"By The Grace Of Chocolate"

An anarchist man named Mott Green, who we knew as "Moth" during his years in West Philadelphia, died on June 1st. This night was the second of two gatherings in his memory, being the screening of the new documentary film Nothing Like Chocolate that was barely finished when he accidentally electrocuted himself in Granada.

I remember him as a guy who was always on a project and talking very intensely about it, especially rigging things to be run or heated with solar panels. Moth is also remembered here as an extremely resourceful squatter. Anything a wretched old house needed to serve as a home, like water, heat, electric, or food --he knew how to get it and make it work, and he would not sleep until it did work.

Aside from the tragedy of his early death, there are only good things to be said about this, especially considering him as an anarchist. He died at the peak of life, when his dreams were coming true. He changed the chocolate industry (or started a revolution, as some say) with love and hard work, rather than with harsh words or actions. He co-founded a factory collective with a top-to-bottom salary ratio of 1:1, whereas 3:1 would be extreme and 7:1 is fair & square. He came from a privileged background but always lived very simply (often to the point of wearing rags and bare feet), but happily.

The film Nothing Like Chocolate was quite wonderful. The viewer will come away wishing that Mott Green had lived to be 100, and loving chocolate, that magical drug that's good for you. What I found really amazing is that the film very thoroughly exposes what's wrong in the world's chocolate industry (including child slave labor in the Ivory Coast) but never with sickening images and testimony. Instead it introduces us to the Granada Chocolate Company, whose members just make you love them and whose operations are fair, profitable, and sustainable.

In the film, an independent chocolate grower joins the collective with a wonderful smile, and speaks of her hope for the future. "By the grace of God," she said, the company would continue to grow and prosper.

"Well, I'm an atheist," Mott countered, "so I say, by the grace of chocolate."

After the main film there was a short video of Mott crossing the ocean (Granada to New York to Portsmouth, England) in a sailboat to deliver his chocolate bars. The gathering for the screening was intimate and moving.

In the collage: Granada chocolate bars, Mott on the Atlantic, and Mott with his co-founder Doug, who died of cancer some years ago.