Let’s listen to one another, and not make assumptions about what others need.
Photo by Sol Cacao
Lately I’ve been thinking about the chocolate and cocoa industry completely differently. In 2020 I joined the Impact Entrepreneurship Fellowship at the New School, and boy, has it been a wild ride. In addition to my MFA program in creative writing (oh, yeah, did I mention I’m doing that?), my cohort and I learn about entrepreneurship, business, and how to positively and effectively impact our communities. It’s made me think a lot about our chocolate community of both chocolate makers and cocoa producers. Here are my biggest takeaways.
1. Be Humble.
I’m one to talk. Literally. I’ve spent the past several years writing about chocolate, leading public and private chocolate tastings, and speaking as a chocolate expert to media and industry consultants. It’s always been important to me to continue learning, and I’ve come to realize that the way to do this is, despite my own expertise, to never assume anything. There’s a huge community of people who talk about craft chocolate, run small businesses, and work toward social justice that have done so for longer and better than I have. The reality is that I’m part of the system that has created problems in the chocolate industry and is creating them in the present, and I’m very privileged in that my daily life isn’t affected by those problems. There are millions of people whose lives are. Those who grew up and/or live in cocoa-growing regions understand cocoa and chocolate more deeply than I ever will. Being humble enough to learn about what they’re doing, and maybe even see how I can help, is key. That leads me to my next point.
2. Don’t Assume. Ask.
I’ve realized that based on my work over the past several years in the chocolate industry, I have a lot of assumptions about how things work. I had been leading tastings for years sharing how cocoa was grown, harvested, fermented, and dried because I assumed those were the important takeaways. But is this the information that cocoa producers would want shared in a tasting? What do THEY want chocolate consumers to know about them and cocoa? We have built our industry on the idea of partnering with producers, and to me, sharing what THEY think is important is vital to making good on that partnership, as well as creating a connection between chocolate consumer and cocoa producer. It’s vital to listen to the people whose lives are affected every day. I also recognize that a person’s intersecting identities influence how we see their point and perspective.
When Chocolate Noise Director of Operations Kim LeVine and I began interviewing cocoa farmers and distributors as part of our Impact Entrepreneurship class, we asked open-ended questions precisely designed to gather information on this topic without influencing the answers. (We even had a particularly great call with Adriano de Jesus Rodriguez and Gualberto Acebey from Oko-Caribe Co-op in the Dominican Republic.)
It turned out there were two common threads among all of our interviews: respect and quality. Everyone we talked to highlighted the amount of knowledge and work required to do their jobs, the high quality of their cocoa, and the respect that their work should garner. Some felt they had respect, while others wanted more. We’ve taken this idea of respect and made it integral to our chocolate tastings and everything else that we do.
3. Practice Community-Centered Design Principles.
This idea — also called human-centered design, and a variety of other names — builds on the first two. The concept of community-centered design is that asking a community what it needs and wants and then listening and co-creating with them is more powerful and fruitful than creating a product or service based on our assumptions about them. Too often those of us in the Global North design solutions for those in the Global South.
Here’s an example that I studied in my Impact Entrepreneurship class: In the early 1990s, Western researchers were investigating why a majority of children in Vietnamese villages were malnourished as well as ways to diminish this problem. For several years prior, the government and UN agencies had been providing nutritional supplements to the families that would prevent this issue, but still, the problem persisted. Using community-centered design principles, the researchers talked to the community and realized that one subgroup of children wasn’t malnourished at all. The families who made their rice the traditional way, without washing it before preparing it, left tiny crustaceans and other protein sources intact, providing robust nutrition for their children. They also fed their kids much smaller meals, more often. The researchers shared the solution, that parts of the community were practicing all along, with the families that were struggling. When the families stopped washing their rice and began making smaller meals, malnourishment diminished by a huge percentage.
There has been a lot of discussion around a guest post on this blog by Kristy Leissle, and I agree and empathize with a lot of what has been said. So often small communities like ours exist in an echo chamber of agreement. I’m not doing that. I’m trying to cut through the noise by including multiple viewpoints that may challenge all of us and our ideas and ideals. The reason we’ve become so heated about these issues is because they’re complicated! They also relate to other parts of our lives and other issues outside chocolate: For example, whether or not to order from Amazon, whether to buy mainstream clothing, and other decisions that contribute to white supremacy. My goal is always to uplift and empower those who have been marginalized, even if that means questioning ideas that I’ve always taken for granted.
About boycotting products by Big Chocolate, it makes me wonder, from a community-centered design perspective: Have we boycotters asked West African cocoa farmers what they would like to see, and what they need? Have we who buy fair trade and direct trade — or who create those systems — collaborated with farmers in Ghana and the Ivory Coast to design systems that work for them too? Maybe the answer is yes, and if so, I’d love for you to share your stories with me.
I don’t know the solution to these systemic problems, but I’m devoted to learning and listening, and amplifying voices.
Now it’s your turn: What do you think about these three points? Are they tenets you already practice? Something you feel you don’t need? As a small percentage of chocolate lovers, how might we contribute to equity in the cocoa and chocolate industry? Email me your thoughts on this post at megan@chocolatenoise.com, and I’ll include them (anonymously if you prefer) in my next blog post and newsletter!