Imagine a world where children have never tasted brownies, where trail mix is just nuts

and raisins, where you open up a box of chocolates and just find emptiness.

This is the apocalypse.

Well, it's the chocolate apocalypse.

But the stakes are still very high, it's chocolate, so...

Very high, I know, I, yeah!

I'm Dylan Thoris and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible

and wondrous places.

And today we're joined by Nikki Twilly, the co-host of the Gastropod podcast, who's

taking us to suburban London, where, inside a thousand square meter greenhouse, is all

that's standing between us and the chocolate apocalypse.

That is after this.

It's humid, it's warm, and everything is plant all around you.

Nikki Twilly writes about the intersection of food, science, and history.

And a couple of years ago, she found herself inside a very unusual building.

The International Coco quarantine center.

Everything is cacao plants and they're all quite small, and the reason they're quite

small is because they're young, and so they look, it's sort of, it's got like a cacao

plant nursery vibe, I guess.

How is the plant that we use to make cocoa, which gets turned into chocolate?

And the reason all these baby cacao plants are gathered and tended to inside of this

greenhouse, is that cacao is a very sensitive, very delicate plant.

...