Holiday Tour Day 13: Brent and Michael Are Going Places and Elements
It was mint to be.
We are now officially halfway through The Cacao Muse Holiday Tour! This has been the craziest, most intense, and most rewarding publishing schedule I’ve had in a while. The idea sparked during Thanksgiving week, I got those steam engines up and running, and so many of you jumped aboard the train—you said YES! at the drop of a chocolate bar. Deep gratitude to you all! Thus far we’ve featured Clay Gordon,
, , , , , , , , , , and , and & .We’ve got twelve more features coming your way—dirty rotten scoundrels chasing a baker’s dozen cats, pets painting masterpieces, books teetering atop pyramids... Are you thoroughly confused? Imagine what I have to go through in the next twelve days.
I can promise you the rest of this train ride will be just as wild as it has been, if not more. And remember what awaits at the end… your turn to have your name up on the billboard, if you win the prizes hidden in the wings. Be sure to subscribe to follow the chocolate train!
Whew. Two days of hard work making our newsletters fly off those shelves and into readers’ lap(top)s—it’s now time to rest, relax, and … take a trip. Or several. Who says you can’t work and play traveling the world?
Brent and Michael certainly can, and they do. Let’s learn from get inspired by the best.
TCM Holiday Tour Day 13 pairing:
BRENT AND MICHAEL ARE GOING PLACES and ELEMENTS
Brent and Michael are humans of my own heart. I’m sure they’ve been to more countries than I have…. in fact I know they have. They make me want to pack up my house and get on a plane, the way I used to in my twenties. My daughter is 13 and starting to wonder about the world so… maybe it’s time.
Not only are they traveling all the time, somehow they both have the time to respond to the comments on their Substack. And collaborate on a feature for TCM’s Holiday Tour. It takes a lot of work to be on that kind of schedule, when you don’t have a fixed home base. When you’re in a foreign country, the smallest, most mundane things—like laundry, groceries, dental appointments—take on much greater significance, and potential challenges. Hats off, gentlemen!
Please welcome
, and .
The Cacao Muse: About that T-Rex chasing you, you know, all you had to do was give him a chocolate mint! Traces of theobroma cacao have been found in the gut of some dinosaurs apparently.* Ok tell us all about you and where you’ve been.
Michael Jensen: We’re Brent and Michael—a longtime couple—who in 2017 decided to sell our house in Seattle and travel the world as “digital nomads.” That means we move to a new country every few months, supporting ourselves by working remotely.
So far, we’ve lived at least a month in dozens of countries — and briefly visited dozens more. If you subscribe to our newsletter, we’ll take you along to the places we’re going next!
Birgitte [to readers]: They’re not kidding. They’ve been to eight countries this year alone. How much you wanna bet they squeeze in one more before the year’s out??
[to Michael]: I bet you’ve had a lot of different kinds of chocolate in your travels.
Michael: I confess to having tried a lot of chocolate around the world! We’ve eaten Swiss chocolate in Switzerland and Belgian chocolate in Belgium. I have to admit I liked Swiss chocolate better, but that’s probably only true because I ate it surrounded by the Swiss Alps!
We do write about food quite a bit in the places we’ve lived, including Thai food in Thailand, Malaysian food in Malaysia, and Georgian food in Georgia, which is an amazing cuisine.
But I’m going to leave the chocolate to you to write about, Birgitte, because you do such a masterful job of it!
Birgitte: ❤️ ❤️ ❤️
TCM: Since you’ve tried chocolate in a few different places, which one’s your all-time favorite?
Michael: Before I get to my answer, I’m going to explain I’m a pretty basic kind of guy. I grew up lower middle class in suburban Denver, so the kind of chocolate I ate was either Mars, usually M & M’s, or Hershey’s, Hershey’s candy bars and especially Hershey's Kisses. Since it’s almost Christmas, I’ll mention how much I loved Christmas kisses wrapped in green, red, and silver foil, as a kid. I loved looking at a bowl full of those almost as much as I loved eating them.
Which was a lot! (And explains why I was such a chunky kid.)
Flash forward all these years, and truth be told, I’m still a pretty basic guy. Back in Seattle, sometimes I would buy Theo’s chocolate, a local brand. They do some pretty nice dark chocolates.
But honestly, my favorite go-to chocolate was Dove Dark Chocolate. For me, it hit the right amount of dark chocolate but with a texture I like.
However, thanks to your newsletter, I’m much more aware of how awful Mars is when it comes to their practices, and I’ve stopped buying it.
Birgitte: Yeah! Good for you. 👏🏽 👏🏽 👏🏽
Michael: So… I don’t have a current favorite brand, but my absolute favorite kind of chocolate is dark chocolate with peppermint. That hits my sweet spot!
Birgitte: Alright so… Theo is a good choice, Dove mmm that’s still commercial but hey, not my place to judge. Now peppermint dark chocolate… yah I hear you! Wait till you see what I’ve picked out for you from my chocolate studio!
Presenting… Peppermint infused with lavender, by Elements.
