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The Atlas Obscura Podcast

International Cocoa Quarantine Center

The Atlas Obscura Podcast

SiriusXM Podcasts & Atlas Obscura

Society & Culture, Places & Travel

4.61.6K Ratings

🗓️ 14 February 2022

⏱️ 17 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Nicola Twilley takes us to suburban London, where a 1000 square meter greenhouse is all that stands between us and the chocapocalypse. Listen to the Malta Lazaretto episode: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/podcast-quarantine-at-malta-lazaretto Listen to Gastropod: https://gastropod.com/ Read Until Proven Safe: https://untilprovensafe.com/

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

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

0:09.7

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

0:18.7

This is the apocalypse.

0:22.4

Well, it's the chocolate apocalypse.

0:26.2

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

0:29.8

Very high, I know, I, yeah!

0:34.4

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

0:40.0

and wondrous places.

0:42.3

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

0:47.3

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

0:54.3

that's standing between us and the chocolate apocalypse.

0:59.0

That is after this.

1:18.4

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

1:24.3

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

1:30.0

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

1:35.7

The International Coco quarantine center.

1:39.1

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

1:43.0

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

1:49.3

plant nursery vibe, I guess.

1:51.9

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

1:57.8

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

2:02.5

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

...

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