Carla Martin is the founder and executive director of the Fine Cacao and Chocolate Institute, as well as a professor at Harvard University.

Alicia: Hi, Carla. Thanks so much for coming on to chat with me.

Carla: Thank you for having me, Alicia. I really enjoy your newsletter and these weekly recordings, and I'm honored to be here.

Alicia: Can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate? 

Carla: Absolutely. 

I grew up in Weymouth, Massachusetts, which is a town, a suburban town on the coast of Massachusetts, about 20 miles south of Boston. It is sort of tongue in cheek referred to as the Irish Riviera. 

And the people that I grew up with, were primarily of Irish and Italian descent, working class, with parents who were members of local unions, etc. And as I grew, it also became a much more diverse town and absorbed many of the other immigrant communities that are in Massachusetts today. These are communities of Cape Verdean descent, Southeast Asian, Cambodian, Thai, Vietnamese, Haitian, Brazilian, and more. And so I grew up exposed to all of these different kinds of foods. 

But I also had the really unique experience of generational food knowledge that was passed down. Both of my sets of grandparents were people who grew up during the Depression. And I grew up hearing stories about my grandfather being unable to stomach turnips any longer, after needing to eat almost exclusively turnips for years during the Depression. 

I also grew up with a grandmother who, as soon as she was legally allowed to work, became a baker in her small town in Vermont, and learned to really deeply appreciate the local foods of Vermont, which in many ways is a place that championed local foods before local foods became like a buzzword of the moment. 

And she then went on after marrying and having children to being the lunch — the exclusive provider of lunch to a New Hampshire elementary school, where she needed to cook from scratch over 200 meals every day. 

And so, through her, through my other grandparents, I learned a lot about what local food meant in New England, what class or food scarcity had as an impact on food. 

And then my own parents are big hippies. And so I grew up always with this kind of this thoughtfulness that they put around everything. They were always reading about something, trying to expose us to different things in our lives, trying to get us to think about what was — what were the stories behind what we might be consuming. Trying to get us to think ethically as moral actors in the world. 

And so, most of my diet as a kid was, I would say, relatively vegetarian. I've gone on to become mostly vegetarian, vegan in my adulthood. And, there was all of that. 

All of this was also colored at the same time by what we had access to on the South Shore. So, a lot of the food that I ate was from Shaw's Supermarkets, like it's what was there. And I can remember Shaw's Cakes as even still are nostalgically some of my favorite cakes to enjoy. They come with a 80 percent shortening frosting. 

Once I was kind of old enough to operate in the kitchen safely, I would make mac and cheese and broccoli on the side for me and my brother. Stuff like that. 

So, there's a long, I think, complex food history that I was lucky to be introduced to by people who were really thoughtful about it. 

Once I became a bit older, and spent more time with friends, I also, through them, got introduced to the foods of these many different immigrant groups in New England. Things like linguica, sweet Portuguese bread, pão de queijo from Brazil, all kinds of different Cape Verdean or Haitian dishes, and really got to have adventures through food. 

So for someone who spent well into her twenties, all of my life within about a 20-mile radius, food was in, a lot of ways, how I would explore and get to know other people.

Alicia: And how did your interest in chocolate come about? And how did that lead to your founding of the Fine Cacao and Chocolate Institute?

Carla: It actually came out of my interest in food to begin with. 

When I graduated from college, I had the unique opportunity to travel to Cabo Verde, which is a small archipelago off the west coast of Africa. If you can kind of locate Senegal on the map, just look to the west of that. And that's where you'll find, with many Cape Verdean peers.

And what I was doing in Cabo Verde was teaching English. I was also, for a time, working with the singer Cesária Évora, who is one of the biggest kind of cultural exports of Cabo Verde. And as I came to learn more and more about the place, I also came to know a number of people who had spent time as conscripted laborers. 

Basically, under Portuguese rule — Cape Verde’s a former Portuguese colony in Africa — people had been found to be indigent or delinquent under Portuguese law if they were unemployed. And they could be more or less forcefully sent to go and work in commodity production and other Portuguese colonies. One of the primarily — primary places that people were sent was to São Tomé and Príncipe, two small islands, also off the coast of West Africa, closer to Angola. So further south, than Cape Verde.

And what people were put to work doing was growing sugar, or growing cocoa. And I became really entranced by the story. It was the kind of thing that shocked me. I hadn't been aware that things like this happened a lot in these contexts. 