Chocolate: Peppermint infused with Lavender
Percentage: 70%
Origin: Ecuador
Ingredients: Organic cacao butter, raw honey, organic cacao powder, peppermint essential oil, lavender essential oil
Price: $7.00
Tasting Notes: Peppermint on its own is an intense, wintery sweetness. But suffused throughout a bar of dark chocolate, its intensity softens. Blended with the fragrant touch of lavender, and the healing notes of raw honey, the peppermint’s coolness rejuvenates, and lingers on after the last breaths of chocolate have melted away.
This company really cares about every aspect of their chocolate. I love their origin story, and their focus on the science of Ayurveda as an approach to healthy eating.
Note, also, the gorgeous design on this bar (see above photo) as well as the packaging (here below).1 That’s real cloth stitched into the paperboard.
And they have a sense of humor—check out this little gem on the product page for this bar:
“You’re mint to be loved.”
Gotta love the wit & charm!
The only thing I’d raise an eyebrow on is the word “Raw” on the package. As explained in Day 10 of our Tour, no chocolate can be truly raw. You need heat to ferment the beans (fermentation itself is considered a cooking process), and you need heat to make chocolate. How much heat, depends on your desired end result. When I was in Seattle recently for the NW Chocolate Festival, a chocolate maker from Ecuador (ground zero for chocolate) confirmed all this to me. It’s more accurate to say “unroasted.”
TCM: Any questions for the experts?
Michael: Last year there was a report that dark chocolate was loaded with toxic metals. What’s the follow up on that been?
Birgitte: I’ve been waiting for someone to ask this—I’m planning a post on this in the New Year. It was a paper published December 15, 2022 by Consumer Reports—you can read it here. First, it’s important to clarify the report didn’t say that all dark chocolate was “loaded” but rather that they detected traces of heavy metals, specifically lead and cadmium, of varying degrees depending on the bar, and that there seem to be a few different ways the metals make it into the chocolate, from bio uptake of naturally occurring elements through the soil, to external sources during the chocolate making process. Secondly, according to my colleague Clay Gordon (we featured him on the first day of the Tour), who has been involved in the chocolate sector since the 1990’s, and others in the industry, the sensationalist headlines crying lethal danger! over chocolate are, well, a bit sensationalist.
On the surface, the report does not sound good. Lead is especially toxic to humans, and cadmium in certain quantities isn’t great either. When the news first broke a year ago, a friend of mine sent me an article about the report, saying she’s stopping her intake of dark chocolate for the time being because of health concerns. I myself was concerned. As it turns out, the answer is nuanced.
Clay has published a number of posts on this issue on his site: here and here. The tl;dr I’d share with you is what Clay points out here—that a.) what’s more important in terms of actual exposure in your body, are the metabolite levels in urine, as opposed to the levels in the chocolate; and b.) we consume plenty of other foods with cadmium, and in much higher quantities than we eat chocolate—for example cereals, leafy and root vegetables, legumes and nuts, and various meat, fish, and dairy.
This aligns with what numerous experts are saying, like this one quoted in The New York Times: “Because of their presence in the environment, these metals are ubiquitous in the food supply,” said Kantha Shelke, a senior lecturer on food safety at Johns Hopkins University and a consultant to food manufacturers, including cocoa processors. “Total avoidance of lead and cadmium is impossible.”
What worries me much more than heavy metals in my chocolate, is the pollution of our entire food system, especially our soils.
TCM: Is there anything you’d change if you could?
Michael: Using children to harvest cocoa beans. Utterly despicable.
Birgitte: You’re not the first featured writer who has called for child labor to stop. I think we’re seeing a trend here. Here’s the thing. We always underestimate the power of the individual. Michael, you’ve stopped buying chocolate from Mars when you found out how they source their cacao. Numerous other people I know have also taken that step, and started to buy their chocolate from smaller craft makers who source their beans sustainably, directly from the farmers in many cases.
Keep multiplying that action, and you’ll see the market needle move. Let’s keep at it!
I have failed, once again, to avoid the dreaded warning banner from Substack that blares, “Post too long for email”
However, for me it’s a badge of honor. It means there is always so much to talk about when it comes to chocolate—and the wonderful writers of Substack who love it.
Here’s your entrance to the adventure of Brent and Michael! Hope you enjoyed this feature. See you tomorrow!
COMING UP! DAY 14 of the TCM HOLIDAY TOUR
Something wicked this way cometh… behold, a scoundrel! Nay, a scallywag!
~ Is there a difference??
~ Well yes. There are flavors of badness in each one, and they differ. Just like the flavor profiles of chocolate, you have mischief & malice profiles in these dirtbags. Only a true connoisseur of raucousness can tease them apart.
You’ll meet her tomorrow.
* You know you shouldn’t believe everything you read… just sayin’.
You’ll notice the packaging on the Elements website differs from that in my photos. Same bar, new outfit.
One nice thing about seeing everyone echo the child labor and equity concept as the main thing to change, is that awareness will inevitably raise, and solutions are immediately offered here.
That lavender-infused chocolate looks like it might be another good one for me to try!
Love this series! You’ve already convinced me to wean myself off of commercial chocolate, and I’m gonna see how much of my family I can convert to the craft life as well!