Bittersweet: A Memoir
112 pages
English

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112 pages
English

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Description








  • Author will be in New York at the time of publication and has regular business in the US.


  • Full-page advertising campaign in the author’s two magazines (5,200 US readers).


  • Leverage of all digital assets.


  • National TV, radio, print, podcast, and long-lead publicity campaign to build on author’s prior appearances on Bloomberg, Business Insider, and more.


  • TV campaign to do live chocolate taste tests.


  • Every ARC will include a chocolate custom made for the author.


  • Preorder campaign: enter proof of preorder purchase on Apollo website to receive a free bar of chocolate!


  • Full Apollo-Program marketing campaign.



AUTHOR AVAILABILITY: Unlimited remote access; occasional US appearances including at pub date in New York.




As seen on The Today Show!

The world’s leading chocolate taster shares his wild ride to attain the most envied job, and explains his warning heard around the world: that we might soon run out of chocolate.

Angus Kennedy, dubbed “the real life Willy Wonka,” has the best job of all time, tasting candy for a living. But the journey to his sweet life has followed a rocky road. In this inspiring, smile inducing memoir, he shares how despite an alcoholic mother, a father dying of cancer, and multiple brushes with death, he rose to fame and became the king of cocoa. He also gives a fascinating tour of the little-known chocolate industry and answers such questions as: what the state of the cocoa bean is and if we’re going to run out of chocolate, is chocolate good for you, and how to know if you’re eating high-quality chocolate.

Doused in Kennedy’s signature humor and wit, this unforgettable memoir is a tale of dysfunction, but also redemption. It is baked to perfection for lovers of great chocolate and great stories, and reveals the secrets of the chocolate world and its king, the bitter and the sweet.


Sujets

Informations

Publié par
Date de parution 25 juin 2018
Nombre de lectures 0
EAN13 9781948062114
Langue English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0500€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Bittersweet

A Memoir



The Life and Times of the World’s Leading Chocolate Taster
A Memoir




Bittersweet
The Life and Times of the World’s Leading Chocolate Taster
Copyright © 2018 by Angus Kennedy
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be sent by e-mail to Apollo Publishers at info@apollopublishers.com.
Apollo Publishers books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use. Special editions may be made available upon request. For details, contact Apollo Publishers at info@apollopublishers.com.
Visit our website at www.apollopublishers.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
Cover design by Rain Saukas.
Print ISBN: 978-1-948062-04-6
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-948062-11-4
Printed in the United States of America.


contents

Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1: Mad Dogs, Vodka, and Candy
Chapter 2: Candy to the Rescue
Chapter 3: My Father’s Death
Chapter 4: Strange Visitors to Number 22
Chapter 5: Welcome to the World of Confectionery
Chapter 6: The Candy Kid Goes Back to School
Chapter 7: Finishing School
Chapter 8: Murder?
Chapter 9: Working in a Mint Factory
Chapter 10: How to Get the Best Job in the World
Chapter 11: Goods to Confess
Chapter 12: Weight Control
Chapter 13: What You Might Not Know About Your Chocolate Bar
Chapter 14: Will We Run Out of Chocolate?
Chapter 15: The Chocolate of the Future
Chapter 16: Chocolate Just for the Moment
How to Taste Chocolate
A Simple Way to Test the Quality of Chocolate



Preface
Okay, I’m not into long lists of thank-yous extended to people neither of us would care to meet.
However, there is one person I should mention: the anesthetist who yesterday put me to sleep for an operation to remove a cyst on my left knee. Yes, he deserves to be on my list of honors. Wow, those anesthetics are amazing. I mean, what is that drug they give you before the one that makes you sleep? You know, the one that says, Hey, Angus, it doesn’t matter if they chop off your entire leg or if chocolate runs out forever—nothing matters!
Just looking into the anesthetist’s face, fully equipped with one dark eyebrow with the curious ability to move on its own, while the other, a light-colored one, remained stationary, was a good start. Watching this facial performance while he proceeded to proudly name all the drugs he was administering as my consciousness drifted into the ether: now that was pretty damned cool.
Angus Kennedy you’re going down.
It was a general anesthetic of course, and I fell asleep the moment I started to lie back and felt the nurse’s hands guide my head. The operation was, I say, almost a success. They found not one, but three “foreign bodies,” which they presented to me in a small blue pot when I woke up (now sent off for analysis), floating around the soft tissues at the back of my knee. Four years of pain are now almost over.
I think I am high from yesterday’s drugs. I must be, and because of that and not being able to stand up, I am here now finishing this book on the couch with a single origin bar of French chocolate handy. (That is also keeping me on the couch!) So we should all thank him, and chocolate of course, and not a boring list of lifeless aunties and distant acquaintances.
I’m a man with five kids, an impossibly busy job in confectionery conferencing and magazines, and never enough time even to escape to the bathroom in the mornings before I have to perform the most intolerable school runs ever in a ten-year-old Land Cruiser. So how was I ever going write a book—another book, even, I asked myself? But once I started, I knew it would be okay. You can’t leave off books when you write them. They’re like plants; they need feeding or they die.
So now I am back home, sitting in the living room over the school holidays with my knee up and trying (rather foolishly) to concentrate with an Xbox on in the background and three overactive boys shooting anything they see on the screen. At last I have the chance—the book I have been meaning to finish will be finished, thanks to my wife, Sophie, now with a drugged-up cripple on the couch during Easter, who at every juncture is being asked, “What can I do now, Mum? I’m bored.”
Ah, Easter: a period in which we in the United Kingdom spend about £2,462 million on chocolate, which translates into 70,000 tons of it, according to the International Cocoa Organization. Not much when the world munches through 7.6 million tons a year. Yes, a celebration during which British kids, on average, consume 8.8 chocolate eggs each; each egg averages about 750 calories. That’s 6,600 calories, enough for each child to run from London to Oxford without stopping.
So I confess: my world—and the act of feeding my family—rely on chocolate. I have made a living out of “loving” a product that can rot your teeth, make you fat, take control, and see us all coming helplessly back for more. It’s time not just for me to make a few personal confessions, but at last, it’s confession time for the whole industry. And my first confession is one of the most difficult for many to swallow.


