Field Notes: January 2025

The search for wild heirloom cacao, Marajó buffalo and new restaurants in Mendoza, Lima, CDMX & NYC.

A regular round-up of culinary news and notes from around the Americas, and beyond. If you have any tips about restaurant or hotel openings, new culinary books, food media worth reading, plus events and happenings of every sort, drop me a line thenewworlder@gmail.com.

Cacao being harvested in the high jungle of Peru near Quillabamba. Photo: Nicholas Gill.

A book about the search for the Amazon’s wild, heirloom cacao

Cacao is a topic that comes up often in this newsletter, such as the origins of its domestication in Ecuador more than 5,000 years ago, finding uses for cacao byproducts or a photo essay of chuncho cacao producers in Quillabamba, Peru. The understanding of the origins of the fruit, which hails from the Amazon, and the industry that surrounds it, remains quite distorted by the wider world. Rowan Jacobsen’s new book Wild Chocolate: Across the Americas in Search of Cacao’s Soul, which I just finished reading and highly recommend, breaks down the recent history of cacao in the region, especially regarding the rarer varieties, often found on forgotten farms and forests along out of the way rainforest tributaries, and the challenges in harvesting, processing and making chocolate from them.

Jacobsen first wrote about his interest in wild cacao in a 2010 story in Outside Magazine titled “Heart of Dark Chocolate.” It focused on the story of Cru Savage, an expensive chocolate bar produced by the Swiss Chocolate company Felchlin from wild Bolivian cacao. The book continues what has happened beyond that bar, not just to agronomist Volker Lehmann in Bolivia, but the loose network of cacao farmers, conservationists, activists and chocolate makers that are doing the legwork of recovering heirloom varieties that are in danger of being lost.

It’s important to highlight the work of these people, those working to encourage cacao diversity grown with care in healthy ecosystems, as much of what gets produced in the region is anything but. Aside of the obvious commercial cacao plantations from Brazil to Ecuador, greenwashing is widespread in the industry. Even cacao labeled sustainable is being traced to significant deforestation, as destructive as palm oil. More eyeballs are needed on satellite images of changing forest dynamics, as well as support for those protecting heirloom strains or using cacao as a transition crop in degraded landscapes.

• “Eat Less Beef. Eat More Ostrich?” by Sarah Zhang – The Atlantic

• “The environmental benefits — and limitations — of hunting as a food source” by Mitch Hagney – Food Print

• “El Festival Gastronómico Sabor a Selva y Río en San José del Guaviare, Amazonia, Colombia” by Mónica Santana León – El Trinche

• “Picking Up the Fork (Again)” by Allie Lazar –

  Pick Up the Fork

• “Notes on Building a Food Culture” by JP McMahon –

  Investigations of Irish food

Otro Bar – San José, Costa Rica: In Barrio Aranjuez, a group that includes, natural wine importer and writer Lissa Barquero and two of the other owners of Isolina, is opening a Hi-Fi listening bar above Cantina La Buenos Aires. Cocktails are the focus, but it will also serve natural wine and small plates. The worked with the architectural firm Santa Furia to preserve and reimagine the historic 1905 building, which the team is gradually doing to forgotten structures across the city.

Papa San – New York, New York: The Llama Inn family is getting bigger, with their largest restaurant yet. Papa San is a Japanese Peruvian Izakaya in the Spiral building, with a bar program from Buenos Aires’ Tres Monos. The official opening is February 18.