Holiday Tour Day 19: The Cultural Futurist and Formosa Chocolates
Never drop a pineapple on your head
Just a few housekeeping items while everyone settles in and wraps their hands around a cup of rich hot chocolate:
Special announcement from today’s featured publication, The Cultural Futurist:
Presenting the first Cultural Futurist virtual salon, hosted by Rachel Haywire and featuring “an eclectic mix of renegade philosophers, writers, and performers.” Said eclectic mix includes yours truly.
Cultural Futurist Salon I – Total Renaissance
Friday, December 22, 2023
Full program: 11am – 3pm Pacific / 2pm – 6pm Eastern / 7pm – 11pm GMT
• This event is online—full details here.
I go on at 11:50am Pacific (2:50pm Eastern) with a talk titled “Algorithms and the Great Disconnect.” I’ll cover the isolating, disconnecting effect of algorithms in our lives and society, and how to reclaim our own mental faculties and creative talents. We’ll have a brief Q&A after the talk. If you love homework, read this before Friday.
How is this related to chocolate? Everything links back to chocolate.
Secondly, the only way to ensure you receive these “delightfully unhinged”1 stories in your Inbox every day of the Holiday Tour, along with everything else barreling down the pipelines in 2024, is this innocent-looking button right here:
We now bring you our feature presentation.
Culture is a curious thing. We all instantly know it when we see/hear/eat/touch/taste/feel it, and yet the definitions thereof are as numerous as stars in the night sky (assuming it’s one unpolluted by our insatiable electric needs). But it’s not definitions we need, nor definitions we yearn for. We yearn for and thrive on the colors, the sounds, the foods, the textures, the moves of our cultures, be it our original native culture, or experienced and discovered through friendships, romances, or explorations.
The future is also rather curious, but in its own, eminently mutable and ever-fluid way. The future is raw potential. A quantum state vibrating not in two but infinite positions at once, always, and possibly never. What we do with all that potential is not just up to us, but all of the other 8+ billion humans and trillions of living things who share the planet with us.
Before this post twists itself into a multi-colored Möbius strip, let’s slide down this rabbit worm hole together and see where we emerge.
TCM Holiday Tour Day 19 pairing:
THE CULTURAL FUTURIST and FORMOSA CHOCOLATES
I wasn’t kidding when I said Rachel is a renegade. After all, she wrote the Techno-Renegade Manifesto, putting none other than Marc Andreessen on notice for his Manifesto.
How dare she! some might say. How dare she speak against the word of those more powerful, wealthy, and influential! others might add.
We’d still be carving stone tablets if no one ever dared speak their mind.
Rachel and I originally connected via The Muse, my other alter ego in the Substackverse. (The Muse is the older sister to The Cacao Muse.) One thing led to another, and short story long, here we are about to slide down a worm hole burrowing through cacao-spacetime with a caravan of really small, chocolate pineapple cake-bearing hippos.
Please welcome
and .
The Cacao Muse: The name of your newsletter is so evocative. Tell us about you and your work.
Rachel Haywire: I’m a futurist and consultant with a focus on how technology and the arts intersect. Recently I’ve been focused on producing, curating, and hosting salons that feature philosophers, writers, and musical performances. I’m also the author of a collection of cultural essays titled The New Art Right, and am currently penning an anthology of sci-fi short stories.
The Cultural Futurist focuses on visions of the future from a cultural lens and insights for the culture from a futurist lens. We’ve got everything on the menu: predictions for the future, media analysis, subcultural history, cultural anthropology, revelations on art movements, philosophical musings, metapolitical dissections, and experimental fiction. Nothing is taboo here, and everything is possible.
Birgitte: Good thing nothing is taboo in your world, because the chocolate we’re about to taste contains a bit of… well let’s just say they’re substances certain purist authorities might consider a touch scandalous.
TCM: You said the magic word, chocolate! What’s your fave Rachel?
Rachel: My favorite type of chocolate is caramel almond bark with sea salt. Extra points for dipping it in a vanilla cream spread. There is something so perfect about this combination. Anytime I’m having a bad day, this is my immediate cure. As I dip and savor it, I feel immersed in an ambiance evocative of a film noir setting. I’ll start viewing myself as Kim Basinger in L.A. Confidential or Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction. It’s pure magic.
Birgitte: Caramel almond bark with sea salt dipped in vanilla cream? That is an instant winner in the Most Decadent Chocolate Choice category. Also, you and Meg should talk.
[Sounds of stampeding miniature hippos. Rachel looks around but doesn’t see anything. Throws Birgitte a confused look.]
Birgitte [motioning to the floor]: Down here. [The two women sit cross-legged in front of a cacao bean-lined strip.] Rachel, in honor of world cultures everywhere, allow me to present to you the Hippos of Lilliput. We have imported them from Mildendo, the capital of Lilliput, via Blefuscu. The pineapple cakes come from Formosa Chocolates of Taiwanese ancestry.
[One by one, the hippos come to Rachel, kneel, and let their pineapple cakes slide off their backs. Rachel stares at the pile of four small chocolate pineapple bonbons in front of her. They’re so meticulously crafted it’s hard to believe they’re meant to be eaten. The cakes that is.]
