Time was when chefs were cooks and limited themselves to managing kitchens or overseeing the delivery of supplies that would be used for the meals they would cook at their homes or restaurants.
These days, chefs don’t just worry about the freshness of the produce they use, but care about their source of their ingredients, as well. And for chefs like Maria Fernanda Di Giacobbe, who creates the most exhilarating chocolate symphonies by harmonizing the different cacao varieties from her native Venezuela, she is concerned, as well, about the welfare of the farmers who produce the cocoa for her chocolate products.
At the Asisa Madrid Fusion 2017 last month, Di Giacobbe spoke of her work in Venezuela, transforming women cacao farmers into chocolatiers. We also learned that Di Giacobbe topped other 19 finalists to win the Basque Culinary World Prize in Spain in 2016, for her tireless efforts into cacao research, education, marketing and entrepreneurial support.
Judges of the prestigious award, which carries a cash prize of $110,000, included a veritable who’s who in the culinary world, such as Chefs Ferran Adria, Heston Blumenthal and Massimo Bottura, and author Laura Esquivel (Like Water for Chocolate), among others, with Chef Joan Roca—a presenter at last year’s Madrid Fusión Manila—serving as jury president.
On Di Giacobbe’s win, Roca said: “[The] recipient…reflects how gastronomy can take a leap from craft to consciousness. Maria Fernanda uses cacao as a gastronomic symbol that has a positive impact on the entire food chain. This is an inspiring project that exemplifies the great reach of gastronomy. Chefs can make a difference.”
She does this, amid the socio-economic struggles in Venezuela where hyperinflation and food shortages run rampant, and the local currency depreciates four times in a month, in what’s been described as an increasing authoritarian regime led by President Nicolas Maduro. Under these conditions, even what little income many Venezuelans make, are too little to place food on the table of many homes. (Officially, the Venezuelan government pegs the currency at 6.3 Bolivars to a US dollar, but in the black market, it recently fell through 1,000 Bolivars to the greenback.)
And yet, after Di Giacobbe won the culinary prize, she says this lifted the “dignity” of the women cacao farmers and chocolatiers who work with her. “Wow, our work is important” was how the women felt, she told the BusinessMirror, encouraging them further, along with their husbands and sons, to go back to the cacao plantations, process the cocoa, and make them into various chocolate products.
Di Giacobbe comes from a family of cooks and restaurateurs, with her mother an excellent pastry chef who specialized in wedding cakes.
She said that after school, she and her siblings had to help out in their mother’s business, and with Di Giacobbe’s love for chocolates, they began specializing in chocolate cakes.
At one time, the family had about 15 restaurants to their name, but all of them were wiped out in 2004, when the Venezuelan economy tanked starting in 2002, after a failed military coup tried to overthrow then-President Hugo Chavez, and a two-month strike by workers shuttered the national oil company. “We thought of what we could do. I said the most important product in Venezuela [after oil] is the cacao. So we took all the old recipes of our grandmothers, used fruits and liqueurs—all the flavors and ingredients from the different regions of Venezuela—and incorporated these with chocolate to make special Venezuelan bonbons.”
She founded Cacao de Origen in 2013, after several trips she made to cacao plantations. The farmers taught her to make cacao, and she taught them to make chocolates. “We needed a place to put all the people together. It’s a place where we can speak about cacao, talk about the different solutions. We transform beans to bar, and promote the products, and we make a little store to sell the products.” The first project area was near the capital of Caracas, and now she will be setting up a new chocolate lab in Rio Caribe, where she has tied up with a local family-run hotel to make it an ecotourism destination.
From just working with 30 women when the project started, there are now 8,000 women who have benefited from it. “It is now a movement,” she said, adding these women go to other plantations like chocolate evangelists, teaching other women cacao farmers to become chocolatiers, as well.
Cacao de Origen has also tied up with the Simon Bolivar University, where participants formally undergo training in entrepreneurship, marketing, packaging, etc., under the Cacao Industry Management Program. From just a one-week course, it has become an eight-month diploma course from which some 1,500—all women!—have graduated.
The movement has also expanded to other parts of Latin America, Di Giacobbe said, as she has worked with cacao producers in Colombia, Bolivia, Ecuador, even India. She is even eager to visit the Philippines, and see how we have revived our own cacao/chocolate industry. She advises Filipino cacao producers to form into cooperatives: “This is very important. If the work [product] is very good, they can command a better price. And with this movement of ‘bean to bar’ in the world, they can sell to the [large] chocolate-maker directly.”
What she values most about her project, Di Giacobbe said, is the freedom now enjoyed by its beneficiaries. “If the producer wants to sell her bean, it’s OK. If she wants to transform [it into byproducts like cocoa butter], it’s OK. If she wants to make bonbon chocolates, it’s OK, too. They are free to do what they want and sell at the prices they want.”
With Di Giacobbe’s support, a better, more sustainable world has opened up for the women cacao farmers of her country.
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Madrid Fusión Manila 2017 is scheduled from April 6 to 8 at the SMX Convention Center in Pasay City. For particulars, go to www.madridFusiónmanila.com.