Good form

This morning, I was downstairs fixing to work on some pottery, and I had the TV on the History Channel. One of the 'Modern Marvels' episodes was on, and it was about chocolate education... since anything containing chocolate sounds good to me, I decided to watch it for a bit. It was called, "The Chocolate Making Process."

First, they showed the harvesting of the cocoa beans and other steps involved in it. I was thinking maybe this isn't such a good thing to watch... Something about covering the pile of sticky looking beans with large banana leaves so dirt and bugs don't get into it, or did they say droppings? And something about the beans fermenting. And then more on drying so the beans don't mold.

So... after that, I wasn't paying real close attention to the program, but then I noticed they were interviewing this older guy. He was standing near a large machine that looked to be sorting the dried beans or something. Turns out it was a de-stoner machine. I found what he said to be interesting enough to copy down and share with you here...

"You have to remember, that where [cocoa] beans are grown in the world are jungle conditions. This is a very wild place, including wild animals. You don't go out into the jungle unprotected. One of the things we pick up in this de-stoner is we also pick up live ammunitions. We consider it really good form to remove all the live ammo before we roast the cocoa beans, for some fairly obvious reasons."