Mott Green, 1966–2013

The anarchist who earned acclaim as a chocolatier

Just last year, Mott Green achieved his dream of making what he called “the first carbon-neutral trans-Atlantic mass chocolate delivery.” A 105-foot Dutch sailing ship carried 50,000 of his hand-crafted dark chocolate bars from the Caribbean island of Grenada to Amsterdam, where cyclists distributed them to retailers. After more than a decade of shoestring operations, Green’s Grenada Chocolate Co. only turned a profit this year. But as Green might have said before his death in an electrical accident this month, profit was never the point.

Born David Friedman in Washington, D.C., Green grew up in Staten Island, N.Y., and attended the University of Pennsylvania, but dropped out because he felt graduating “would be capitulating to a corrupt social structure,” said The New York Times. After serving as a “master tinkerer” and activist among anarchist squatters in Philadelphia and New York, he moved into a solar-powered hut in Grenada, where he took a version of his nickname, Moth, as his first name and Green as his last “to reflect his environmental interests.”

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