Some 70% of cocoa, the raw material for chocolate, comes from West Africa where global warming is driving extreme weather—excessive and untimely rain or drought—and jeopardizing the livelihoods of cocoa farmers by decimating their crops.  February 2025 was no different as yields plunged for a third year.  Other factors reducing cocoa yields include mealybug infestations, smuggling and illegal mining.  [See source.]

Coca trees can only survive in a zone 20 degrees north or south of the equator.  “Cacao trees are sensitive to environmental changes and don’t produce beans well in diverse conditions and extreme weather, which is bringing adversity to farmers and the chocolate business. It takes new cacao trees at least three years to produce beans.” [See source.]

“Extreme weather and changing climate patterns have upended crop harvests, which are expected to fall short for the third year in a row, tightening global supplies and raising prices,” UNCTAD stated, citing its commodities price figures. [See source.]   Deforestation is another issue.  Far too often native forests are cleared to plant cocoa crops that take years to mature, worsening the environmental damage.  [See source.]

Without a more sustainable approach to cocoa cultivation, the future looks grim. 

Wouldn’t it be cool to speak with your younger self and help him or her avoid mistakes and optimize future decisions?  That may sound like science fiction, but using high-resolution footage from the past, you can now do that, in a way, by reanimating your younger self.

Sounds creepy, right?

Still, I thought it was worth an experiment, so I created avatars of myself from 2016 and 2024—eight years apart—and asked them to recite a children’s poem from Alice in Wonderland, a meditation on growing older, called Father William.

Well, that is to say, we can now transport certain flavors over the internet at least experimentally.  Several groups of scientists have been working on techniques for recording, transmitting, and reproducing taste sensations, apparently with some success.

These approaches simplify flavor into five major categories:  “sodium chloride for salty, citric acid for sour, glucose for sweet, magnesium chloride for bitter and glutamate for umami.”

[One] system uses sensors to detect the levels of these chemicals in food, converts them to digital readings, and then sends these values to the pump, which pushes small amounts of different flavour-containing hydrogels into a small tube under a person’s tongue. [See source.]

Naturally, the technological execution is also in flux at this stage.  The design mentioned above involves a small cube that dangles outside your mouth with a sensory tab that fits under your tongue.  Alternatively, another approach has a “rod that resembles a hand-held microphone with a surface that’s designed to be licked rather than talked into.”  And the same inventor (who by the way, also gave us the “electric fork”) is also working on a “lickable screen” for incorporation into a cell phone.  [See source.]

He was still talking after 45 minutes, non-stop and without waiting for any acknowledgment from me that I was listening. The words flowed.  The thoughts connected in a tangled way like an overgrown blackberry patch, sometimes completely losing their thread and sometimes bending back on themselves to reconnect to some theme visited a few minutes ago.

It made me reflect that he wasn’t talking to communicate with me.  He was talking for some other reason.

And that made me think about why we talk.

Is it only people who talk without the intention of communicating?