Dear Somatites,

It will not surprise you at all to learn that Alistair and I buy organic spinach. We have read enough studies about the effects of synthetic pesticides on the human body to do the best we can to avoid them.

At the same time, we’re not puritans (yet). The Environmental Working Group publishes a list each year of foods that can safely be bought from any origin (the clean fifteen), and foods that are best bought organic (the dirty dozen). You can see the full lists here.

It’s important to us on a personal level to eat as cleanly as we can; it’s also important to our business. We only source cacao (and matcha and hojicha) from small farms which are either organic, or very close to it. We’re aware that disease happens sometimes in the natural world (as it does in the human body), and from time to time farmers have to make emergency interventions. But it is our experience that those interventions are rare, and never topical (ie never applied to the parts of the cacao tree we eat).

Some farms we source from have organic certifications. Our Daintree cacao, for example, comes from the only certified organic commercial cacao farm in Australia. Farmer John Goodman has devised his own method of encouraging green ants to ‘farm’ mealy bugs on his cacao trees. Mealy bugs plant eggs which eat cacao sap and secrete sugar, which the green ants eat. In return, the green ants protect the mealy bugs (and thereby the trees) from pests and predators.

Farmer John allows no synthetic chemicals on his farm. His neighbours that do use chemicals are well outside the designated buffer zone, and have agreed with John only to spray when the wind is blowing away from his farm. When we visited him last June, John wouldn’t even let us on his farm wearing synthetic insect spray; instead he offered us his own home-brand organic bug spray (which seemed to work for him, though not so much for Rose).

Our Peruvian cacao is also certified organic, as are our matcha and hojicha. Our Karkar Island cacao is organic, except for some synthetic fertiliser used to comply with UN standards in the (UN-funded) nursery. Our Mexican cacao is almost entirely organic - Farmer Josué had to spray for a root disease five years ago, but hasn’t used chemicals since. Our Ecuadorian cacao comes from uncertified organic farms. Our Solomon Islands cacao was certified organic until last year, when the farmers decided it was too expensive to renew their certification.

Therein lies the rub. Organic certification is not free. Governments around the world establish organic standards, then rely on independent accreditors to apply them. These accreditors are private companies who charge hefty fees. To have a farm certified organic in Australia costs around $2000-$3000 a year, which is a significant cost for generally small-scale organic farms.

We buy our Solomon Islands, Ecuador, and Flores Island (arriving soon!) cacaos from collectives of small farms, some of which have less than a hundred cacao trees. For the cacao to be certified organic, all the farms that contribute have to be certified, and the cost becomes prohibitive. But when we visit the farms your cacao comes from, and when we talk to the growers and suppliers, we always question them about what chemicals they use. We do our own organic check.

It’s not just for our customers (and ourselves) that we try to ensure our cacao is grown in as healthy and natural an environment as possible; it’s also for the environment itself. So much is said about sustainability these days (perhaps too much, and often by the wrong people), but at Soma we genuinely do care about it.

The Greek word ‘cosmos’ and our English word ‘cosmetics’ come from the same stem. The Ancient Greeks considered the universe a thing  of unfathomable beauty, which was valuable because of its richness. In India, they call the cosmos Sundari, which means something like ‘overflowing beauty.’ This rhymes with Islam, where it is said that “God is beautiful and adores beauty.”

The problem with all our talk about sustainability is that sustainability is an economic term. Like - who are we making the world sustainable for? We’re making it sustainable for ourselves. It’s a human-centric concept, and it misses the splendour of nature. But if you have ever watched a sunrise, or lain beneath the stars at night, or swum in the sea in spring, you will know that nature is much greater than the things humans happen to take from it.

We feel the greatness of nature on cacao farms. Cacao is an understory tree that requires a canopy to shade it, so it always grows as part of a larger ecosystem. Cacao farms are full of grasses and tall trees and thousands of tiny critters (ask Rose). A cacao farm feels like a little jungle. 

We’ve see other types of farms that don’t have the splendour of nature. Some farms feel like a battery farm for plants, amped up on chemicals, fighting nature to produce as much cotton or soy beans as possible. But because cacao trees fruit for sixty years, cacao farms grow into old neighbourhoods, full of shade, soul, personality, and magic. 

A cacao farm is a little jungle from which humans gather fruits. If you ever follow Farmer John out onto his farm with his cutting pole in the morning, or drive with Farmer Paul through his vast farm on the slopes of the Baghya volcano on Karkar Island, or hear the river and the exotic birds that live on Farmer Josué’s farm in Mexico, you will understand what we mean when we say that Soma Cacao is a gift from nature, not a commodity we’ve extracted from it.

That feeling of life and plenty is what we look for when we choose cacao farms to work with. It’s a bonus if they happen to have been certified organic.

We hope you can taste the magic in your morning cup,

With medjool dates and vanilla paste (put this one through the blender),
Rose, Alistair, and the team at Soma Cacao