difficult to find. Ask a villager about chocolate and they invariably say “Milo,” which is a vitamin-fortified hot chocolate drink here. Most have never eaten a chocolate bar, or if they have, it flakes in their mouths with the ever-satisfying texture of chalk.

But I digress. I mean to tell you about my time as a cocoa farmer. We are in late cocoa season, and the 50 kilo bags of beans are still regularly being dried all around the village. Cocoa farming is hard work. Such hard work, in fact, that I will never take chocolate for granted.

The process of farming cocoa is really a year-round effort. There’s spraying with fertilizer, pruning the trees, weeding the newest mangled additions to the farm, planting of root trees and tubers to stabilize the trees, and general inspections to make sure “black pod disease” has not infected the crop.

The pods, which house the budding cocoa beans, grow along the whole of the tree. Once the pod is yellow and about two pounds, it is ready to be plucked. After all the pods are plucked, it must be gathered from around the farm (usually on the day after picking) and brought to one pile. 

 

Cocoa pods grow along the tree

I had the pleasure of helping Gifty and Jackson “carry” cocoa and was exhausted after a measly five hours of work. Bend, toss, bend, carry, drop, repeat. Somewhere in there, Gifty demanded that I no longer carry the cocoa to its destination, but instead I “carry” her, which is an expression used to mean to help someone lift something heavy on their heads so they may carry it.

Gifty and Justice walk through the cocoa farm

Once gathered to a central location, the pods are cracked with a machete and pulled of its beans. Oddly, the sticky substance inside the pods that surrounds the beans tastes exactly like sour apple Now and Laters.

After enjoying nature’s candy for a few minutes, all the beans are placed in a pile with cocoyam or banana leaves placed on top while it ferments for a couple of days. Once fermented, the cocoa must be dried in the sun for a few days and is then sold for a little more than 100 USD per 50 kilo bag.

From there, it goes to local emporiums and is later shipped off to the capital city of Accra and sold to various companies, later to become delicious chocolate.

So basically, whoever figured out that chocolate can be made from these beans is one of the best humans to walk this Earth.

To celebrate this blog post, I’ll eat some American chocolate, sent by my lovely parents. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, everyone!