Peter Wise shares his perspective on our visit to Kallari:
Tuesday, our sixth day in Ecuador. It is getting hard to remember which day of the week it is. The group is bonding ever closer and the stress of traditional school is not present. Days are no longer Wednesday, Thursday, Friday etc., but the day after the hike and the day before rafting. Each day is defined and known by the impressionable activity of the day. The sixth day was Chocolate Day—mmm. Chocolate Day was a good day.
We started by picking up Giovanni, a manager of the chocolate cooperative, Kallari. After arriving on a countryside farm, we greeted a Quichua family in the Kallari cooperative. We spent the first part of our morning twisting off ripe cacao pods from small trees. Ripe cacao pods are football shaped, about the size of a small cantaloupe and are lumpy, ridged, and are yellow or orange. Cracking open the pods by machete or smashing two together will reveal the sweet, white jelly-slime that coats the large, dark cacao seeds. The second half of our morning we spent spinning open the gathered pods and separating the valuable seeds from the split fruits. In the afternoon we saw the fermentation and drying process and tried some cacao. I is very bitter, but reminiscent of chocolate.
Upon driving back to the Kallari office, Giovanni gave us a short talk and some samples of chocolate. It was delicious, regardless of the fact that it was 1:30 and we hadn’t eaten lunch yet. Both a delicious product and good marketing by making us hungry caused us to empty our wallets to fill our pockets with delicious, organic, fair-trade, and relatively inexpensive yummy chocolate. Many of us plan on bringing back chocolate as a gift to our friends and family in the States, but the temptation of not eating it is extraordinarily high across the board.
