So I originally wanted to start this article, this essay, with an exploration of cacao because now that I have been in this business for almost a year and have received questions and curiosities from people at the farmers market about what cacao is and isn’t, and how cacao is different from chocolate and coffee and all these other plants and substances, I wanted to continue exploring that.
I wanted to help explain the cultural nuance as well as the process of cacao.
But as I hold cacao in my mind, a lot of other words and concepts have been coming to me.
Words like reciprocity and exchange, which have a lot to do with business and work and being a human in this day and age.
And then, from a recent conversation with a friend, new words like legacy and thriving have also come.
So this will be a tapestry of an article where I will weave together these concepts of driving and the process of becoming, using cacao as an example through the lens of cacao as a human relationship and as a life form—not even just an animal, but a bean that exists and strives to live.
What does it mean to thrive and not just survive?
What does it mean to be a legacy and create legacy?
Because the cacao that my ancestors knew and understood and cultivated is very different from the cacao that is being cultivated and produced now.
And yet this version of cacao is not going to be the only one that ever exists or continues to exist.
Just as I am the legacy of my ancestors.
My ancestors couldn’t have even fathomed the amount of colonization, cultural obliteration, and suppression that have happened—that would happen to them.
And I don’t even think I could conceive—I mean, I didn’t realize I couldn’t have conceived—of what my life would become.
I didn’t know that getting a certain degree in English was going to effectively create and potentiate different transferable skills, and that those skills would allow me to work in any industry: in the nonprofit sector, in the for-profit sector, in government, making six figures, taking pay cuts, always being provided for, and then being able to be a freelancer and career coach and now a cacao drinking-blends vendor.
So I want to start with cacao as a way of easing us in. Especially for those who found me through the farmers market in person.
I want to be able to keep sharing what cacao is, how it is different from other plants culturally and biologically, and I want to be able to use cacao as a sort of metaphor for what it looks like, what it feels like, potentially, to thrive and survive in a longer journey.
I’ll weave in other words like exchange and reciprocity because I think that has a lot to do with the process of becoming, the process of thriving.
So let’s begin.
To Begin With Cacao
I really enjoy beginning with the etymology of words. I did a deeper dive into cacao on my podcast, if you want to go deeper. It’s called “The 8,000-Year Journey of Cacao: On Lineage, Loss, Return, and the Medicine That Survived Us.”
So I’m not going to go as deep as I did in that episode, but to start: the original word in its native language was kakawa.
The plant is native to Ecuador and South America, and it eventually made its way into Central America, particularly Mexico and other parts of Central America, through Indigenous movement and cultivation.
That gave rise to societies and cultures such as the Maya, Aztec, Pipil, Chorotega, and others.
And culturally, cacao had many dimensions.
It was a currency.
It was something that was consumed.
It was something that was exchanged.
People used cacao beans to give and take from each other. It was cultural. It was economic. It was nutritional. It was economically nutritious and physically nutritious and biologically nutritious.
And so, in some ways, it reminds me of some of the Lakota tribes here in the United States, where the buffalo—or American bison—is a very central piece of culture.
The buffalo were hunted to meet the needs of the tribes, but not excessively. The intention was to meet the needs sufficiently. And the entire animal was used.
The fur. The meat. The organs.
Everything was used in order to create the tipis, to create nourishment, to sustain the tribe and the community from the inside out.
And similarly, cacao was sort of kind of that.
A very key element to Indigenous cultures and communities in Central and parts of South America where cacao was not just something that was drunk in order to have a certain effect, as Western culture sometimes claims.
It was a deeply infused and embedded piece of culture.
It was woven into economics, into the ways that individuals gave and took from each other, and into the ways that people were able to build reciprocity and economic exchange.
It was part of mythology. There were specific gods associated with the sacredness of this plant. Cacao was thought of as a seed of life.
There were specific vessels and pottery made for the consumption and production of cacao. It was central to baptism, coming-of-age ceremonies, marriages where couples would exchange it, and medicinal practices.
It was an essential element to these cultures. It wasn’t just a trend.
It was multifaceted.
Then We Have Colonialism
When two worlds met—the European world and its empires, with their own systems of belief, indulgence, economics, and culture—there was also a system of entitlement that allowed one culture to impose itself upon and remove other cultures.
And that is still something that we experience to this day.
The majority of the world is Black and brown. All of Africa, all of Latin America, parts of Europe—there are more Black and brown communities than there are white communities globally.
And yet the narrative has been predominantly white.
Black and brown people have been called minorities in white-majority cultures, even though white-majority societies benefit from and harvest the labor and resources of Black and brown communities, including cacao.
So once we get into colonization, and the Spanish arrive in Central America and take cacao back with them, and sugar gets added, and the production changes, the meaning and culture of the plant begin to change too.
Because they are not tied to cacao spiritually in the same way.
They are not tied to it economically in the way that Indigenous communities were.
They are not tied to the environment in the same way. They are not tied to the whole relationship.
