You're listening to TED Talks Daily. I'm Elise Hugh. On today's show, Chocolate. In a talk recorded for Ted Monterey, 2021, chocolatier Hermann Santillan, shares a taste of how chocolate brings people together and connects indigenous Mexicans with their culture and spirituality.

This talk will make you so hungry, but also hopeful, about the sustainability of the cocoa bean.

My village is Villa de Mazulapam del Progreso, a beautiful little village in the mixed

region of Oax.

My village and the surrounding 154 villages of the region have a population of about 400,000 people.

For many centuries, our culture has retained mysticism, rituals, and many culinary traditions.

And one of those culinary traditions is our special connection with chocolate, dating back up 800 years.

Our ancient indigenous communities were among the first cultures in the world to use chocolate as a symbol for social union.

This tradition is still alive today, with chocolate front and center during the most

important events of our communities, like birds, weddings, and even funerals. But even to

Oaxaca has a rich history of chocolate and even to people enjoy chocolate all around the world.

Asian mixed traditions around how to grow cocoa,

process it, and prepare it, are fading away. Mexico is considered the cradle of chocolate,

but four out of five chocolates made in Mexico are made with foreign cocoa. Meanwhile, the average

change of a Mexican farmer is 63 years old, so we need to

train a new generation of farmers in order to keep our land fertile and our crops alive.

I wanted to do something about this, and given that I truly believe in preserving and spreading

the wisdom from indigenous communities to modern life,

I turned my attention back to a hack as rich history of chocolate.

And also, I wanted to try to support the economical in my region,

which has been considered one of the poorest regions of Mexico.

So I teamed up with a tenacious theme of local people to embrace our regional

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