Bourdain in Peru

“Imagine you took a lot of acid, and then you ate that whole bowl of ants …” The one where Tony Bourdain treks into the Peruvian Amazon in search of rare cacao beans— and comes back with an idea for a funky chocolate bar he christens Good & Evil.

During a previous trip to Peru, Anthony Bourdain wrote in his program notes for his return visit to Piruw Ripuwlika — Peru’s quechua name — for CNN’s Parts Unknown (season 1, episode 7, originally aired June, 2013) ), he bounced around Lima, explored the ever-changing food scene — ”from the more cutting-edge fine-dining restaurants to the funkiest but most delicious traditional cevicherías” — huffed his way up pre-Columbian Andes mountains, got dizzy from altitude sickness, stuffed his mouth with coca leaves, ate guinea pig in Cuzco, explored the jungle of Amazonia, drank chicha with yucca farmers, took ayahuasca in the darkness of night with a curandero, puttered upriver in a wobbly boat — the kind TV producers like his long-suffering companion Tom Vitale just love — “with imaginary bats screeching in my brain and lights that probably weren’t there dancing in front of my eyes,” and took in the sights of Machu Picchu at dawn — “one of the most extraordinary experiences one can have in this life” — then watched millions of cutter ants strip a forest floor clean, made friends, and “learned something about the world and about myself.”

There was hardly a reason to return, Bourdain readily admitted in his programs notes, save one: His close friend and partner in kitchen crimes Eric Ripert, the chef of the most excellent Le Bernardin in NYC, told him that he (Ripert) had recently tasted the “best chocolate in the world,” and asked if Bourdain would be so kind as to get involved in a likely disastrous cooperative venture into the high-end gourmet chocolate business. Cacao loco!

The resulting chocolate bar, christened Good & Evil, would kick off the most viral discussion of chocolate in recorded history. (To save you the trouble, don’t bother looking; I tried. The most recent mention of Good & Evil chocolate on Reddit dates from two years ago; the high-end kitchenware and home furnishings retailer Williams-Sonoma had exclusive rights to Bourdain-Riperts’ chocolate confections, but any trace of Good & Evil has long since vanished from Williams-Sonoma’s various websites.

Don’t get me wrong: Williams-Sonoma has plenty of gourmet chocolate, but not Bourdain-Ripert.

If you rewatch Parts Unknown, as I did the other night, it might help to sample some gourmet chocolate of your own, to get in the mood.

LA-based Compartés comes highly recommended by connoisseurs, though in my neighbourhood Green & Black’s is more accessible, and less likely to require you to take out a bank loan to cover the cost — to get into the mood.

Peru is less politically driven than earlier 1st-season episodes of Parts Unknown like Libya and Colombia — Peru may have been more politically stable when Bourdain visited than it is today — but the country is full of surprises, none the least its claim to pride-of-place as the world’s premium supplier of gourmet cacao beans.

To reiterate — after all, what are TV reruns for? — Good & Evil was the culinary love child of Bourdain, Ripert and Éclat chocolatier Christopher Curtin; it was fashioned from personally selected, hand-picked pods of Peruvian Pure Nacional, an exceedingly rare and prized all-white strain of cacao bean thought to have been wiped out nearly 100 years ago.

No wonder the Good & Evil bar sparked a chocolate conversation that went viral.

“I don’t know whether you knew this,” Bourdain says at one point, “but I am an aficionado of early erotica of pre-Columbian and post-Columbian eras — you know, like pottery of people doing it.”

Erm, alrighty then.

The Peruvian rainforest was the incubator, too, for many of the early legends of El Dorado, the so-called “City of Gold.”

“Wow, gold necklaces,” Bourdain says, during a museum prowl of pre-Columbian arts and artifacts.

“You see why the Spanish just freaked out when they came here and turned into maniacal greedheads.”

And then there’s the cuisine.

“Whole different flavour spectrum, right? All new. It’s almost like you need a new section of your tongue when you eat this food, It’s not like, well, this is something like. It’s not ‘kind of like’ anything. It’s really awesome.”

Not to mention the chocolate.

After watching Peru, either for the first time or the umpteenth, it’ll be hard to settle for a Snickers or Twix ever again.

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Glimmer of Hope

Roundups of the year’s most important environmental stories can’t help but focus on the bad. Here’s a good news story, though.

The most important environmental stories of any year are always those most likely to have ripple effects well into the future.

Hot winter, hot spring, hot summer and hot fall, capped by a bogus climate conference in an Arabian Gulf petrostate to close the year, marked 2023 as a year to forget, though, of course, we can’t — and shouldn’t.

The past year was the world’s hottest since record-keeping began, meteorologists and climatologists agree. Don’t argue. The science is in. Time to stop playing games.

On every continent and across every season, surface temperatures broke long-standing records and, in the process, made it clear that the age of climate change isn’t some distant what-if. It is here, now.

There were glimmers of hope, though, if a glimmer is, in truth, all they are. Offhand, I can think of two.

I’ll get to the second, involving youth climate protesters and the courts, in my next post. First, though, here’s a story that barely caused a ripple in the mainstream press, but which has the potential to change the way governments think and act in the future.