Introduction
Welcome to my job. I confess: I get paid to eat and write about chocolate and candy each and every day that I am still alive. The best job ever, some say.
And welcome to my world: chocolate, a substance that contains nearly the highest calorie content of any food and is one of the most addictive, too. A hefty 90 percent of American citizens vote it as their favorite flavor, while according to recent research by Fererro, 43 percent of Brits would give up booze for it, 35 percent religion, 27 percent would never wear their favorite pair of shoes again, and 9 percent admit they would give up sex for chocolate.
So, the basic truth is that I fly around the world visiting chocolate factories and sampling their confections directly from conveyor belts for my articles and various media assignments. When I am not in factories eating these goodies, extra chocolates and candies are delivered almost daily onto my office desk with ever more creative deliveries. That’s nuts, right?
I even have a chocolate coffee table in my office. It was presented to me as a gift after a global chocolate convention. It’s mostly eaten now, mainly because I enjoy the occasional snap as I break off pieces and consume my table in front of my guests. Chocolate sculpture is a big thing now, especially in Paris, where the competitions last for days on end. You can hardly tell these things are made out of chocolate; they make anything from shoes to famous faces to entire landscapes, detailed with edible spray paint. It’s all a bit ridiculous if you really think about it.
There are people out there who love chocolate far more than I do and deserve to have it more than I do. But life isn’t like that. Anyone who believes life is fair is very lucky.
I didn’t plan or really deserve the dream job of being Britain’s chief chocolate taster. But it seems to have to be this way. Besides, we don’t apply for the best jobs in the world, we create them. We always create the most enjoyable things. We never seem to work for them. How can anything be enjoyable if we have to work for it anyway?
Journalists and television presenters with jobs that I would die for say to me, “Angus, I want your job.” We go into the TV studio (where I hand out chocolates, of course) and it goes like this: “Now, let’s go over to meet our next guest, Angus Kennedy. Yes, we have the world’s expert on chocolate here in the studio, who is, wait for it . . . paid to eat chocolates. I want his job.”
And I’m thinking, as I am being interviewed and almost revered (even more ridiculous), “Well, yes, I do eat chocolate for a living, but I also do lots of other things as well. I run a small publishing business, I edit, I write articles, I sell books, I take kids to school, I empty the dishwasher, I try to fix broken lawn mowers, and I attempt to mend things that I can’t mend just because I am called ‘Dad.’” They don’t see the other bits, like me trying to maintain my weight with a bad knee and having to get all my teeth capped in advance at huge expense due to the large number of sweets I have to eat.
But they’re having none of it. They have a real Willy Wonka who is paid to eat chocolate, and that’s enough; nothing else matters. So, meet Angus Kennedy, the British eccentric who does absolutely nothing else at all but fly around the world gulping copious amounts of delish confections.
We have to dream—it’s good to dream. Life is made possible by dreams. Perhaps we want to believe that we can eat candy all the time and be paid for the pleasure. Dreams deserve to be where they belong, realized before we die.
Well, I thought, if so many people want this “dream job,” which I do in part have, then of course I will write a book about it and how I landed it, and show you what it’s like in a secret industry about which so little is known. Oh, and I will address the question “Will we run out of chocolate?”
I did seem to achieve the impossible, so I am going to tell you about how I became a Willy Wonka. I failed my way to success! Sometimes you don’t really have to work that hard to succeed. We make it easy to make life difficult, but make it difficult to make life easy.
In fact, the harder you chase your goals, the more likely it is that they will run deeper into the forest. And, most likely, what we are chasing is something that we never were supposed to catch anyway. We keep hunting, never catch anything, and die p

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