Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Chocolatey Goodness


So sometimes cruising around the internets leads to strange coincidences. Maybe not earth shattering stuff that keeps you up at night but the kind of stuff you notice enough to say, "Hey, that is kind of weird." That is what happened with today's picture.
This is a photo of a band from Venezuela called Desorden Público playing at an outdoor music festival called Im Fluss in Basel, Switzerland*. It seems like a pretty cool festival - a big barge is moored in the Rhine and bands play out there for two weeks.
The band plays ska/reggae/rock (click here for a live stream of their music). They have been around since 1985 (that is a pretty long time for any band, right?). And like I said, they are from Venezuela.
Now for the kind of weird interconnectedness part of the web. Remember - I warned you that it wasn't an earth shaking thing - just a little weird. One of the articles that popped up in my reader today had to do with growing cacao beans in . . . Venezuela. Hey - I warned you!
But the thing is that when it first arrived in my in-box, I just skimmed the article - and even thought about not going to the full text after reading the scrib on the reader. But after I looked up the information about the band in the photo, I became more interested in the article. And I learned some stuff - cacao in Venezuela is mostly grown on plantations owned by non-Venezuelans but farmed by local (read: cheap) labor. Venezuelan cacao is known for making some of the most coveted chocolate in the world which is what keeps growers motivated to keep growing in an otherwise politically hostile environment - activists do sit-ins in fields (with machine guns), the government requires permitting and inspections out the wazoo (all for big time fees). Venezuelan cacao accounts for only 1% of the cacao grown in the world - and the output of the nation has remained constant for the past 300 years. And there is more.
So maybe I haven't found a new calling in life and my mind wasn't blown but I never would have known that stuff if I hadn't come across this random photo on Flickr. And now I am really curious about chocolate made from cacao beans grown in Venezuela! Me want to taste some!
* Thanks for the correction, knickinoptik - Basel, Switzerland not Bassel, Germany.
Photo credit: knickinoptik on Flickr

1 comment:

knickinoptik said...

Minor corrections: The festival is in "Basel" which is in Switzerland (though at the border to Germany, but not in Germany).