Word: rosenberger
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...what many connoisseurs consider chocolate's gold standard--had been on the verge of extinction. But here on the Monterosa plantation near the town of Choroní, a small group of entrepreneurs and laborers has dedicated itself to making sure the bean flourishes once more. Monterosa's owner, Kai Rosenberg, has devoted the past 20 years to resurrecting the criollo strain and its gene base. "After I survived a rampant cancer, I decided I was going to do what I really loved," he says. "I used to be in insurance. Can you imagine?" (Watch TIME's video, "Bacon Chocolate...
...ancient people of the Yucatán Peninsula were the first to crush cacao into what was later known as xocolatl--what Rosenberg calls the champagne of the Maya and Aztecs--a frothy beverage reserved for the élite and for special occasions. The Spanish took chocolate back to Europe in the 16th century, discovering the pristine and aromatic criollo bean in Venezuela along the way. Until the 19th century, Venezuela produced solely criollo cacao, which satisfied more than half the world's demand for chocolate. But when an infestation came close to wiping out all the cacao in neighboring Trinidad...
...businessmen like Rosenberg have recently been spurred on by a growing global market for fine, dark, single-origin (unblended with other varieties) chocolate. Europe and the U.S. account for an almost 40% increase in demand in the past three years. The challenge for Rosenberg and other criollo growers now is to make the plantations viable enterprises. Yet modernity hasn't quite arrived at the Monterosa hacienda, set in the tropical forest of the Henri Pittier National Park. Workers here are drying cacao much the same way they have for 250 years...
...among the world's most labor-intensive crops. Harvested fruit is sliced open with machetes, and the seeds are then scooped out by hand, placed in fermentation boxes and covered with banana leaves for three to four days. "Technology-wise, we haven't left the 18th century," says Rosenberg. "It is a process that cannot be industrialized." Silvino Reyes, who owns another hacienda, La Concepción, agrees: "Although Venezuelan cacao can sell for close to $2,500 per ton, our production level is the same as three centuries ago." That is, about 15,000 tons a year...
Sometimes people with BDD also have bulimia, according to Brown psychiatrist Katharine Phillips, a leading authority on the illness. In Rivers' 1997 autobiography Bouncing Back: I've Survived Everything ... And I Mean Everything ... And You Can Too!, she says she became bulimic after her husband, TV producer Edgar Rosenberg, committed suicide in 1987. Rivers is heartbreakingly funny about the subject. Of her admission that she never told her therapist that she was gagging herself after meals, she writes, "Exactly how would I have put it? 'By the way, doctor, my finger isn't just for reading the wind and calling...