Those, of course, are not our words. They are Mark Twain’s, specifically the satirical notice he placed at the start of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Not only are Twain’s words not our own, they in no way reflect our objectives or what we want our readers to do. Twain hoped his words would get people first and foremost to enjoy the story and not search for motives, morals, and plots. We hope you enjoy our narrative, too, but we have motives, morals, and plots, for sure, specifically the preservation and propagation of fine flavor cacao and chocolate now and for future generations.
So why use Twain’s words to start the book? Because Twain’s notice claiming a lack of seriousness in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has the exact opposite effect: it makes you take the book seriously.
Like Twain’s notice—and like fine flavor chocolate itself—this book is a mixture of seriousness and fun. In writing this book, we strived to remember the words of Charles Schultz, creator of the beloved Peanuts comic strip: “All you need is love. But a little chocolate now and then doesn’t hurt.” We may take the future of fine chocolate very seriously, but we never forget that this is a book about the simple pleasures found in chocolate in its richest, most complex forms.
That said, people looking for motives, morals, and plots behind the names found in this book can stop. No, really. Stop. Seriously.
We cast a wide net to ensure a global view, but to keep things manageable for readers, we limited ourselves to a representative sample of topics and only a few perspectives on them from each country or region. There are many more people researching and growing wonderful cacao, manufacturing brilliant chocolate, and transforming that chocolate into magnificent bonbons than we could possibly include in this book. Someone could easily interview an entirely different lot—or choose to talk to people from just a few regions or a single origin—and come up with something just as tasty. We support and hope to raise the bar for all them!