Birgitte: We accept these precious gifts from Formosa, and are forever grateful to your chocolate maker for such delicate craftwork! Let’s slice things up a bit.
Chocolate: Taiwanese Pineapple Cake
Percentage: Unlisted
Origin: Unlisted
Ingredients: Dark and white chocolate, pineapple, butter, sugar, almond, flour, glucose, cocoa butter, pectin, salt, baking powder, soy lecithin, <1% of the following: FD&C blue 1, yellow 5, titanium dioxide.
Price: $ varies depending on collection size
Tasting Notes: The dark chocolate shell cracks under the pressure of your teeth, gently exploding into an ecstasy of fresh, juicy pineapple, followed by the soft crunch of a tiny almond cake. Notes of marzipan and butter round out this unforgettable delight.
Note: Let’s get this out into the open right now. I told you these bonbons were a little scandalous. What’s with the artificial colors? Yah, I know. These are the baddie beasts on my Chocolate Ingredients List. Did I ingest blue 1 and yellow 5 during this tasting? Why, yes I did. Did I blow up? No. And probably won’t tomorrow either. But this is the first and last time I have done so throughout the entirety of the calendar year Anno Domini 2023—knowingly—so I think I’m good. Apart from those and the soy lecithin, the ingredient list is remarkably wholesome, especially for a bonbon. But I shall send a special request back with the hippos to ask Formosa’s owners if they can use natural colorings.
TCM: Anything you’d like to ask the experts?
Rachel: What is the origin of white chocolate? How did it come into being?
Birgitte: Many sources will tell you that Nestlé accidentally invented white chocolate in the 1930’s when they were working on a condensed milk formula enriched with vitamins for sick children, and added cocoa butter to it to shape it into tablets. Being in the business of marketing their products, they realized they could make non medicinal versions of this white chocolate, and so they did.
Incidentally, the Maya also used cacao as a delivery vehicle for medicine—what, I get to eat chocolate to take my medicine?? Bring it on, castor oil be damned!
But a skeptical researcher named Sarah Wassberg Johnson discovered much earlier references to white chocolate, dating as far back as the 1870’s. So I would peg these recipes as the first recorded instances of white chocolate, not Nestlé’s.
As for whether white chocolate is real chocolate, we cover that in Meg’s tour day.
TCM: What would you change about the industry, if you had the power?
Rachel: I’d want the unhealthy stuff off the market because it degrades the legacy of chocolate. Hershey’s and brands of their ilk need to stop. That is not what chocolate is! Chocolate is part of a cultural renaissance. It shouldn’t be a corporate product that cheapens and degrades chocolate into a lowest common denominator that removes its very essence.
I mean, chocolate has been a muse for artists for centuries. The color and texture of it have been used in sculptures, and the very concept of chocolate has inspired paintings and films that focus on themes of indulgence, luxury, and sensuality. Corporate chocolate takes away from its cultural beauty. I’d love to see more independent chocolate artists, which is why I love what you’re doing at The Cacao Muse so much.
Birgitte: ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ That is my purpose, my will, and my intention. May The Cacao Muse inspire much chocolate joy and artistry!
[The hippos sink to their knees, bowing their heads. Suddenly, four new chocolate pineapple cakes pop into existence atop their backs. The hippos rise, and without another word—wait, they never said a word to begin with—they turn and disappear into the distance. Actually, they’re getting on a boat headed back to Lilliput.]
And so the chocolate pineapple cake caravan bids us adieu… till the next Lunar Year!
Were you wondering how it was possible for the hippos to sprout new chocolate pineapple cakes, so far away from Formosa, when they had already rendered their precious cargo to Rachel and me? It’s simple. They’re quantum hippos. They’ve been paired with pineapple cakes for all of eternity.
Here is another worm hole we’d like to invite you to slide into:
COMING UP! DAY 20 of the TCM HOLIDAY TOUR
If a cacao pod falls in the rainforest, and there’s no one around to hear it, does it still make chocolate?
~ Well first off, a cacao pod never falls off the tree. It has to be cut down.
~ What if it’s never cut down?
~ It shrivels on the branch.
~ What a waste of beans.
~ Yes.
A better question to ask would be, does cacao grow in the desert?
We answer that question tomorrow. The sands of time beckon…
p.s. Did you notice that the initials of Cultural Futurist are the mirror image of those of Formosa Chocolates? I swear on my 11th century ancestors’ heads I had not arranged it that way. It’s another sign of the interconnected quantum nature of all things chocolate and culture. Or maybe Rachel’s name is really Alice. Anyhow, if you did notice you’re a total letter geek and you have way too much time on your hands. Get thee to a chocolate factory!
As announced by the great Allison of Epstein, Queen of Scoundrels
I've been living in Taiwan for a while now, and I can vouch for the pineapple cakes – they're exquisite! But I haven't tried this decadent little creation yet; might have to expand my dessert to-do list!
Not sure how I missed that you also write The Muse, but I've been subscribed free there for a while as well. I enjoy your work almost as much as I enjoy chocolate ;)