December 23, 2008

The Best Chocolate You’ve Never Heard Of

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kallari.gif
Kallari, released at Whole Foods in October, is the world’s first widely-available chocolate bar made and marketed by actual cacao farmers. It also might be the best chocolate I’ve tasted, and I’m a big chocolate fan. It’s produced with a rare, highly-celebrated bean grown in the Ecuadorian Amazon by 850 enterprising Quichua families who receive 100 percent of the profits. It probably doesn’t hurt that they got a little bit of help from Robert Steinberg, the founder of Berkeley’s renowned Scharffen Berger chocolate. If you’re looking for a holiday gift, Kallari’s 75% cacao bar might be a good bet. In these depressing times, you’ll get to talk about how it was made by farmers who until recently couldn’t even afford to ship their beans from the jungle to Quito but who now run the show–true role models for us children of the recession. And then you can suggest opening it right away so you can snap off a big chocolatey chunk for yourself.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

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Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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