The Fruit and the Fly
Only tepid slime gets us sexy. No goo for me, no cacao for you. The scientists shrugged. Give them back their goo, they told the export barons. You made a very expensive mistake. You overdid it.
In the adjoining photograph you can see an open cacao pod. Inside the pod is a fly. The fly is attracted to the sweet creamy pulp that surrounds the cacao seeds. As the temperature inside the pod warms up, the pulp begins to liquefy and pools in the pod. When it rains, the pod fills with a mixture of rainwater and liquefied cacao pulp. As the pod begins to ferment, as things in warm humid climates tend to do, the pectin in the pod breaks down and is added to the mix, resulting in a warm, slimy goo. Like literal flies to honey, this substance attracts a very small insect, one that only flies far enough and lives long enough to travel the short distance from one tiny delicate cacao flower to another, unconsciously carrying the essential pollen that turns blossoms into fruit. They’ll dive bomb into one of these warm slimy cacao pod pools to breed, lay eggs, and die. Over time as the pod continues to break down, it returns essential minerals and sugars back to the soil, back to its mother tree, and the cycle is complete.
So when we harvest the big ripe pods, we open them right there in the field, scoop out the precious beans into a bucket or rice sack, and place the pods with the open side facing up to receive the rain. It is the way countless generations harvested cacao for millennia (the oldest preserved cacao seeds were recently found to right here in Ecuador, carbon dated to 5,300 years ago).
Things changed when a decade or so ago, some big cacao export company decided they could extract and market the pectin in the pods to other companies that make pectin-containing products like jarred jam, Jell-O, and various other "fruit snacks." Why waste, right? The company also criticized the traditional harvesting method as inefficient and unsanitary. Trucks were brought in to move the cacao pods from the field to new harvesting facilities, wherein workers opened the pods, took out the beans, and dumped them into vast fermenting tanks. More trucks came to cart away the pods to another facility to extract the pectin. Hands were shook, backs slapped, and scotch glassed lifted to this triumph of mechanization.
Then, something started to happened, or rather, stopped happening - the cacao trees stopped bearing fruit; the tiny flowers withered and fell off. A harvest season passed. One year became two, and then three. The scientists were brought in. Ah, they said, the insects that pollinate the cacao trees need water to breed in. Tanks of water were placed in the field. Problem solved, or so they thought.
The little pollinating bugs scorned the water tanks. Only tepid slime gets us sexy. No goo for me, no cacao for you. The scientists shrugged. Give them back their goo, they told the export barons. You made a very expensive mistake. You overdid it.
The tanks were hauled away. The trucks stopped coming for the pods. The people came back to harvest with machete and rice sack, leaving the scooped out pods in the field. The flies carried the pollen, performed their one and final act of sex, and went back to soil. After several failed harvests and much money spent, things went back to the way they were.
Nature has systems. The people trying to engineer carbon capturing technology and such like to call nature's systems "low-tech." Yet they lack the subtle power to transform the husk of a fruit into the perfect receptacle for the precise insect out of billions of insects that pollinates the very tree that makes that fruit. Nature is very high-tech. A lot of people just don't want to recognize and admit it.
Nature’s systems are astonishingly complex. And yet, they do just enough of what they’re designed to do. Every action has a precise and measured reaction. Everything has a purpose, an intention.
In modern-day life, there’s quite a bit happening to react to. And even though humans are every bit as natural as a cacao pod or a fly, we are also social, clever, and have all sorts mental chaos going on that makes it really hard not to over-do.
Nature has systems. It knows what it’s doing. Right now, the evening mist is condensing inside that pod in the field, pooling, warming, making a final home for those miraculous little flies. Right now, Venus is rising in the night sky and millions of light years behind her a star is exploding. Thinking about these systems, these cycles, fantastic and mundane and beyond my understanding as they are, it doesn't change our reality. Thinking about the flies mating and far away worlds beyond our galaxy changes me. The rainwater in the pod, the star in the sky — they hum a soft message to me that things go on, that the things I’m so worried about can matter, but less than I’m making them matter. That I’m overdoing it. Perspective shifts. I settle down and in. Cool thought, calm action, indifferent like nature itself, enters. I hold on to it, just enough.
At Sueño de Vida we work in a meaningful way to heal land ravaged by deforestation. How meaningful? According to a recent UN Foresight Brief on climate change,
--It is of the utmost importance to stop deforestation and to increase reforestation efforts around the world. Agricultural practices should focus on soil building and the use of agroforestry methods.
That is exactly what we do here at SdV. You can help by helping us do what we do every day: plant forests that nurture soil, people, and local community.
Click HERE to donate directly to our reforestation fund OR make a monthly pledge on our Patreon.
Kristen Krash is the co-founder and director of Sueño de Vida, a regenerative cacao farm and reforestation mission in Ecuador. Sueño de Vida works to educate and inspire everyday people about permaculture, sustainable living, environmental activism and healthy living all in the name of living more in harmony with nature to create a better world for us all.