Chocolate: Sweet Science & Dark Secrets of the World’s Favorite Treat by Kay Frydenborg

This book, marketed to a young adult audience, is a quite exhaustive (272 pages) history of chocolate, cocoa, cacao, and the growing and marketing thereof. Ms. Frydenborg covers the origins of chocolate and cacao beans, the uses of chocolate as medicine, food, and candy, the growing of various species of cacao, the history of slavery in connection with the chocolate industry, and recent efforts to map the genomes of and preserve various types of cacao plants. And I love the cover. It’s delectable.

I wanted to recommend this book to a friend of mine who is working on developing mixed-use and sustainable farming in a mountainous part of the world that is suited for growing coffee, not chocolate. I think he would find quite a few parallels between the kind of farming he is trying to promote and the type of cacao farming that the scientists in the book are helping farmers to implement.

The book has great information and adequate writing and organization. There is some repetitious material that could have been left out or edited down. But the main problem is horrible copyediting. I did NOT read an ARC of this book; it was a final published copy that I borrowed from the library. I found multiple typographical and syntax errors. Dozens of them. Do publishers hire copyeditors nowadays? Or do they just depend on a computer program to copyedit the book? If it’s the former, someone should have gotten a better copyeditor, and if it’s the latter, shame on them.

I can’t recommend this book to anyone because of the shoddy copyediting. And that’s too bad because it would have been a nice addition to the library of anyone interested in the history of chocolate or in modern agricultural practices and innovations in relation to cash crops such as cacao and coffee.