Plow to Plate Films Presents: Nothing Like Chocolate

Films for Foodies tend to fall into certain categories.  There are films that lavish aesthetic, cinematographic, appreciation which leave you hungry such as Jiro Dreams of Sushi.  Others screened in this series use food as a launching point to tell a larger story.   Black Gold is not so much about coffee as it is about fair trade.  Bananas! deals with the exploitation of Nicaraguan banana farmers exposed by a U.S. multi-national to banned toxic herbicides and Asparagus! dwells on the plight of the small town American farmer.  Beer Wars is less about beer and more about the warlike, cut-throat nature of the beer industry and King Corn is not about corn on the cob but about the pervasiveness of corn syrup and other corn derivatives in our food system and our very bodies.  Juliette of the Herbs was a loving biography of a fascinating, nomadic woman who devoted her life to understanding and using the powers of plants to heal.

What is remarkable about Nothing Like Chocolate is that it is at once a story about a person, a business, and chocolate while it also addresses the larger issues of fair trade and food justice.  The film works on all these levels.

Mott Green:  The heart of the film is Mott Green, born David Friedman.  Green grew up in New York, the child of two intellectuals, and dropped out of college in 1988 just shy of graduation.  That year he met some anarchist squatters and became an activist with a radical approach to alleviating suffering.  He electrified the squatters’ abandoned houses, installed solar-powered hot-water showers, converted a Volkswagen bus to run on electricity and worked in several soup kitchens.  In the mid-1990s Green moved to Grenada where he founded the Grenada Chocolate Company in 1999.

The camera crew tags along with Mott as he speaks honestly of his life on the island, weighing the loneliness he feels as a single man against the freedom he enjoys to work around the clock on his business and follow his passions.

Chocolate: Mott’s great passion for chocolate developed, in part, out of his enjoyment for coco tea, a mild stimulant.  Before starting the business, he knew nothing about chocolate, but he learned.  Leading a tour of the factory, Mott explains to some children that the phrase, “like water for chocolate” is a misnomer because water and chocolate don’t mix.  In fact, in drying, fermenting, and roasting cacao beans, the very point is to get most of the moisture out.  The cacao nib, or center, is 50% fat and 50% solid.  Grinding the nib is very similar to making peanut butter and results in a rich, thick, delicious looking (but actually very bitter) dark brown paste known as chocolate liquor that when sweetened, molded, and hardened becomes chocolate.  It takes Mott three days to make his small batches of chocolate from scratch. 

Clearly, for Mott, and the other chocolatiers featured in this film, chocolate is a food not a candy.  Their artisanal chocolate is pure, unlike mass produced commercial products adulterated with palm butter.  They revere this food, as did the indigenous peoples who used the cacao bean as currency to trade with the Spanish conquerors. 

Food Justice/Fair Trade and The Grenada Chocolate Factory:   

One of the reasons Mott began the Grenada Chocolate Factory, the only chocolate-making company in a cocoa-producing country, was his abhorrence of a decades long problem endemic to industrial chocolate production, forced child slavery in West Africa, particularly the Ivory Coast.  He felt this social problem had its roots in the global scale of production which keeps cocoa production separate from chocolate-making and divides consumers from producers.  Unlike wine whose origin is specified, the cacao beans that go into a mass produced candy bar can come from anywhere. 

Mott, a kind of radical Willy Wonka, wanted to produce chocolate in the opposite way – locally, organically, sustainably, ethically, and as an Organic Cocoa Farmers' and Chocolate-Makers' Cooperative proudly paying cocoa farmers the highest price in the world for the beans at $2.00 per dry pound, a full $.70 more than the $1.30 offered by the government’s Grenada Cacao Association. 

The company, whose slogan is “tree to bar,” is one of the only small-scale chocolate-makers producing chocolate where the cocoa grows and it performs every activity involved in production, from planting and growing cocoa trees to drying the cocoa beans in the sun and fermenting them. Mott created unique processing methods, designed and maintained his own solar-electric powered machines, refurbished antique equipment and even packaged the finished product. Mott shipped the chocolate bars to other Caribbean islands on a 13 foot Hobie Cat and to Europe on the Tres Hombres wind powered sailboat and delivered them to their final destinations using volunteer bicyclists in the Netherlands.  In 2011 the company was recognized by the State Department for promoting sustainable economic development and outstanding environmental conservation.

In researching Nothing Like Chocolate, after watching the movie, I was shocked and saddened to learn that Mott Green died on June 1, 2013, just a year after the film was made.  He was electrocuted while working on some solar-powered machinery.  He was 47.

The Grenada Chocolate Company continues with the help of Mott's mother and business partners.  The documentary's director, Kum-Kum Bhavnani, will join the post-screening discussion from London via Skype and Joe Angello, a business partner and distributor of the product in the U.S., will be here in person.  Mr. Angelo worked closely with Mott and will be able to give personal insight into Mott’s accomplishments and philosophy of non-complacency.  Nothing Like Chocolate is a great film about a special man.  Knowing that Mott Green is no longer making the world a better place is, indeed, bittersweet.

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Nothing Like Chocolate: Tuesday, July 8th, 2014

Park Slope Food Coop – 2nd Floor

7:00 p.m.  Free and open to the public.  Refreshments will be served.