Chocolates of Ecuador -- Arriba, Nacional, CCN51
Posted in: Opinion
What many people may not realize is that two of the current names used to describe cacao varieties (criollo, forastero) are examples of how the victors write history.Criollo means, roughly, native (e.g., comida tipica criolla), and forastero, roughly, foreign. In the context of cacao, criollo means "from here" and forastero means "imported from elsewhere" and are therefore quite meaningless when talking about varieties of cacao as the "native" (as in, original varieties) are the foreign ones - as there is now consensus that criollo varieties were selectively bred from forasteros as the Mesoamericans (the Toltecs and Olmecs) found uses for the seeds where South American Indian tribes focused on uses for the pulp.Criollo and forastero are just as confusing as the term "arriba" which only means "up" (also, over, above, forward) and refers to where traders had to go ("up" the Guayas river from Guayaquil) to get the fine flavor cacao best known as Nacional.Over time these generic terms were applied to specific varieties of cacao without paying any attention to their original meanings.Motamayor's study is perhaps the first serious attempt to try to rationalize the naming scheme. However, I find it interesting that with the exception of "criollo" and "amelonado" all of the suggested new names refer to specific places. Amelonado is a reference to the shape of a pod - melon-shaped - of a specific variety of forastero originating in Brasil. It is likely that criollo varieties in Venezuela were almost certainly re-introduced from Mesoamerica.Ultimately, I don't see that there will be much uptake of these terms outside of the academic/scientific community - and perhaps hard-core enthusiast community - any time soon. Too much marketing and advertising has been done around the existing terms to make the transition easy. Plus, with an increasing emphasis on origins it's going to be hard to differentiate (meaningfully) between, for example, Nacional and Curaray; both are from Ecuador and Curaray is an obscure river south of the Napa in the Oriente.I think more people would understand and appreciate the distinction between "heirloom" (e.g., Nacional) and "hybrid" (e.g., CCN 51) cacao varieties.