And I also became really confused about how it was that people were making their way back and forth between Cape Verde and São Tomé to me, and even realized that many of the people coming back from São Tomé were disabled by the work that they had done, were left impoverished, existed in a type of indentured servitude, or a debt slavery in São Tomé. 

And many of them, of course, remained in São Tomé and began to receive pensions from the Cape Verdean government, which was something that really just blew my mind that one government would be sending pensions to its diaspora in another country to support them. 

And of course, I was thinking to myself all along, this was for sugar and for cocoa, these two things that we don't necessarily even need. How could it be that these things that I had always loved as luxuries or sweet things were underpinning, were held up by such problematic labor conditions?

I then returned to the United States and entered graduate school. And I was in a program for African and African American Studies, and was one day at a local Whole Foods in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I picked up a chocolate bar from Lake Champlain Chocolates that advertised itself as a São Tomé origin. And I had it, I liked it. And I thought, ‘Well, that's kind of interesting.’

I then went to Formaggio Kitchen, which is the place that — it's the kind of elite specialty grocer in the Cambridge area, and found another bar that was actually made in São Tomé by a chocolate maker known as Claudio Corallo. 

And I just became fascinated by this idea that here were these products being advertised to American consumers, as — of São Tomé's cacao, as something that was supposed to be interesting and flavorful and fabulous. But there was nothing being said about that complex production that went on behind the cacao and the labor. 

So, that really drove me to try to learn more, to better understand what was going on in the supply chain, and try to really dig into it. Fortunately, in African and African American Studies, this is a discipline that provides us with all of the tools that we need to really analyze something like this. 

So, I began digging in, I was writing my dissertation about something else. But I started focusing more on cocoa and chocolate, exploring all of these things. And once I graduated, I had the opportunity in a postdoctoral position to create a class at Harvard called ‘Chocolate, Culture, and the Politics of Food,’ which turned out to be one of the university's most popular classes. 

And it became clear to me that one of the ways that I as an educator might draw people in to look at things like the history of slavery, of colonization, of inequality in contemporary commodity production, might be to basically bait them with chocolate and then switch upon arrival to talking about these tougher issues. 

As I did all of that, I also found that I was repeatedly being approached by people in the chocolate industry, who were saying, ‘We see that you're teaching about this. How can we learn about this?’ I was tweeting at the time I was blogging, I was putting out a lot of information about what I was learning. And industry members were saying, ‘How can we basically get on this learning train?’ 

And that's when I was inspired to start the Fine Cacao and Chocolate Institute. I was actually advised by my mentors at Harvard, if you want to do these things and make them more publicly accessible, one way you could do that is through starting a nonprofit organization. 

And so that was in 2015. I founded FCCI as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. And I knew from the very start that I didn't want to do this kind of public facing work as a lone ranger. I wanted to do it in community. And FCCI has become a way of basically building a team of like-minded academics and industry members who want to do education and research on the cacao and chocolate industries, and who want to communicate about them differently. 

We do this work now in a variety of different ways. We do it through educational programming for professionals and for consumers. We do it through research, and we do it through a lot of community building and communications activities. Historically, this has been through in-person, lectures, classes, events, and more, publications. But of course, in this COVID-19 moment, we've also been able to really prioritize a lot of multimedia communication. And that's become a bigger focus over the past year. 

Alicia: Right.

So, you founded this institute, kind of in the — I would — from my perspective, like the peak of the craft chocolate boom in the US. How has the chocolate industry changed, from your perspective, if it has at all, since you founded the Institute and now?

Carla: Yeah, it's — in some ways, it hasn't changed at all. In other ways, it has changed a lot. 

If we look at the industry as a whole, in the past 10 to even 20 years, it has gone through a reckoning in being forced to really deal with some of its biggest challenges. It's been forced to address things like forced labor, or the worst forms of child labor, to address things like deforestation. The variety of different kinds of sustainability buzzwords that the industry is not really allowed to ignore in its work.

At the same time, exactly as you said, the craft chocolate movement has gone through a large expansion. When it really started in the 2000s, it was — a very, a handful of Lone Ranger-type chocolate operations. Since the 2010s, this number has grown exponentially. There are now more than — thousands of companies that fit within this kind of small-scale chocolate making category globally, and that are really pushing the envelope on what it looks like to source cacao, and also to produce chocolate in an artisan fashion.

That, I think, has shown that — more than just a kind of experiment, this is, in many ways, a viable option for business. There are increasing numbers of businesses that are growing and expanding. They're not growing at the same rate as, say, craft beer, or cheese, or other specialty categories, but they are growing. They are learning a lot about how to interrupt the status quo operation of the chocolate industry or venture.