Ecuador, August. This country of 17 million people (according to the official 2022 census) and covering some 282,000 km² (109,000 square miles) is one of 17 countries officially designated by the NGO Conservation International as megadiverse, those countries that are home to the majority of the Earth’s wild species, including a wide range of endemic plant and animal species found nowhere else. Ecuador’s territorial responsibility includes the Galápagos Islands — and it is also home to potentially vast reserves of oil.

Even as some countries say one thing and do another with regards to oil exploration and development — hello, Norway — on Aug. 20th Ecauadorans voted in a historic referendum to put the brakes on the development of all new oil wells in Parque Nacional Yasuní in the Amazon, one of the most biodiverse regions on the planet.

Unesco designated Yasuní as a World Biosphere Reserve in 1989. It covers more than 1m hectares (2.5m acres) and is home to 610 species of birds, 139 species of amphibians and 121 species of reptiles. On one hectare alone there are 665 tree and bush species, more species than in the whole of Europe or the USA and Canada combined.

On one hectare alone there are 665 tree and bush species, more species than in the whole of Europe or the USA and Canada combined.

The referendum was included as part of the first round of presidential elections. In the end, voters chose to safeguard the biosphere by a margin of nearly 20%, with more than 58% in favour and 41% against.

The move means an estimated 725m barrels of oil will stay underground in an area of the Amazon that is also home to the Tagaeri and Taromenane indigenous tribes, two of the world’s last remaining “uncontacted” Indigenous communities.

Ecuador’s voters took the unprecedented step of knowingly forgoing the profits to be made from oil extraction. They decided the damage was not worth the risk, no doubt aware of the oil industry’s reckless practices and appalling record when it comes to extracting oil in the Amazon region, not to mention attendant factors such as water pollution, environmental degradation and human rights abuses.

At a time when the climate crisis is intensifying and the Amazon rainforest is fast approaching an irreversible tipping point, Ecuador has become one of the few countries in the world to set limits on resource extraction through a democratic vote.

In a second referendum, Ecuadoran voters voted to block gold mining in the Chocó Andino, a sensitive highland biosphere near the capital of Quito, by an even larger margin: 68% to 31%. Pedro Bermeo, founding member of Yasunidos, an activist group that gathered hundreds of thousands of signatures petitioning the referendum, told the Guardian newspaper that the vote shows that the “greatest national consensus at this time is in the defence of nature, the defence of Indigenous peoples and nationalities, the defence of life.”

Well, yes. It doesn’t end there, though.

“The fight isn’t over,” Bermneo added. “Even if politicians separate us, nature unites us, and we will work together to ensure the government complies with the will of Ecuadorian people.”

And, with luck, the will of people the world over.

The referendum is binding — and permanent. It cannot and will not be undone by a future government; it’s enshrined in law.

Baby steps, but steps just the same.

Hablemos de Culturas

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Deal! Or No Deal?

An 11th-hour deal has been struck at the CoP28 climate talks — but what kind of deal? The devil’s in the details, as always.

It’s being labelled “the UAE consensus,” but those are not the kind of words to stir hope and joy in the climate science community.

On the face of it, the 11th hour — literally, midnight Pacific Time — agreement to “transition away” from fossil fuels sounds like, if not the end result exactly, a step in the right direction.

What the EU has labelled “the beginning of the end of fossil fuels” is also being singled out by the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) as an “improvement,” but with a “litany of loopholes.”

Climate justice campaigners are, by and large, disappointed with the wording, which they say can — and probably will — stand in the way of implementation.

Was it ever thus.

The reaction from small island countries like Tuvalu, Vanuatu and Kiribati is telling because they are the nation states most vulnerable to the impacts of the climate crisis in the immediate term, as opposed to “somewhere in the future,” say, 2050, when — in theory — the world will have cut greenhouse gas emissions enough to limit global heating to no more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.

That was already a tall order as the science tells us that the world is already at 1.7°C ahead of pre-industrial levels. Rapid ice melt in the polar regions and glaciers in more temperate climes might not seem evident right now in London, New York and Washington D.C., but it is an existential issue in Tonga, Micronesia and the Maldives, among 33 other member states.

The deal encourages the world’s nations to embark on a de facto phasing out of fossil fuels, but developing countries still need billions of dollars to help them transition away from coal, oil and gas. The G7 nations, fast-growing economies like those in China and India, and the wealthy oil sheikhdoms of the Arabian Gulf are not compelled, let alone required, to move as quickly as the climate science urges. The US has pledged just $20 million in new finance to help emerging nations, and even that amount — paltry considering the US is also the world’s most active producer of oil and gas — and even that is likely to be rolled back when political conservatives regain power in the US White House and Congress, as they are likely to do next November, with Canada to follow in 2025.

China has already vowed to expand coal production, and India will face no penalty for following suit. Russia, which worked hard behind the scenes to forestall any kind of deal, including this one, will face little opposition next year, when the UN’s climate conference will be held in Azerbaijan, an oil producer and more or less a client state of the oil and gas-producing Putinocracy.

There is a silver lining to all this, if silver is the right word exactly. Timing, as always, is a factor. Perhaps shamed by the optics of handing the world’s biggest, most important climate conference to Azerbaijan in 2024, the following year’s conference will be held in Brazil. And not just Brazil, but in the heart of the Amazon rainforest, the symbol of nature’s last stand against global heating.

Let’s hope it’s still there.

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