They are tied to the specific production and value that these European powers saw in cacao. And that has stayed true in different forms ever since colonization.
On the one hand, from white Western culture—whether that’s Australia, Europe, the United States, Canada—there is this element of procuring cacao in order to receive nutritional benefits.
Or there is this Westernized spirituality:
This is going to open my heart.
This is going to help align my chakras.
So I don’t know if it’s straight-up appropriation. But it is definitely a change in how people relate to the plant.
And it changes how people build reciprocity.
Because if the idea is to just consume—to just take from the plant and not give back to the plant—to just take whatever perceived benefits a particular culture has decided cacao provides, that changes the way that cacao is planted, harvested, produced, sold, and consumed.
Especially when cacao is predominantly grown in Central and South America and Africa—the Global South—while much of the Global North becomes the consumer and value-generator.
The story changes. The narrative changes. The culture changes.
What Is “Ceremonial Cacao”?
There is a term that goes around called “ceremonial grade.”
This generally refers to cacao that has been minimally processed, has a higher cacao-butter content, and has been harvested and prepared in ways that are associated with traditional cacao practices in Indigenous and local communities, particularly in Central and South America.
But “ceremonial grade” is not a scientific classification.
It is not a universally regulated definition. It is, in large part, a marketing term.
And this is where I start thinking about the story again.
Because who gets to decide what makes something “ceremonial”? Who gets to decide what makes something higher grade?
Who gets to decide what makes something sacred? And who gets to profit from the story?
There is a history here from the early 200s involving Western spiritual tourism, cacao tourism, meditation teachers, yoga instructors, travelers, and the New Age movement that developed from this guy named Keith Wilson.
There was a cultural shift in the West toward being closer to Spirit without necessarily being tied to religious dogma or organized religion.
More exploration of the soul. The unknown. The invisible. Through plants and experiences and yoga and different forms of movement medicine.
And cacao became part of that conversation.
At this point in our journey, I want to remind us of the words reciprocity, exchange, and legacy.
Because at this point in time, where is the giving back to cacao?
Or is it constantly taking? What has the legacy become of cacao besides being taken into bits and pieces?
And what happens to the people whose ancestors cultivated and harvested it?
The Central American farmers. The South American farmers. And now the African farmers and harvesters.
People who have been so disconnected and detached from the original culture and intention of cacao through generations of history and economic systems that their relationship with the plant has necessarily changed too.
The exchange they receive might be money.
But what does that money mean in their standard of living? In their country? For their families?
What does that so-called money mean in exchange for harvesting something that was once so sacred to their ancestors?
Meanwhile, white culture and others are able to promote cacao and presumably benefit even more from its production because they have been able to write the narrative.
Asymmetrical Paths
In this story, I think about all these asymmetrical paths happening.
And there doesn’t seem to be a fair exchange happening in all of this.
There are different legacies. Different processes of becoming. Different opportunities to define what something means.
What does this mean for a white person in Canada being able to sell cacao powder because of an experience they had one time in Mexico or Costa Rica or El Salvador?
And what does it mean for that business to exist on the backs of people whose ancestors were once so infused and embedded with the plant, but who have now been removed from so much of their own culture and legacy?
What is the legacy that is being made for them? Or that they are being able to create and cultivate?
These are the questions I want to sit with. Because the moral of this story, I guess, is that the journey is never-ending.
Cacao as Legacy
I am proud to say that my ancestors cultivated and sustained this plant and were cultivated and sustained by it.
The plant defined them just as much as they defined it.
And it was a culture of equals.
Plants are not above humans.
Humans are not above plants.
There was a level of tenderness and care.
That’s not to say that Indigenous societies didn’t have their own hierarchies, or that there wasn’t violence, conflict, or inequality within different tribes and communities.
It wasn’t a utopia.
But the value of reciprocity and exchange—and what it meant to thrive—is interesting to meditate on as we humans in the twenty-first century grapple with what is the worth of something when we are not included in the process of valuing things.
Because depending on what government you are in—whether you’re reading this and you’re in Canada, Europe, South America, Central America, the United States—we all have different governments that, for better or worse, govern our lives.
And depending on that structure, that system of government, we may or may not have more or less access to changing it.
To being able to have reciprocity. To vote.
To exchange through protest.
To shape the culture and society that we live in, and that lives in us.
What Does Money Actually Mean?
I think about money a lot. I think about what it means to trade time for money.
There was an essay I did a while ago about Kairos versus Chronos and different concepts of time.
For example, what does time mean when, let’s say, at work, I have to send an email:
In order to put the words on the screen, I have to think about what I’m going to say.
I have to think about what I want the other person to understand. Or how many people are going to be in the email.
I have to think about what they understand about the subject at hand. The context they have. Their relationship to the topic.
And depending on the urgency of the task, or who I’m sending it to, it changes the tone.
It changes what I think about. What they’re going to think about.
