Inside the Chocolate Industry with Simran Sethi

Simran Sethi is a journalist and educator focused on food, sustainability and social change. She is the author of the book Bread, Wine, Chocolate: The Slow Loss of Foods We Love, and creator of the podcast The Slow Melt, which explores the world through the rich, delicious—and often illuminating—lens of chocolate.

In this episode, Simran discusses flavor, and that “element of deliciousness” our food is in grave danger of losing if agriculture continues on its current (conventional and large-scale) trajectory. Simran also talks about the 5-year journey across 6 continents that informed her book, and the loss of biodiversity that she writes about in it, explaining that as we select our foods for certain qualities well-suited to huge agribusiness farming operations, we are losing subtle—and delightful!—differences in flavor.

Tune in to hear about

• The number of species that provide 95% of the world’s calories—take a wild guess before you listen, you’ll never get it

• The complicated story of the chocolate industry

• How cocoa from Ghana tastes different than cocoa from Vietnam

• The risks of cultivating monocrops (and what the heck that even means)

• Understanding the origins of our food

This conversation originally aired in June 2017, but we’re bringing it back as the third installment in our three-part series on tea, coffee and chocolate—listen at the link below, on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts, and don’t forget to subscribe!