"Walk into a row of greenhouses in rural Britain, and a late English-winter day transforms to a swampy, humid tropical afternoon. You could be in Latin America or Sub-Saharan Africa. Which is exactly how cocoa plants like it.
"It's all right this time of year. It gets a bit hot later on in the summer," says greenhouse technician Heather Lake as she fiddles with a tray of seedlings — a platter of delicate, spindly, baby cocoa plants. Since she started working here at the International Cocoa Quarantine Centre, eating chocolate doesn't feel the same. "You certainly know all the work that goes into producing that chocolate bar, and all the potential threats that could be there in the future," Lake says."
Those potential threats are the focus of this research center. Every cocoa tree that travels the world starts with a vacation here in the British countryside. The facility is part of the University of Reading, about 40 miles west of London. And a big chunk of the funding comes from America, via the U.S. Department of Agriculture. ...
It is an incongruous sight in the middle of rolling English farm country. Which raises the question, why here?
[Cocoa researcher named Andrew] Daymond says chocolate makers wanted to put this center in a place with weather so dreary, none of those awful cocoa diseases could possibly survive outdoors.
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