How much time does all of that thinking take? Knowing that the brain takes up 20% of the calories that I ingest in my body, how do we quantify that? How do we qualify our thoughts? This is where, when I think about money, I think about what money means in exchange for time. In exchange for all my thoughts.
Because forty hours a week is an arbitrary number. To contain us. The individuals.
If a person works forty hours, they’re not necessarily working every hour on the hour.
But there is that idea of being paid for their time. Being paid for the capacity.
The bandwidth. The availability of their time. Regardless of whether a task actually takes an hour or three hours.
Regardless of whether the structure is actually supporting the rest needed in order to take the time.
A lot of the concepts I think the modern world has to contend with are about:
What does it mean? What does it mean to have reciprocity? To have exchange? To thrive?
These are all verbs, presumably. Exchange is a noun, meaning that it’s a thing, an entity on its own, but it’s also an action.
Thriving Versus Surviving
So I think we’re at this moment of crossroads. Each and every one of us. As well as, I think, society as a whole. As a global community. As a human species.
We’re at this place of: What does any of this mean or matter?
Because we are—or have—lost ourselves. Lost our human culture. Lost the natural reciprocity, the give and take that is ingrained in all life.
We can’t guarantee cacao will always be available to us. We can’t guarantee that it will always give what it has traditionally given.
I was watching a two-episode documentary series on Sitting Bull, one of the Lakota’s most famous leaders, during a time when the United States was expanding its territory and believed it had the right to displace Indigenous communities for the sake of its own economy and culture.
There was an initiative that was passed to undermine the Lakota by targeting something central to their way of life: the buffalo.
The government did not necessarily explain it in those terms. The government was trying, or was acting, in an effort to grow itself and grow its people—the people it governed. And in doing so, it took measures against communities and Indigenous tribes it did not seek to understand.
There were fundamentally different cultural perspectives.
Many Indigenous cultures operated through a circular understanding of life: What goes around comes around. Life needs death. Death feeds life. And for the Lakota specifically, the buffalo was central to their culture.
They used everything from the buffalo. It was not just meat. It was not just clothing.
And white American culture, as a consumption and capitalist culture, operated through a different construct of value.
A construct based more heavily on extraction. What can this do for me? What can this produce? What is it worth?
It is an individualistic culture rather than a communal one.
And so there was a point at which the United States government recognized that buffalo were central to these communities.
In an effort to undermine and displace those communities, buffalo were deliberately targeted.
The broader result was catastrophic. The buffalo almost went extinct. But the U.S. Government got what it wanted: Indigenous people on reservations.
And I continue to ask: Why? What is the meaning of it? What is the value of those actions? Was it worth killing a buffalo that was never going to be eaten? Never going to be used for nourishment? Shelter?Safety? Spirituality? Was it worth the destruction of the buffalo for the sake of land?
Presumably, white individuals wanted land. They wanted homes. They wanted families.
But it wasn’t enough.
Even in order to create the United States, Indigenous communities already living on the land had to be removed from the East Coast, which at the time consisted of colonies before it became the United States.
It became continuous excavation. Continuous consumption. Without consideration of reciprocity. Without fairness to those who were already living, existing, coexisting, and developing reciprocal relationships with the environment and with one another.
What Does It Mean to Be in Relationship?
So I want to leave you with these thoughts. As we here in the Northern Hemisphere are entering fall season, getting into autumn, getting into a more reflective mood, I want to ask:
What does money mean to you now?
And not just in the short term. What does money mean to you in the long term? In your relationships with others? In the lifestyle you’d like to have? In your values? Or the values that you want to develop? What does money really mean to you?
And what does time mean to you?
In the short term. In the long term. Are there certain things you’re not willing to trade in exchange for your time or your money?
And looking at these examples of the buffalo and cacao: Neither is extinct now.
But the legacy—the history, the systems, the things that transpired in order for these entities, these life forms, to exist as they do now—means that they are not what they used to be.
I don’t think the buffalo can just roam as they once did. Just like cacao. Now there are farms. There are supply chains. There are markets.
So what does it mean to be in relationship? To be in a reciprocal relationship? To have reciprocity in your life?
But for me, as I develop, continue to experiment, and continue to learn in this business as a farmers market vendor, as someone who still has an office job, I ask myself the same questions:
How long will a job be worth it for me?
When is enough enough?
And for the sake of what or who?
I feel a deep sense of pride and humility and gratefulness that I get to be a steward of cacao on behalf of my ancestors.
And in this way, I develop and hone and strengthen my relationship with my ancestors. With my family. With my lineage. With my culture. With my history. And I also get to create a new chapter.
A new sense of meaning and value and culture.
Because I don’t speak Nahuatl. I don’t speak Qʼeqchiʼ.
And now there is a new language I speak. I am cultivating new ground. And I think that’s ultimately where we will wrap up this journey. Because the journey is, I think, creating, sustaining, and then creating again.
That’s the circle.
And I think we, as a people, are coming to that full-circle moment.
Share with a friend :)
